Former NC State AD Debbie Yow talks challenges of COVID-19 outbreak on The OG
Posted April 1, 2020 4:42 p.m. EDT
Former NC State athletic director Debbie Yow may have just retired, but she still has a ton of friends in the business - and she's been hearing from a lot of them in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak that has shut down sports, she told The OG on Wednesday.
"You really don't envision having a catastrophic situation like this," Yow said.
She said schools can start to look for money in certain places if they need it - their own reserves, which she said are healthy at places with enormous athletic budgets but not so much everywhere else - your conference reserve, and your catastrohpic insurance.
"I think you have to separate the pain, and part of the pain is what happens for the rest of this (fiscal) year, which takes you through June 30 and then the next step is what do you do about the following fiscal year. I think there are three places you can look immediately - one is your department reserve. The second would be your conference reserve. Most conferences, at least within Power 5, do have a conference reserve and they have a standard - in other words, you can only have a distribution out of the reserve if it reaches a certain point. But that can all be changed by the presidents, if need be," Yow said.
"And then you look at the catastrophic insurance that your league has. The ACC has catastrophic insurance. I just don't know if it covers the NCAA issues or if it only covered the ACC Tournament. Those would be the three areas that I'd look at right now for the end of this year. Then next year, that's a whole different issue, especially if football can't be played."
Current NC State AD Boo Corrigan joined The Adam Gold Show last week and expressed a need to take the crisis day by day. That's good, Yow said, but she knows Corrigan well enough to know that he is also planning ahead - all athletic directors have to be.
"(Corrigan) said something to the effect of this is one day at a time, and I think that's accurate. because we've never been through anything exactly like this. The closest would've been the stock market crash in '08 - other than that, I can't think of anything during my 29 years as an AD that would even come close. I think there's some wisdom in what he said in terms of one day at a time. But I have to tell you that I'm pretty sure even though he said one day at a time, they're sitting around the table with people that he trusts the most and talking about what would be the worst-case scenario and what would be the best-case scenario," Yow said.
"I think planning for the worst-case scenario is really important right now, and the worst-case scenario is that there is no football. So what does the budget look like if there is no football, and how do we manage that? That's such a big question to answer."
Of course, Yow no longer has to answer it. She retired after 43 years, but she's found plenty ot keep her busy. She's putting more attention into dieting and exercising, something she rarely had time to do when running an athletic department. She's doing some consulting work, although obviously that's slowed right now. She's still on the National Football Foundation board, and she's still a member of the board of trustees at NC State.
"I would make the case I'm doing a better job at the work as a board member because I have more time to really focus," Yow said. "I just have more time to really focus on the agenda.
"And then there's writing people and thanking them. There are so many people over the decades who've been good to me and helped me along the way, and I've never taken the time to actually write them and thank them."
