Can an Elite Women’s Soccer School Survive the New College Sports Moneyball?

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Stevens Stadium sits just off the main entrance to Santa Clara University. With 6,800 seats, it is the largest women’s college soccer structure in the country, and it has hosted World Cup practice and the 1996 NCAA Women’s Soccer Championship, which set a collegiate women’s soccer attendance record two days in a row. The 60-year-old venue’s pitch, Buck Shaw Field, has seen more history than a typical college soccer field.

Over the years the program has produced United States national team stars such as Brandi Chastain, Aly Wagner, Leslie Osborne, and Danielle Slaton, all of whom now own Bay FC, the local NWSL team. Julie Ertz, who recently retired after a 10-year run on the national team, is also an alum, and seven other former Broncos currently dot NWSL rosters. 

The Broncos moved into Stevens in the early 1990s after the university decided to move on from its prior tenants: the football team. Aside from being one of the nation’s premier programs, the soccer team has been able to claim some of the highest attendance records because they’ve called a football stadium home for more than 30 years, a rarity in the sport. 

The university’s decision to cut its football program decades ago hasn’t yet impacted the Broncos’ dominance: They’ve won two national titles since 2000, the most recent one in 2020, and they’re tournament regulars. Santa Clara, who was eliminated by North Carolina Friday night, went into the 2024 NCAA women’s soccer tournament ranked 11th in the country and was the only school in the top 20 without a football program.  

Santa Clara is a mid-major Division I powerhouse in a traditionally non-revenue sport. And women’s soccer has never turned a profit in coach Jerry Smith’s nearly four-decade tenure here, he says.

But the absence of football has never been more prominent than it is now, when the gridiron is driving all the major decisions and direction of college sports. 

It’s a tumultuous time for college athletics, so maintaining success will get increasingly difficult for Smith. That’s because attracting and retaining talent in Santa Clara will be more of a challenge. The new NIL (name, image, and likeness) era intersects with an increasingly populated transfer portal as athletes are no longer required to sit out a season upon changing schools. 

Because of the proposed House v. NCAA settlement, set to take effect next fall, the athletic department could also be facing new restrictions on its scholarship capacity and an uphill battle to offset a new revenue-sharing model without the help of football—the biggest moneymaker.

“It just seems so much is riding on one sport,” Smith said of football to Front Office Sports. “It just seems way out of balance to me.” 

Santa Clara football faced an unexpected blitz in the early 1990s: NCAA bylaws. The program was the school’s only non–Division I sport. New rules prohibited athletic departments from being multidivisional, which meant the Broncos had to either bring the rest of their teams down to D-II or spend the money to move football up to D-I. 

A jump to Division I required a stadium renovation, a facilities upgrade, and plenty of other financial resources. Although the football team had been a Division I program at one point, it hadn’t played in a major bowl game since 1950, which aided the administrators’ decision. The Broncos took their last snap that season. 

Smith, who was just six years into his current 38-year tenure with the Broncos, predicted it would be a problem for years to come. “My job just got a lot harder,” Smith recalled telling local reporters at the time. 

Smith’s program didn’t immediately suffer. His 562 career wins are ranked third all-time among Division I women’s college soccer coaches, and he is just nine from surpassing longtime Connecticut coach Len Tsantiris for second. But it changed his recruiting, which is still being felt today with NIL. 

“We kind of stay away from a five-star kid,” Smith says. “Because I think I can win without them. And I’m going to lose out to a Power 4 conference. They’re going to outbid you on NIL. There’s such a low return on that kid for Santa Clara that we really don’t spend time recruiting them.”

Santa Clara’s campus is just outside of San Francisco and annual cost of attendance is north of $80,000, but the Broncos don’t have an NIL war chest. Smith has to pick his spots with the school’s collective when it comes to offering money. 

Ryan Merz, the head of compliance who helped set up the Santa Clara NIL Exchange, says the highest earner on campus is men’s soccer player Naji Elder, who might be pushing into five figures in earnings after counting his free merchandise from deals. The collective started with the school leaning in to a group of billionaire alums for help, but Merz and athletic director Heather Owen say one of the problems has been convincing alums from an academic school to invest in a college sports model they didn’t grow up in, a common problem nationwide. 

Smith hasn’t offered NIL money to a high school recruit yet, but it’s on the list of calls he knows he’ll be making in the near future. 

He remains close with both Ertz and Basketball Hall of Famer Steve Nash, who is perhaps the school’s most famous alum. He’s kept business out of his relationship with both but is aware of the help they could provide. 

“I haven’t called Steve,” Smith says. “But it’s coming. I haven’t called Julie. But it’s coming. It’s a big wave that’s coming.”

Smith’s offseason plans are quickly booking, too. Unless the Broncos are still playing, he plans to spend Nov. 27 at Chase Center for a Thunder-Warriors game, which will feature Brandin Podziemski and Jalen Williams, the basketball program’s first two NBA alums since Nash was drafted in 1996. Smith is going to the game to fundraise for the men’s basketball program because of the potential domino effect. A successful basketball program could mean NCAA tournament revenue and increased ticket and merchandise sales that the department can use on other programs. 

Merz says when the NCAA changed its rules to allow NIL, the basketball program immediately asked for funds to help recruiting, and has gradually trickled down to women’s basketball and soccer. 

“If you look at the financial model of a place like Santa Clara, it’s really men’s basketball,” Smith says. “All boats rise with men’s basketball. That’s what runs our conference. I envision us like the Big East of the West. And that’s why I work so hard for men’s basketball. We’ll all win if men’s basketball wins.”

In 2023, Gonzaga, which recently announced it was leaving the conference for the Pac-12, won the West Coast Conference title for women’s soccer. Smith said it wasn’t a coincidence that a WCC school with a humming basketball program saw its success translate to women’s soccer. 

“Football is a blessing and a curse in many respects,” WCC commissioner Stu Jackson tells FOS. “Non-football conferences can’t achieve the revenues that football conferences do. By the same token, the fact that we are basketball-centric affords us the opportunity to think about the strategic direction of basketball 24 hours a day, seven days a week that football conferences do not. I think that’s a blessing.”

After winning the national championship in 2020, Smith was feeling confident and decided to reach out to some high-level recruits. The results were humbling. 

Smith chased an unnamed prospect who wound up committing to Duke. Two days before she signed, she flipped to Florida State for more NIL money. She ultimately turned professional out of high school. The Broncos were never really a factor in the recruitment. 

“That was an education,” Smith says. “We looked at each other as a staff, like, ‘Guys, what are we doing?’”

Smith says there’s a correlation between the kids he loses to NIL and the schools they choose: those with football programs that can easily outbid the Broncos. He says most of those players are landing five-figure deals. But the problem isn’t the money as much as those schools’ ability to spread it further down the roster. 

The Broncos’ players have noticed the changing paradigm firsthand after seeing leading scorer Farrah Walters depart for top-ranked Duke a year ago. 

Smith has combated the portal by leaning in to it. He’s found older players are interested in the school’s academics and proximity to Silicon Valley. This year’s roster boasts eight transfers, seven of whom came ahead of this season. Smith said he has offered NIL money only to transfers, with players usually landing four-figure deals. 

Santa Clara has some players who are old enough to have been recruited before the NIL and portal era and have noticed the shift in recruits’ questions on visits. 

“The conversation has changed a bit,” says starting goalkeeper Marlee Nicolos, who is in her seventh year of eligibility, to FOS. “But maybe the answers haven’t changed that much.” 

Heather Owen had a dream job at Stanford, her alma mater, where she rose to deputy athletic director after playing basketball for legendary coach Tara VanDerveer in the late ’90s. But when Santa Clara had an opening after longtime AD Renee Baumgartner stepped down in May, she was encouraged to take a meeting with a search firm. 

Stanford boasts 36 teams in its athletic department, with a heavy priority in Olympic sports, and has struggled to get basketball and football going in the world of NIL and the portal. As Owen weighed the job, which wouldn’t require her to move, her interest grew. 

“As you started to think about doing Division I sports without football, that actually became pretty attractive,” Owen says. “Santa Clara is, on a given day, eerily similar to me with Stanford.”

Hired in September, Owen is now tasked with leading Santa Clara in the modern era with no football while keeping programs such as Smith’s in contention. 

Football can bring in significant revenue even at schools without successful programs. UC Berkeley, which is less than 50 miles north of Santa Clara’s campus and boasts a similar profile to the school, brought in nearly $39 million in football revenue for the 2023 fiscal year (which counts the 2022 season) despite going 4–8. 

In Olympic sports, success doesn’t guarantee profit. North Carolina, the Broncos’ Friday opponent, is the best program in the sport’s history, having won 21 of the 42 all-time national championships. During the athletic department’s 2023 fiscal year, it operated at a loss of roughly $1.1 million. 

Plenty of Power 4 schools are banking on improving football for the trickle-down effect. But Owen is focused on both basketball programs to keep women’s soccer—the school’s one program regularly in the national championship conversation—a priority.  

“I think you start with those two, and then over time you build out everything else,” Owen says. “I think Santa Clara can do it even in this environment. I think it can shoot an interesting gap.” 

Owen has told her department to “stay nimble” regarding the pending House settlement. If the settlement is approved and the school opts in to it, men’s basketball would net two additional scholarships to increase from 13 to 15. Women’s soccer currently has 14 scholarships to divide among 30-plus roster spots. Opting in to House would cap the roster at 28 players but double the scholarships.

“Just think what I could do if the scholarship field was level,” Smith says. “You can outbid us for NIL. Maybe you have a bigger school and you’re on TV more, but scholarship-wise and the amount of money that the families that come here have to pay on tuition, room and board, books, that’s going to be a more level playing field. I’m super excited about that.”

Santa Clara, without a major TV deal, may have a big problem offsetting one part of the settlement: the back payments to former athletes that, as of the current proposal, won’t come from the schools but from the media revenue distributed by the NCAA.

“The House settlement back damages are onerous, but they’re not catastrophic,” Jackson says. “We can withstand this. The real question becomes what is our conference and each of our members look like going forward as it relates to opting in and revenue-sharing.”

Smith is optimistic his program can sustain success. But with so many unknowns and a lack of regulation, he isn’t dismissing the possibility he could be wrong. 

“We’re not caught up in so much turmoil like other places,” Smith says. “I think Santa Clara is a place where we can last longer if there’s going to continue to be chaos. What’s happening with the money that’s being spent by the Power 4, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us won’t be able to keep up.”