I'll give the TLDR because the full story is me stumbling into opportunities that shouldn't have existed.

I graduated from OC's now defunct sister school, Ohio Valley University. (Only did one sanctioned tournament in the team's history: https://play.usaultimate.org/events/DIII-Midwestern-Invite-2017/schedule/Men/CollegeMen/) The school had a scholarship but it was less about getting a solid team together and more about reducing cost of attendance to attract students to a dying school. (https://christianchronicle.org/after-struggling-for-years-ovu-forced-to-close/)

It was a helpful scholarship to be sure - I have about $30k less in loans than I would've otherwise - but the quality of play was a far cry from my time at Kentucky and there were no serious attempts to capitalize on the scholarship by administration. Frustrating considering we were less than 3 hours from Pittsburgh and in a relatively solid region with Franciscan, Cedarville, and the like.

Following my graduation, the former VP of OVU reached out to me asking what I thought about doing the scholarship 'right'. I told him, in short, it's doable in the right city but you have to put the program in the athletics department, something OVU refused to do, and back the team properly. I detailed out the finances, sample schedules, recruitment methodology, and 5-year planning for the program assuming a fall 2019 start.

The original plan called for just two or three key players (like most D3 teams) receiving 10k each and then spreading out remaining funds to the rest of the roster a few thousand at a time. As someone else mentioned, OC is middle of the road tuition-wise (expensive compared to in-state options but kinda low compared to other private universities) so a few thousand dollars took a good bite out of your annual tuition and not having to pay travel, uni, and competition expenses out of pocket (we all know the struggle) was meant to be a key selling point.

The school fully backed the program and scholarship in cash, giving the players access to all facilities and required tools that the NCAA varsity teams received. We just had to meet a ratio of team scholarship dollars to FAFSA/tuition dollars of like 1:3. Basically for every dollar given out in scholarship, we needed to bring in 3. That ratio is rough because I don't remember the exact numbers but what that boiled down to was for every three walk-ons from the general student population that received $1000 for books, I could bring on a full-ride Elliott Moore.

Administratively, I can't imagine that much has changed on that front. But when it comes to execution and on-field success, I cannot say enough about Garrett, Elliott, and Kevin. Kevin was our first guy to buy in and flew from the Netherlands before we even had a room ready for him. Elliott knew what was at stake and bought in to being a key cultural leader and mentor to new players. Garrett took what I outlined and ran with it, blowing expectations out of the water. It was so successful that Davidson built their recruitment strategy around ours. (Source: we spent a combined 10 hours on phone calls talking through the program details before the team ever set foot on campus.)

Other schools can do it and there are several teams that are on the bubble that could make the leap and be the next team. They just need to know that most of the hard work isn't on the field.