Jasper Poag

The second year of being fully in the NCAA offers many opportunities for Mississippi University for Women, but it also now provides the university with some challenges that it needs to overcome.

One of these challenges that the university faces is athletic facilities. Another challenge includes university branding and getting the university's name out to more people. The school’s athletic director Buddy Foster said athletics is now trying to move forward with the university to begin making progress on some of these challenges.

“Well, I think that now that I have more of an ability to evaluate, you can always look for areas that need to continue to grow and keep moving the program forward,” said Buddy Foster.

“You know I think obviously facilities across the board has been a big thing that is lacking-you know an athletic-dedicated weight room, more practice space for our outdoor sports, indoors training room, that we’re able to serve our student athletes’ needs more with hot tubs and cold tubs and that sort of thing,” said Buddy Foster.

These challenges also lead to more opportunity to find ways to get the brand out to the public more effectively.

“I would say facilities is on the forefront. Along with that improving our ability to get our brand out and getting Brian on board has helped immensely with that, but we also just purchased a new product called Huddle that will allow us to live stream more events, do commercials, have advertisements on those live streams, so really trying to continue to take steps to grow the program,” said Foster.

One positive thing that helps The W’s athletics program is that the school is public, so the costs of attending are not as expensive. However, being in an athletic conference provides challenges such as traveling and the costs that go with getting teams to and from events.

“I think The W is in a great spot in terms of you know being in a conference now. I started here as the men's basketball coach back in 2018, and we were not in a conference. We just had started the NCAA process. There were a lot of unknowns that way, and to see where it is now is really exciting,” said Assistant Athletic Director Brian Merkel.

One of the main things that is important for the athletic department is getting the word out to the public and trying to put a good foot forward.

“I think you know we have got some really good athletic department sponsorships here in the last few months. You will start to see some different signage and some things in our facilities. You know, if you go on our website different things you will see some businesses that really have bought into our department. We recently became partners with Columbus Orthopedics, which is a really cool deal for us, and their partnership with us in providing athletic training, but also if our kids need to see a physician or need to do physical therapy,” said Merkel.

The challenge at this level of Division III is that schools do not offer athletic scholarships. At this level students put more emphasis on school with the opportunity to still play the sports they love.

“At our level obviously first and foremost we do not offer athletic scholarships, so I think social media has done some good things, but also in the sense that people are always comparing themselves and want that quote-on-quote ‘offer,’ and ‘offer’ in their minds is athletic scholarships, so as a Division III we do not offer athletic scholarships. But the thing that attracted me to this particular institution was the total cost for room, board and tuition per year,’’ said Men’s Basketball coach Dean Burrows.

“Once I am able to get in front of a prospective recruit and their family and let them know that this is our bottom line before any financial aid or academic scholarships they are like ‘hold on,’ so it is a really good opportunity in that regard,” said Burrows.