About 80 schools will send student-athletes to this spring’s Division III Men’s and Women’s Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Division III will pay about $260 ($75 daily for 3 ½ days) to help pay for rooms, meals and other expenses of each of the 688 student-athletes (344 men and 344 women) who will participate in outdoor track and field competition. It also will pay transportation costs.

But the number of student-athletes representing each school varies, from only one competitor to more than 20. For example, 23 men represented Wisconsin-La Crosse last spring when the Eagles won the outdoor track team crown.

Although Division III will pay for however many student-athletes qualify to represent a school at the championships, it pays only for a maximum of two noncompetitors (generally coaches) to accompany student-athletes to the event. Most competing schools – those who qualify eight or fewer participants – are reimbursed for only one coach.

The Division III Championships Committee hopes to change that limitation sometime soon – not just in track and field but in any individual/team sport in which travel parties may include six or more student-athletes, including cross country, golf, swimming and diving, tennis, and wrestling.

Division III, which in recent years has stepped up funding to allow more student-athletes to participate in championships and to provide a quality setting for competition once they arrive, also is recognizing that student-athletes benefit from support by the same array of coaches and support staff they’ve worked with throughout the season.

“We have situations like a need for coaching specialties, or male coaches coaching female student-athletes, or transportation issues like whether drivers are available for a couple of minivans, or bringing an athletic trainer with 10 or 12 athletes,” explained committee chair Jeff Martinez, who serves as director of athletics at Redlands.

The committee wants to pay for two noncompetitors to accompany a squad of six to 10 student-athletes, three for a squad of 11 to 15 student-athletes, and four for a squad of 16 or more student-athletes. It estimates it will cost about $150,000 annually to pay the expenses of additional noncompetitors.

The Division III Strategic Planning and Finance Committee has suggested waiting at least until 2009-10 to begin paying for additional coaches or support staff, agreeing with the Championships Committee that the division’s top priority in championships is to continue increasing funding of student-athletes’ daily expenses to keep pace with inflation.

The Division III Presidents Council is expected to decide in late April whether to increase student-athlete per diem – an action that could result in each competitor at the outdoor track and field championships receiving about $280 ($80 daily) to cover expenses by 2009-10.

But the idea of funding additional noncompetitors ranks high on the Championships Committee’s wish list, and Martinez hopes that the idea still can become reality sometime during the next two-year budget cycle that begins this fall.

“Nonstudent-athlete travel would remain our first priority,” he said. “If it’s not allocated in this first year of the biennial budget, it certainly would remain our top priority in the second year.”