ULAA approves fiscal budget for 2020-21

Louisville athletics is on track to have an excess of $4 million from its 2019-20 fiscal year, which University of Louisville athletic director Vince Tyra says will be used in next year’s budget.

The University of Louisville Athletic Association (ULAA) approved a $95.1 million budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year on June 12. The approved budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year is a 15% reduction in operating expenditures compared to the 2019-20 budget.

Tyra said Louisville was having a great year in many ways in 2019-20 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which ended athletic competitions in mid-March for the remainder of the academic year.

“We already knew we had a more challenging year next year than this year,” Tyra said. “We were hoping to end with a nice surplus, we were hoping it would be greater than what we ended up having.”

With student-athletes being brought back to campus June 1 in phased returns, there is plenty of uncertainty heading into the 2020-21 fiscal year, which begins July 1.

Football season ticket renewals are down as government and health officials decide on preventive steps for COVID-19 during the fall. The entirety of Louisville’s student-athletes won’t be on campus until August.

“This is like no other year I have entered, knowing that the budget won’t look anything like the project looks like very soon,” Tyra said. “We will have different forecasts coming about during the year, it’s hard to tell what is going to occur here as we get into the year.”

In planning the fiscal budget, Tyra took into account the decrease in revenue along with finding ways to limit operating expenses. Fixed costs are more difficult to decrease.

“We have tried to take a number of things into account,” Tyra said. “It will depend on how well we are able to mitigate the COVID virus.”

Louisville announced in April that the school’s head coaches and senior athletic administrators agreed to take a 10% salary reduction for the 2020-21 academic year.

Tyra wants to limit how much the budgetary decreases affect student-athletes.

“We may to make further moves, the initiative was to try to protect the student-athlete experience as best we can,” Tyra said.