FSU Athletic Endowment

A rare mention of FSU's athletic endowment level.

Re: Is Stan Wilcox a go with the pack guy or a leader?

Jerry Kutz 5/15/2014

"Jerry,

Does the Champions Campaign address what I consider one of our most important budget issues, is it going to finally complete the endowment of all our athletic scholarships?

BTW not impressed so far with Mr. Wilcox but am withholding judgment till he comes out with his master plan.  I do agree with PopsNole that we will likely never know what he is saying behind closed doors and he very well may be quite vocal about our concerns but is getting out voted.

This post was edited on 5/15 12:09 PM by Calif_Nole

---

You ask: "Does the Champions Campaign address what I consider one of our most
important budget issues, is it going to finally complete the endowment
of all our athletic scholarships?"
That is two questions.
To the first question, the answer is: Yes, The Champions Campaign will seek donations to the endowed scholarship fund as well as to athletic facilities.

To the second question, Is it going to finally complete the endowment of all our scholarships, the answer is: Very unlikely. We have less than $70 million in our endowment right now and would need almost $200 million in our endowment to fully fund annual scholarship costs at the current cost (almost $10 million per year) at a 5 percent return on $200 million.

We will ask our members, including those on Warchant, to give to either facilities, the endowment or to increase their annual fund pledge which goes to the operating budget. Successful fundraising campaigns are donor centric and thus far our donors have shown more interest in giving to facilities than to the endowment. I can see our members designating another $25 million to the endowment during the Champions Campaign but it won't come anywhere near the $125-plus million we need to fully fund the endowment in today's dollars unless we get an epic gift from out of no where.

Like most other athletics programs, most gifts to the endowment come through estate gifts. We have quite a few of our donors leave FSU Athletics, notably the scholarship endowment, in their final wishes but fortunately most of those donors are still alive and attending games and giving to the annual fund. Over the next 10-15 years, you'll see the scholarship endowment grow as the inevitable occurs.

If our annual fund contributions, also a part of the Champions Campaign, continue to grow (we were up over 9 percent last year), it will allow the endowment to grow with earnings compounding its growth.

I expect our fans will get to see a good bit of Stan Wilcox and his team during the Champions Campaign as he was instrumental in initiating the $250 million athletics portion of the Duke Forward campaign that is reinventing Blue Devil athletics facilities as well as building their endowment and operations budget.





The

Jerry Kutz is Senior Vice President of Seminole Boosters and was the co-founder and columnist of the Osceola."