Hammersmith
Active member
No, that's not the situation at all. In fact, that sounds more like the old NDSU/Fargodome arrangement than the UND/REA arrangement.grizband said:It may have changed, but at one point UND paid $1 per year to use the Ralph Engelstadt center; which, I'm told, rivals some NHL arenas.SACCAT66 said:CDAGRIZ said:I know nothing about College hockey finances. It seems like the kind of sport that could actually make money on the men’s side. Is that true?
It could.... It all depends on who owns the rink you are playing in. UND didn't own their rink, so they payed a lot to play there (from what i know, could be wrong). If the school owns it, and you can put it to other uses with that money going to the team, you could succeed.
The UND/REA deal has been in the local news quite a bit over the last year or so, so we know a lot about it. The REA handles all the ticket sales for UND hockey, FB, MBB, WBB & VB. The REA takes either 48% or 52% of all ticket revenue(can't recall which direction the split goes), bills UND for a bunch of other stuff, then cuts UND a check at the end of the year for anything left over. Unsurprisingly, there's never all that much left over compared to what went in.
For example, in 2017 the REA took $2.4M worth of ticket revenue, billed UND $247k more for handling ticket sales, and then billed UND another $1.1M for utilities, maintenance, staff, etc. At the end of the year, the REA paid UND back $750k. And that was a bigger payback than normal; usually it's between $250k and $500k.
So not all that good a deal. The UND president asked the REA to renegotiate the deal last year due to a big cut in state appropriations and all hell broke loose. Ralph Engelstead's daughter made it her goal to get rid of UND's president by withholding all future donations from the REA trust and going to the media regularly with everything she said he was doing wrong. It was an ugly several months.