Have you ever wondered how each and every student-athlete receives multiple uniforms, special equipment, travel equipment, and more?

The money doesn’t just come from a set budget for each year, instead, it comes from the fundraising events that the staff of Averett Athletics does as well as student-athlete fundraising events.

Averett University’s Athletics Director Meg Stevens said, “all athletic departments do some sort of fundraising to supplement the budget. For us, it is about how many dollars can we raise to make sure we provide our student-athletes with the best possible experience.”

Fundraising adds a little extra money into the budget as wiggle room for any inconveniences that may not have been able to be taken care of in the main budget.

“We also fundraise for for ‘uh oh’ moments, for when something breaks or if something doesn’t go well. Fundraising is a piece of that,” Stevens said.

Most of the fundraising events that happen are  Stevens herself and the athletic team, while others such as the Day of Giving and the raffle tickets see the student-athletes on the frontline.

“What we classify as fundraisers, some of them aren’t fundraisers but they do generate revenue. Revenue generation we consider that good for putting toward our intercollegiate athletics budget,” Stevens said. “We are asking more but therefore we are also giving more back.”

Day of Giving started many years ago as an opportunity to get the Averett community such as students, coaches, parents, professors, and many more involved with Averett Athletics. This event used to be called Cougar Club where boosters, Averett parents, and alumni would give back to the athletics department, however, narrowing it down to Day of Giving allowed Averett Athletics to capture it into one day to try to raise more and generate more.

“I believe in one team fundraising, so right now if you allow each team to fundraise, football would be the team to raise the most. So my job is to not necessarily make it equal but equitable. When we do one team fundraising we make sure it happens equitably. We need to make sure we take care of our student-athletes no matter what sport they play, no matter what gender they are, but they are treated equitably,” Stevens said.

In the last year, the format of Day of Giving has changed from fundraising as one big Averett Athletics group down to the different sports fundraising for a particular item. For this to have worked and to continue to work in the following years, parameters have been set.

“Coaches had to submit which types of equipment they were interested in. They couldn’t be one-offs or t-shirts for the team. They had to be big or capital products like a stringing machine, or other things that maybe we can’t pay for them with the budget but it would make a big difference to that program,” Stevens said. “We approved those certain items and then the coaches and teams worked together to fundraise to say ‘hey this is the item we like, please help us to get it.’”

The student-driven fundraising doesn’t stop with the Day of Giving in fact, the students have been involved in one of Averett’s largest revenue-generating events, the raffle tickets.

“It’s a great low cost, fairly simple when you get down to it fundraising event,” Stevens said. “Each student-athlete sells ten tickets. You’re not asking for some crazy thing. You are asking for every student-athlete to chip in. When we talk about being one team, the raffle tickets are a part of that.”

For this revenue generator to work, all of the student-athletes need to sell 100% of their tickets. This type of fundraising is almost guaranteed as it is simple to send out ten tickets to all the student-athletes as ask them to sell them. A set number of tickets per student ends up being a set number of revenue going back into the budget for student-athletes.

“What hurts us is when a team doesn’t sell 100% of the tickets. It makes us question if they really put the effort in. There’s a lot of students out there that are selling candles and popcorn and working sporting games. We have reduced that so students can focus on their academics,” Stevens said.

The raffle tickets can be purchased by anyone, students, parents, neighbors, professors, the list goes on.

“The raffle is great, we have students and parents win $1,000, and it’s great!” Stevens said.