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USA Triathlon’s Finances Revisited

USA Triathlon has quietly released their 2023 Form 990 and Financial Statements. The documents reveal most of the financial picture of our sport’s governing body in the USA. The documents reveal heavy spending in two key competing areas of focus for the organization — elite sport development and the core membership-paying, age-group audience.

The bottom line is this: according to the tax return, USAT’s expenses exceeded their revenue by just over $2 million, approximately $250,000 more than the gap in 2022. The tax return, however, does not paint the entire picture, as it does not include certain donor restricted contributions and/or non-cash or unrealized assets. Review the financial statement that pairs with the Form 990, and it’s a slightly better picture — a combined (unrestricted and restricted) positive gain of almost $477,000. That’s a huge improvement over 2022, which showed a loss of nearly $3 million.

Let’s pull back a couple of layers on the revenue generation and expense side.

Revenue: Memberships, Sponsorship, Events and Grants

As expected, USA Triathlon memberships make up the largest percentage of revenue for the organization. 2023 membership revenue was $7.3 million. That figure is $173,000 less than reported membership income from 2022. 2023 was the launch of USAT’s Youth and Junior Premier Membership, which saw a one-time $25 fee valid from the date of purchase until the athlete’s 18th birthday. It was also the final year of the prior membership rate structure for adults, as USAT now offers tiered memberships. USAT states their membership base as “over 300,000 unique active members.”

Contributions to USA Triathlon totaled just under $3.4 million in 2023; this is a sizable increase of almost $1.4 million from 2022. The bulk of these contributions fall in the “donor restricted” bucket. These contributions are separate to those from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Contributions from USOPC were down in 2023 by roughly $70,000, totaling $1.4 million.

Sponsorship is also a critical component of USAT’s financial picture. Those sponsorships, which currently list 34 different partners in varying levels, brought in just under $3.3 million. That, again, was a smaller slice than it was in 2022; sponsorships that year raked in just over $4 million.

Then there’s events. USA Triathlon events in 2023 included Multisport Nationals, Age Group Nationals, Youth/Junior Nationals, and the Legacy Triathlon. There was also the sizable industry conference Endurance Exchange, held in January of that year in Austin, TX. Combined, events, camps, and clinics brought a total of $2.56 million. That’s up by about a quarter of a million over the previous year.

All told, these major programming sources of revenue were down compared to 2022. What made up the difference? Investment income. USAT made money on investments in 2023 — just over $1.2 million after expenses. That’s a nearly $3 million turnaround against the sizable loss suffered in 2022.

The grand total of revenue, depending on whether you’re looking at the 990 or the financial statement, comes out to $17.4 million (990) or $20.8 million (financial statement).

Program Service versus Support Service Expenses

There are two buckets that expenses for USA Triathlon are divided into. The first are program expenses. These are the types of expenses that are in service of USAT’s mission statement: “…to grow, inspire and support the triathlon community.” And then there are the so-called “support” services; they are the staffing and other operational expenses that come from, well, having an organization in the first place.

Top-level: USAT’s expenses topped $20 million in 2023. Of them, roughly 64.3% were related to program services (just over $13 million). The remaining $7.26 million is attributable to support services: General & Administrative, Business Development / Strategy, Marketing & Communications, and USAT Foundation General & Administrative. These expenses were slightly down versus what the organization spent in 2022.

Looking at program services, there are two areas that drive the bulk of spending. The most spending occurs in the “high performance” bucket, representing a total of $4.2 million. According to the Form 990, spending in this area represents support for “Olympic and Paralympic athletes, as well as approximately 450 elite athletes across the country, from youth and junior to Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, to continue to pursue their athletic goals.” The financial statement breaks this down further, including: $1.8 million for travel; $877,000 for salaries; $499,000 for professional fees; and $492,000 in a bucket of “other event/athlete.”

The other main bucket of spend is to “constituent services.” What are constituent services? According to USAT, “this division and program is unique to providing infrastructure, support and resources to our entire Multisport ecosystem…” and includes support for membership, race directors, coaches, clubs, and officials. The spend here was just over $4 million. $2.6 million of that was spent on insurance, with another $632,000 on salaries/wages.

There are two other areas of spend under program services. The first of these is events; after all, producing races is not a free endeavor. USAT spent almost $3.3 million in producing events in 2023. As you might recall from the section above, USAT brought in $2.56 million in revenue from those events — so, on paper, a net negative. That said, that’s where things like sponsorship, or in-kind donations, help make these events a net positive. And the last area of spend is in “sport development.” Sport development includes the youth, junior, high school, and collegiate club / NCAA efforts, as well as the DEIB program “Together We Thrive.” Spend here was just under $1.2 million — the two largest line items were salaries and wages ($383K), followed by entry fees of nearly $363,500.

From the support services perspective, the largest single expense are salaries and wages of key staff across the four functions mentioned earlier. Salaries for support function staff total $2.86 million. In total, USAT spends over $5 million on its staff, or roughly a 7.7% increase from 2022, although half of this increase can be attributed to inflationary pressures. The salaries of the top-eight highest paid officials represent over $1.5 million of that budget allotment. Those individuals and salaries (base, bonus/incentive compensation, and “other reportable” compensation) are:

  1. Victoria Brumfield, Chief Executive Officer: $346,255
  2. Tim Yount, Chief of Sport Development: $213,904
  3. Camellia Noriega, Associate General Counsel: $191,406
  4. Sheri Trahern, Chief Financial Officer / Chief Operating Officer: $170,824
  5. Scott Schnitzspahn, High Performance General Manager: $165,134
  6. Krista Prescott, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer: $161,208
  7. Gabe Cagwin, Chief Advancement Officer: $151,830
  8. Brian D’Amico, Director of Events: $115,202

Most other expenses, across the board, were held relatively flat to slightly down against this backdrop. The only other sizable increased expense in 2023 was travel, most of which was attributed to the high performance program. Support services accounted for only $260,000 of the total travel expense, which wound up at just north of $2.9 million — or an increase of nearly $500,000 over 2022.

What Does the Future Hold?

According to the financial statement, USAT has just under $13 million in financial assets that could be used to meet cash obligations within a year, with a total asset availability a shade under $16 million. It means that, barring a total collapse of either the membership or sponsorship revenue generation, USAT is in a decent position to operate. It is perhaps somewhat unsurprising to report that Brumfield has an employment agreement that runs “through 2028” and the home Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Still, the question of the value USAT provides its members is looming. How sustainable is it for insurance to make up 60% of the spend on constituent services? Or, put another way, for every membership dollar expended, roughly 35 cents of it is spent on insurance. For how long can that cycle continue to last? We’ll look forward to seeing the numbers for 2024, which will provide the data for the high-performance spend from the first “normal” Olympic year since the Games in Rio in 2016.

Images: World Triathlon

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USA Triathlon

Notable Replies

  1. Is the insurance spend the cost that USAT incurs by providing insurance to sanctioned races? I remember that being a big part of their value proposition.

    The CEO taking down $350k seems excessive. For an organization with such poor finances and no new ideas, they should have created an incentive scheme where she has a low base and then gets bonuses based on being profitable and Olympic performance.

    Really, they should hire a high functioning corporate executive that is independently wealthy and can do the work gratis.

  2. I’m curious about the investment income. Is it through the financial markets (stocks, bonds, mutual funds etc).

    That would seem to be a prudent use of a sizable portion of it’s cash reserves.

  3. The numbers don’t lie. What is the membership benefit for the majority of age groupers out there? Why not support your local triathlon club (i.e. tri club of san diego, d.c. tri) vs. USAT? Besides the value of racing ‘nationals’, what does USAT provide to the every-day triathlete that could not be met with your local triathlon club? Yes, the club insurance is a factor, but local clubs can easily obtain coverage by other means, while providing direct benefits to their members (local events, sponsor discounts, community, recurring workouts, etc.)

    To this day, if it weren’t for the ‘USAT membership requirement’ for some races, I don’t see the value in funneling $ towards a highly disproportionate spend to high performance and others.

    Someone please change my mind…(in the meantime, I need to complete my Safe Sport Annual Refresher course, brb.)

  4. Avatar for pk pk says:

    That’s a good question it’s always easy to blame feds and overall from an outside view IE European I would say the reason of you Tri problem is that ironman is so strong and your fed so weak and you miss a proper club structure which in Europe seems to work much better and of course that also works better for ironman as they increase races in Europe while you decrease races in USA

    So in a way what you see is that when a fed does not work proper it has a negative effect on triathlon
    So maybe your conclusion could be you need more federation
    And I say this as somebody who is very much anti federation as they are way too burreucratic but at the same time we can’t deny that in Europe where feds tend to be strong the sport works better
    As we have a healthy non ironman race sceane which you are lacking
    So yes if your club is working great but I would say most clubs in the USA do not work
    Still every time I see the salary of usat CEO IAM in disbelieve

  5. The insurance is across all of their constituencies – so supplemental race insurance + club insurance + coach insurance + RD insurance, of which it’s really down to your membership being active in order to take advantage of any of those services.

    To be fair to Vic, her comp package is lower than Rocky’s was.

    But, to illustrate some of the changes over the last 5 years: if you go back to 2019, the total expenditure on insurance was around $1.4 million. It’s nearly doubled.

  6. I will always be in the camp of USAT should go away. Forcing race directors to force athletes to use their insurance model is the only reason they remain in existence.

  7. When folks say “insurance”, what does that mean?
    The actual cost for the “insurance” is about 4 bucks. The rest goes into the bucket to pay for all the other stuff. Do athletes want to pay for all the other stuff? Since about 1/3 of the races do not sanction, I guess a lot of RD’s do not want to put this burden on their customers.

  8. That insurance expenses have risen is like more a function of insurers raising rates on everything rather than anything to do with USAT.

    I know that personally, my medical, homeowners and auto polices have roughly doubled in that same time frame too.

  9. Let’s just say I can imagine being a retired executive living in Colorado who is passionate about triathlon. What I can’t imagine is volunteering to drive to Colorado Springs 3-4 days/wk, hiring and firing people, dealing with pissed off members like GMAN (I joke, I joke), begging donors for money, etc. for literally $0 dollars rather than sleeping in and going on a bike ride.

  10. Oh I can imagine the type of person who would do that. You’re probably more likely to get someone who would have a personal agenda though.

    And that’s the potential problem with the CEO position of USAT. What are they measured by? Increasing membership? Increasing number of races? Increasing financial outlook?

  11. Seeing as they are a USOPC governing body:

    Olympic medals.

  12. See I would say that if that is true…Then that should change. They should be measured by growth of the community and keeping the budget in check.

  13. That part of the mandate is always going to be there. It’s more a question of how much of a piece of the pie that end of the puzzle should make up versus the rest of the community.

    What I think will be interesting is getting the 2024 financials next year so we can look at what a full Olympic cycle costs. And then pull results from Olympics / Paralympics / races this year to see where it all ends up – as well as see what else might be in store for Constituent Services beyond insurance.

  14. I have a feeling It’s going to be ugly…

  15. The Salaries seem about right, for a top end NGB (USAT is one of the most well run NGBs) aren’t abnormal. However, USAT had a war chest, what happened? Or is that all under the foundation? I remember reading a 990 and they had 13M in cash. Granted this was 2019 or something.

    Expenses need to get sorted, but lower revenue is concerning. What did running Dallas cost them in 2022 vs how much Moritz & Co paid them? What does running Legacy tri cost?

    Given the current economics around triathlon it’s clear there will not be a WTCS race here anytime soon.

    For awhile, USAT had like 50-60 employees and you could find them all, when I was also playing Rugby. The difference in customer service between USAT and USAR was WILD, and USATs great membership services team came with a cost I’m sure.

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