From Greenfield Recorder
By Hannah Bevis
AMHERST — There’s a refrain repeated often in hockey dressing rooms and on the bench — control what you can control.
For the UMass women’s club hockey team, what will define their offseason (and potentially their next season) is the uncontrollable.
The Minutewomen are short more than $40,000 due to a clerical error that denied them funding they typically receive from the Student Government Association (SGA). Typically, the club needs around $90,000 total to fund their season. That money comes from a variety of places, including $1,500 yearly dues from each of the roughly 26 players on the team, and various fundraising the team does to make up the difference.
UMass club hockey teams are used to raising a portion of their budget every year, often holding different fundraisers to generate supplementary funds, but approximately half of their budget each year comes from the school’s SGA. The Ways and Means Committee, which is part of the legislative branch of the SGA, oversees the budget approval process for a Registered Student Organization (RSO), which is the category that the club hockey team falls under.
The process of creating a budget and assigning funds is labor intensive.
“Our coach also works with our team treasurer to do the budget every year. So around December we submit our budget to the school for the following season, and there was an error that was made that no one on our team was aware of,” UMass player Danielle Craig said. “So when we submitted our budget, one of our accounts was in a negative balance and within the bylaws. If you are in a negative balance at the time of your budget requests then you automatically get denied. We tried to appeal it, we tried multiple things. We basically exhausted every resource available to us and there’s nothing we could do to get the budget back.”
The team was denied an appeal hearing from the SGA, and went to an appeal hearing from the Senate in an effort to get the decision changed. Ultimately, they were told nothing could be done because the budget had already been approved.
“(SGA and the Senate) know the full story of what happened and then we did reach out to the person who made the error and they fully took responsibility. They even wrote a letter to the Student Government Association saying ‘hey, like this was my fault,’ but again, unfortunately [SGA] came back and said there’s nothing they could do,” Craig said.
According to members of the club hockey team, finances are kept in two accounts, and a purchase by the team was approved but funds from the incorrect account were used. That put them in the red despite having enough money to cover the cost in that other account. The mistake wasn’t flagged, and by the time the Minutewomen realized that a mistake had been made, it was too late to be approved for their yearly funding.
“The employee in question is not a staff member of the SGA. All purchase requests go through the University’s Student Activities and Campus Life Finance Office. The employees do not have the administrative responsibility to “inform groups that they are in the red” because the students have access to their financial accounts on Campus Pulse,” SGA Speaker of the House Jackie Fallon said in an email to the Gazette. “All purchases must be initiated by a member of the respective group, and no member should be making requests for which there are insufficient funds. Per the SGA Bylaws, club officers must maintain accurate financial records, including their account balances.”
“Every year, the committee releases guidelines for how groups are expected to create their budgets,” SGA president Tess Weisman wrote in a email to the Gazette. “In these guidelines it states that no group may receive funding if their fee account has a negative balance at the time of the student group or Agency funding deadline. As this group’s fee account carried a negative balance, unfortunately, they did not qualify for funding per the [fiscal year 2024] guidelines.”
“We understand the disappointment and challenges that students face without funding,” Weisman continued. “Our SGA is committed to improving the way that information is shared between the SGA and student groups. By effectively communicating the resources and funding guidelines offered by the SGA during the budgeting process, we aim to reduce misunderstandings and increase possible funding opportunities for student groups.”
The Minutewomen play in the American College Hockey Association, and are the only women’s hockey team at UMass. Last season they finished with a 13-8 record and frequently play in the national tournament. Most recently, the club qualified for the 2022 national tourney. UMass plays in the ACHA’s Division I, and travels significantly to compete against other Div. I teams.
“We basically have to pay for everything,” explained Craig. “So that includes ice time, refs for our games, we also have to have EMTs at all of our games, any equipment we want to buy, new jerseys, hotels, rental cars … we pay our coaches, literally everything gets paid for and that’s why this budget from the school is so important every year because we are a D-I club team. A lot of the other D-I girls teams that we play are either a long bus ride away or flight away… (there’s) a lot of traveling, a lot of expenses that you wouldn’t realize how much it costs, but it adds up quickly.”
The team is hoping that the Amherst and women’s hockey communities can help make sure they are able to fund their 2023-24 season. The team already has organized an additional fundraiser and is hoping to negotiate some sponsorships from local businesses in the area as well.
“There’s only so much money that I can milk out of my parents and out of my family members,” team member Brianna O’Neill said with a laugh. “Women’s hockey is so important. Though we are a club team, it’s really important to fund women’s hockey in the first place because it’s already such an underfunded sport … any amount of money helps, even if it’s two bucks that (people) donate. Anything helps.”
As of publication, the team has raised $5,645. People can donate to the team’s GoFundMe account online (https://www.gofundme.com/f/umass-amherst-womens-ice-hockey).
(Originally published at https://www.recorder.com/Clerical-error-leaves-UMass-women-s-club-hockey-with-no-2023-24-school-funding-51542330)
