The City University of New York board of trustees last Monday authorized a contract worth approximately $4.4 million for three years with Kansas-based Mammoth Sports Construction to manage and operate athletics at its eight senior colleges.
“Will this make us bowl eligible?” one trustee jokingly asked.
“The CUNY Bowl,” replied trustee Bill Thompson Jr., chairperson of the board of trustees who once served as New York City comptroller.
Mammoth will use its “the University required outside expertise to manage and operate the CUNY Athletic Conference more efficiently,” according to the resolution the board approved last Monday. The conference covers teams at 14 of the system’s senior and junior colleges that compete against each other and local non-CUNY institutions in sports such as basketball, swimming, cross country, baseball and volleyball, But Mammoth will only be involved with the eight senior colleges, according to CUNY spokesperson Noah Gardy.. Those colleges are also part of the NCAA Division III, while the six junior colleges are with the National Junior College Athletic Association.
The conference has been run through CUNY’s central administration, and bringing in Mammoth is intended to “enhance student athletic experience and better align the conference with our peer conferences from across the country,” Gardy told THE CITY in a written statement.
“Almost no conferences are administered through a university or a university-system. Most are separate organizations with a board, typically comprised of the presidents of their members, that independently hire staff and advance their priorities.”
CUNY had 1,629 student athletes during the 2023-24 academic year in its senior colleges, with another 539 at its junior colleges.
A coach at a senior college, who asked not to be named while speaking frankly about CUNY management, told THE CITY that they are not convinced the contract will result in any positive changes for their athletics programs, saying that CUNY hasn’t invested in maintaining athletic fields or practice facilities.
“We don’t even know what they’re going to be doing,” the coach said of Mammoth.
NCAA Division III and junior colleges are hardly flooded with revenue from media rights, ticket sales and sponsorships like their counterparts in Division I. It’s rare for a university system like CUNY to contract an outside vendor to manage its athletics, according to Matt Brown, who runs Extra Points, a newsletter that covers business policy and off-the-field stories in college athletics.
“At the Division III space and Division II space, conference operations and conference offices are generally skeleton crews,” Brown told THE CITY.
In 2020, CUNY commissioned a study about the conference that concluded it should be controlled by university’s presidents rather than its office of student affairs. By October 2022, the board charged the University Athletics Council, a subcommittee of its Council of Presidents, with overseeing athletics.
Mammoth Sports Construction works with colleges, professional sports teams and K-12 schools on projects that include consulting, design and construction, according to the company’s website. Projects featured on the site include installing turf grass and constructing football fields and sports facilities. Other institutions have included the University of Nebraska, Oklahoma State University and Dodge City Community College in Kansas.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.