Facility management strategies that boost athletic program revenue
Athletic directors today have to be business-minded, and whether they think of themselves this way or not, they are landlords.
The most valuable physical assets a school owns are often its athletic facilities and most of the time those facilities sit empty. AAU practices could fill quiet Saturday mornings. Camps could fill dead summer weeks. Club trainings could fill the empty afternoon hours. Events could fill a building that would otherwise sit dark.
This is a conversation more schools need to have out loud.I have coached at institutions that were smart about this and I have also coached at institutions that were not. The difference between the two does not show up in a single budget year; it compounds, quietly, over a decade, in ways most administrators do not see until it is too late to easily fix.
When a school is smart about facility use, the math works in every direction.
When a school is smart about facility use, the math works in every direction. Gyms that would have sat empty on Saturday or Sunday mornings host AAU practices. Summer weeks that would have been dead become camps. Local clubs run training sessions in the afternoons. The school covers some of the cost of running the building, the athletic budget gains a real revenue stream instead of a request line at the end of the year and the relationship between coaches and administration changes because the coaches are no longer always asking for money the school does not have.
I have seen what that does to a program from the inside. When there is a revenue stream, the conversations with administration stop being adversarial. A uniform order is not a negotiation. A new set of practice balls is not a favor. The athletic department is contributing to the building it uses and that changes how everyone in the school thinks about it. Athletics stops being a line item that only ever costs money and becomes part of how the institution sustains itself.
There is a second benefit, and it matters as much as the revenue. It is usually framed as a private school advantage but that framing is too narrow. In an era when families shop for high schools, public and private alike, every family that comes through your gym for a camp or a Sunday practice is a family getting to know your school. They see your campus on a morning when they otherwise would never have set foot on it. They watch how your staff run an event. They form an impression of the place.
For a private school, that impression turns into applications, enrollment and tuition. For a public school in an age of open enrollment, school choice and per-pupil funding that follows the student, it turns into families who choose your district over the one next door and into community goodwill that shows up when a bond or a levy is on the ballot. Either way, a young camper today is a prospective student in a few years and a club team renting your gym is a roster of families who now have your school in their mental map.
Getting families onto campus is something schools spend real money to do. A well-run facility program does it and gets paid for the privilege.
When a school is not smart, the math runs the other way. Empty gyms generate no revenue. Empty pools generate no revenue. Empty fields generate no revenue. And none of them are free to own. The building costs money to put up and it costs money to keep standing, whether anyone is inside it or not. The base insurance gets paid. The roof ages and the floor wears on the same schedule either way. Those costs are fixed the moment you build the facility and an empty building does nothing to offset them.
Using the building is not free either, and it is worth being honest about that. An event needs custodial coverage. It runs the heat or the air conditioning and turns on the lights. It puts wear on the floor and carries its own liability. But those are marginal costs, and a rental priced correctly covers them and leaves money behind. The mistake is treating the small cost of using a building as a reason to walk away from revenue while the much larger cost of simply owning the building gets paid every month regardless.
The result, when no revenue stream is ever built, is an athletic budget that stays permanently squeezed. Every uniform order becomes a challenge. Every bus rental becomes a challenge. Every official’s fee becomes a challenge. Coaches spend more time fundraising than coaching, which is a poor use of the people you hired to develop athletes. And the surrounding community never sees the inside of the building, which means the school stays invisible to exactly the families it should be reaching.
I am not arguing that schools should turn themselves into rental halls. There are real concerns, and any athletic director who has managed a facility knows them — wear and tear, scheduling conflicts with your own teams, security, liability and access control. These are legitimate operational problems.
It is no longer enough to schedule games, hire coaches and order equipment.
But they are not reasons to leave a building empty; they are reasons to build a thoughtful program for using it to its potential. Wear and tear is managed with rental agreements that account for it. Custodial and utility costs are built into the rate. Scheduling is managed by protecting your own teams’ time first and renting only what is genuinely available. Security and liability are managed with the same insurance riders, supervision requirements and access policies that every successful program already uses. None of this is new. Schools across the country do it well. The knowledge exists. What is usually missing is the decision to take it seriously.
Schools that figure this out share a few habits. They treat their athletic facilities as assets, not as expenses to be minimized. They give someone, often the A.D., explicit responsibility for facility revenue and they make it part of that person’s job rather than an afterthought. They write clear policies so that saying yes does not require reinventing the rules each time. They build ongoing partnerships with local clubs and AAU programs that bring in both money and families year after year. Finally, they protect the school’s interests carefully while still finding a way to say yes more often than they say no.
The role of the athletic director has changed. It is no longer enough to schedule games, hire coaches and order equipment. The job now includes stewardship of some of the most valuable physical assets a school owns. If you are an A.D. or a head of school, the question is not whether you should think of yourself as a landlord — you already are one. Your gym, your pool and your fields are real estate and they are either working for your program or sitting idle while the bills come due.
The only question is are you leveraging those assets to benefit your athletic department?
Brian Kays is a teacher and girls basketball coach at The Webb Schools in Claremont, California.
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