Athletic Board of Control meeting covers pool hours, referee pay

Though swimming can be a way to stay in shape, it’s hard for some students to take advantage of the pool in the DakotaDome.

On Oct. 11, 2017, the Athletic Board of Control met to discuss the possibility of varying pool hours to be more compatible with USD students in hopes of raising its attendance.

Josh Sorbe, an SGA senator and ABC seat-holder, said this a good conversation to be had.

“Maybe there’s a bigger issue of just accessibility for students at USD to access workout facilities in general,” Sorbe said.

Wendy Johnson, associate director for the Wellness Center, passed around a calendar showing the hour-to-hour schedule for every day of the week, showing which activities take up pool time.

The chart showed when the pool is in use by the USD swimming and diving team, private swimming lessons, the Vermillion Area Swim Team, the open swim time and some blank spaces, which signify when the pool has to be closed due to maintenance and testing.

Johnson said since pool hours vary from day-to-day, the users per day remains low.

“From last spring, from Jan. 7 or 8 to the end of finals week, we had about 1,100 total users,” Johnson said in the meeting. “Which isn’t a lot.”

The pool’s location remains a challenge to bring in patrons.

“I think that this conversation reminds us we have a facility we can use to swim at,” Sorbe said. “We have lap swim hours almost every day, six out of the seven days, we have open swim in some form.”

One potential idea to encourage student attendance was having intramural sports, though in the past they’ve shown to be unsuccessful, Johnson said. Trying to encourage fraternities and sororities with open swim hasn’t been successful either.

“We haven’t tried intramural for a couple years, they tried water polo and they didn’t really have a good turnout,” Johnson said.  “We’ve tried to run different events to gain interest and we haven’t been very successful.”

Later in the meeting, the ABC discussed the response letter from the Summit League regarding the difference in men’s and women’s referee pay. The letter contained different reasons as to why there’s such a different in pay. It mentioned that all other 32 Division I conferences have discrepancies in referee pay.

Because officials are independent contractors, they have the right to refuse work if they don’t feel the pay is sufficient.

The league offers 88 percent of league basketball games accepted by Tier I officials, the most qualified. USD women’s basketball games had 92 percent of home games refereed by Tier I officials.

They finally mentioned how women’s officials have seen regular raises in pay, regular discretionary and cost of living over the last 10 years.

“I think if you’re reffing a women’s game you should be getting paid as much as a men’s game,” Novak said. “Because they’re really good, and they’re just as good as our men’s team.”

SGA wrote a resolution showing their support of the ABC’s recommendation for the pay of women referees in the Summit League.