WVU Open to Selling Naming Rights to its Sports Venues

Wren Baker is searching for revenue opportunities.

Over the last several months, new WVU athletic director Wren Baker has been evaluating the athletic department and identifying the most pressing issues that need to be addressed.

In his opinion, generating more money is priority number one. 

"We've got to find a way to bring in more revenue. We do not have a spending problem," Baker stated Wednesday. "Compare us across a variety of spending categories, we're very efficient with the dollars that we have. But we've got to eat, breathe, sleep, and think 24/7/365 how can we bring in more revenue? You go back and look at historically when our team's have been the most successful, I would venture to say we probably were around the average if not a little higher in the league in terms of budget. We're not there right now. We've got to find a way to do that. There's lots of buckets. Not all of them are big buckets, but they all add up. If that's outside revenue, if that's finding way to get more money coming in licensing, if that's creating more premium space opportunities - all of those things are additions to that revenue stream. My job is to find a way for our coaches to have the tools in their tool belt that they need to be successful."

One path to generating more revenue would be to sell the naming rights of Mountaineer Field and the WVU Coliseum, among other venues. Of course everyone will always refer to those venues by their original name and that's something Baker understands. But at the end of the day, if there's an opportunity to put the athletic department in a better financial situation, they're going to make it happen. And as a matter of fact, that process has already begun.

"We're exploring that in really all of our venues and have had some third parties engaged just to do some valuations on what that could bring. Certainly the juice needs to be worth the squeeze because people get pretty attached to certain names on venues and I get that. But they also get attached to winning and as I outlined earlier, winning takes money. It's something we're evaluating and are definitely going to look at. If you want to advertise you company in the state of West Virginia there is no better organization to partner with than WVU Athletics. Period. We have the biggest reach of any organization in this state. If there's an opportunity to monetize that, we've got to look really hard at it and we are engaged at getting some early valuations to say okay, these are the venues that we think could have some corporate naming or even some individuals to name and here's what we think those would bring in from a dollar perspective."

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