How a former women’s teaching school became a college sports disruptor

HARRISONBURG, Va. — It doesn’t take long.

Visit James Madison University, and you will quickly notice how eager folks are to hold doors open for one another. Students for students. Students for professors. Locals for students. In this college town, aptly nicknamed the “Friendly City,” if they can see you coming, they’re holding it open.

JMU’s campus sits in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, flanked by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg, it didn’t become fully co-ed until 1966 and didn’t field a football team until 1972. It now has 22,000 students.

For much of the past 25 years, the university’s evolution occurred in the anonymity of low-major NCAA athletics, including the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) — essentially the second division of college football. JMU won national titles, upset big-name opponents and invested in its teams, yet most of the achievements were far removed from the biggest and brightest stages of college sports.

Then in 2022, JMU climbed to the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and Group of 5 conference level — still looking up at the power-conference penthouse, but at least in the building — and thrived. The 2023-24 season became the Year of the Dukes. JMU football posted an 11-2 record, ranking as high as No. 18 in the Associated Press Top 25 poll and finishing with the program’s first bowl game. Men’s basketball went 32-4, a record number of victories on its way to winning the recently joined Sun Belt Conference. The Dukes then advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1983, toppling fifth-seeded Wisconsin in the opening round. Olympic sports such as softball, volleyball and women’s lacrosse also have surged.

Here in the foothills of Virginia, a former women’s teaching college is emerging as the latest disruptor in college sports.

“I think we’re the best school in the Group of 5,” said athletic director Matt Roan. “When you talk about where we stack up, we’re already at the top of that group.”

But the new perch also affords a clear view of JMU’s ceiling. On Saturday, the 2-0 football team will travel to face the 3-0 North Carolina Tar Heels. It’s an opportunity for the Dukes to continue upending the paradigm, to slay a classic big brand from the ACC. The problem is, regardless of what happens on the field, it won’t change JMU’s balance sheet.

North Carolina’s athletics revenue was $139.4 million for the last fiscal year. The biggest chunk of that — about $45 million — came via ACC payouts, most courtesy of the conference’s television deal with ESPN. James Madison’s athletics budget was $68 million. That’s one of the highest among G5 schools, but less than half what the Tar Heels bring in each year, and even farther from the richest power-conference heavyweights that top $200 million annually: Ohio State, Texas, Alabama and the like.

“If you like winning and you like success, it doesn’t come cheap,” said Scooter Renkin, JMU’s associate athletic director for development.

James Madison has invested in athletics as much or more than just about every other G5 school in the country. That might be enough to pull off an upset Saturday in Chapel Hill, or even to solidify the Dukes as the best of that second tier in the years ahead. But for JMU to continue its rise, it must close that revenue gap at a time when the only sustainable path — membership in a power conference — is the equivalent of a steel-bolted vault that no one is holding open.

JMU has come a long way. But in the current landscape of college sports, is it stuck settling for where it is? Or can it find a way to break through that door?

Mickey Matthews was hired as the head football coach of the Dukes in 1999, taking over a program that won three games the previous season and had just one conference championship in school history. Bridgeforth Stadium, which opened in 1975, had expanded to a capacity of 12,500, but attendance lagged and the facilities were in disrepair.

“I used to tell people you could throw a hand grenade up in the stands during games and it wouldn’t injure anyone,” said Matthews.

Aside from a brief stretch of NCAA Tournament berths for men’s basketball in the early 1980s and a surprising field hockey national championship in 1994, JMU had little athletics success. But the same year Matthews took over in football, the university also hired Jeff Bourne, a first-time, fiscally minded athletic director empowered to grow the department.

“Athletics was very much a university commitment,” said Bourne. “I was told when I was hired it would be a long road and it won’t be easy, but they wanted that future for the program.”

Bourne and Matthews believed in that vision. And Matthews started winning games.

“We had all the ingredients: Beautiful campus, great school, the marching band was terrific. We just needed to put it all together,” said Matthews. “I was convinced when I took the job that James Madison did not know what it was sitting on.”

In 2004, Matthews led the Dukes to a 13-2 record and Division I-AA (now FCS) national championship. After flirting with an off-campus stadium, the school doubled down on Bridgeforth and the existing footprint, building the Plecker Athletic Performance Center behind the south end zone in 2005 and completing a $62 million expansion in 2011.

The Dukes won a second football national title in 2016 and were runners-up in 2017 and 2019, convincing FBS-quality talent to come to JMU and play for championships instead of riding the bench elsewhere. ESPN brought “College GameDay” to town for the first time in 2015, as 12,000 strong packed the Quad and introduced the Dukes to fans nationwide. Lee Corso dressed up as founding father James Madison, powdered wig and all.

The university helped finance those bootstraps along the way. JMU’s athletics budget of $68 million in fiscal year 2023 ranked highest among Sun Belt members by a margin of $14 million, and top five among all G5 schools. More than $53 million came via the mandatory fees that are part of tuition payments for every JMU student — making JMU the most heavily subsidized athletic department of any public university in the country.

It’s not a one-year blip, either. Over the past decade, JMU athletics has had an average annual budget of $52.6 million, with student fees (a standard part of tuition costs for nearly every college) contributing an average of $41.3 million per year.

That safety net allowed JMU to grow its athletics programs patiently and deliberately. Regional peers like Appalachian State, Marshall and Old Dominion made the leap from FCS to FBS years sooner, lured by the higher revenues available via ticket sales, licensing and, most significantly, media rights from the conferences, NCAA and bowl payouts. But despite interest from G5 leagues such as the Mid-American Conference (MAC) and Conference USA, JMU stayed put, leaning on those student fees to translate football’s success to other sports and waiting for the right FBS fit.

“Our fees are on the higher end, and we do get some criticism for that,” said Charlie King, a longtime JMU academic administrator who previously oversaw athletics and currently serves as the university’s interim president. “But we make no apologies for it, either. I bet a whole lot of other schools wish they could be where we are athletically.”

Women’s lacrosse won a national championship in 2018. Softball went to the Women’s College World Series in 2021, upsetting top-seeded Oklahoma. Nearly every athletics facility got a facelift, headlined by the brand-new, $140 million Atlantic Union Bank Center, an 8,500-capacity basketball arena that opened in November 2020.

In summer 2021, in the wake of Texas, Oklahoma and the SEC setting off another wave of conference realignment, JMU decided the moment had finally arrived. It accepted an invitation to the Sun Belt, joining the likes of App State, Marshall and ODU.

As a result, the student fee subsidy is already shrinking — because it has to. In 2015, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed a bill that capped the percentage of university student fees that can go toward athletics spending. For in-state G5 programs, the cap is 55 percent. JMU had to present a pro forma to the state legislature as part of its move to the Sun Belt, showing how it would get under that threshold by 2029. The department is already below 60 percent once it factors in allowable deductions such as pre-existing debt and certain auxiliary services, according to Kevin Warner, JMU’s associate AD for communications.

JMU made its move to FBS without a budget-altering windfall. The school has yet to receive any revenue from Sun Belt media rights, and when it does, it will be about $2 million a year, max. Nor does JMU have the level of private funding that exists at Liberty, another Virginia university and potential G5 disruptor, or SMU, where big-money donors helped bankroll the Mustangs to the ACC. In lieu of that, student fee support will remain critical.

“The onus is on us to continue communicating why the support we get from the institution and our students is a good investment,” said Roan, who succeeded Bourne in May. “The whole front-porch metaphor: Athletics do shine a light on this institution.”

Even without a billionaire booster or millions in TV revenue, membership in the Sun Belt has made a difference. No one tailgates or storms the court for low student fees. At JMU, where fees cover student ticket costs, student attendance for home football games averages about 8,500. That’s nearly 40 percent of the school’s total enrollment — what Roan describes as students “voting with their feet.”

Meanwhile, JMU has steadily converted that growing student interest into grassroots alumni investment. Football’s average attendance was north of 25,000 in 2023, season tickets sold out for a second straight year, and mid-level fundraising has increased markedly, keeping JMU among the most well-funded and aspirational G5 schools.

“Everyone wants to be part of it when you’re winning, but it’s more than that,” said Bob Chesney, hired in December as JMU’s new head football coach. “When you get into the Valley here, there are no professional sports teams, so you start to become that for these people.”

JMU football coach Bob Chesney was hired away from Holy Cross in December after Curt Cignetti left for Indiana after five seasons. (Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Bridgeforth Stadium sits on the older west side of the Harrisonburg campus, flanked by Newman Lake and the cherry blossoms that line its shores. It’s a fitting time capsule for JMU athletics.

The 50-year-old facility has been renovated on three sides, but the fourth is still the original concrete slab from the mid-1970s, lined with metal bleachers. You can see the progress, but also the work left to be done. King estimates it could cost another $100 million to complete the stadium update and surrounding redevelopments.

That’s a massive commitment for a school in JMU’s position, once again contemplating what comes next. Where does it go from here? Are we nearing the end of JMU’s rise — or is this somewhere in the middle?

The Year of the Dukes begat an offseason of change. Football coach Curt Cignetti left for Indiana after five seasons, with 13 former JMU players following him via the transfer portal. Basketball coach Mark Byington was hired away by Vanderbilt after four seasons. It’s the familiar scourge of a thriving mid-major, stripped for parts by the power-conference cartel.

Bourne is gone, too. After 25 years at the helm for JMU, he retired in April to a house on Lake Norman, just outside Charlotte, N.C. When the university recognized his career at halftime of the spring football game, more than 10,000 fans joined the celebration.

Before he set sail, Bourne did his best to keep JMU on course, bringing in Holy Cross’ Chesney and former Morehead State men’s basketball coach Preston Spradlin, two coaches with a familiar resume of punching up and overachieving. Then he hand-picked Roan as his predecessor.

“’Don’t mess it up’ was my top priority,” said Roan. “And it was more colorful than that.”

The 40-year-old grew up a couple of hours from Harrisonburg before playing football at Virginia Tech and Southern Utah. He fits the JMU mold, shepherding big strides as AD at Nicholls State and Eastern Kentucky, two difficult places to flourish. But JMU presents a new challenge.

The Dukes waited for the right moment to elevate from FCS to the G5, but did so as the gap between the G5 and power conferences was widening. TV deals for the top leagues continue to increase, all while millions of dollars in athlete revenue sharing and other financial burdens linger on the horizon in the proposed House v. NCAA settlement. It leaves JMU in a purgatory of sorts, vying for second-tier supremacy but priced out of competing with the power conferences, trapped between its ambitions and financial limitations.

In the newly expanded 12-team format, JMU has a legitimate shot every year to make the College Football Playoff out of the Sun Belt, a path that wasn’t previously available to the Group of 5. The recent NCAA Tournament win for men’s basketball showed second-weekend runs are similarly attainable. Same for the WCWS upset of Oklahoma and a national championship in lacrosse. All of those echelons are now in play.

“We talk about being an ‘everything school’ — we want to be good in everything,” said Roan. “We have people that are buying into that.”

Maintaining it is the difficult part. The organic growth the program has achieved over the past two decades — consistently hitting on coaching hires, stretching every dollar, doing more with less — is a tough task made tougher by better competition, no matter how committed JMU is.

Still, the school and community have seen the benefits of those ambitions, and believe it will ultimately be enough to crack that vault.

Conference realignment never rests in college sports, evidenced by the recent rebirth of the Pac-12, or the ongoing uncertainty in the ACC, where Florida State and Clemson saber-rattling for a way out has the rest of the league on edge. If JMU can remain viable long enough for chaos to strike, could the Dukes slip through the next time that door pops open?

“Where JMU fits in this whole makeup of college sports in the next decade or so, I don’t know. But I do see us being a program that continues to prevail,” said Bourne. “Sometimes there is destiny in place, time and people.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Barry Chin / The Boston Globe; Ben Solomon / NCAA Photos; Scott Taetsch, Sarah Stier, Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)