Jim Curry already is in a good mood when he sits down for an interview in his office. Florida State's assistant athletic director for compliance once worked at Coastal Carolina.
As he talks about how "Cost of Attendance" fared in its first year, he's watching his former employer's baseball team chase an improbable championship in the College World Series.
"Overall, I think it was a really positive thing," Curry said of the new legislation, which will provide thousands of dollars in stipends to student-athletes each year. "You see the opportunity to provide enhanced benefits to student-athletes. Those are opportunities with the amount of resources we were able to invest in, that don't come around very often.
"When you're getting less questions and concerns from student-athletes, it's having a very positive impact on them in terms of how they operate from a day-to-day fashion."
There's now six outs left in the CWS title game, and Coastal Carolina has a 4-2 lead.
Cost of Attendance (COA), which for the first time allowed Power Five conference schools to provide money for student-athletes to pay for personal expenses not covered by a traditional scholarship, went into effect last fall.
Every school relied upon federal guidelines to determine the actual dollar figure for cost of attendance for their student-athletes. Factors in determining that number included everything from personal items, ranging from clothing to toiletry, to gas money and flights home.
When COA was being implemented last August, Curry told Warchant that while the money should be used for personal items, student-athletes are free to purchase whatever they want.
FSU budgeted $2 million to fund the first year of its COA initiative, and full-scholarship athletes received a full cash payout on top of the scholarship itself. Partial scholarship athletes -- in sports like baseball, cross country and track -- had their check applied toward tuition, room and board. If there was money left over, those student-athletes could receive cash.
In-state, full-scholarship student-athletes receive $4,500 per year at FSU, while out-of-state athletes pocket $6,018 annually.
Because of where FSU sits geographically, that can create some oddities in the system. Under those rules, an athlete from Thomasville, Ga. (34 miles away) would receive more money to cover travel costs than someone from Miami (483 miles) or Key West (641 miles).
"We didn't hear any [complaint about] that, and you're 100 percent right," Curry said. "There are kids who have a higher transportation stipend who live a heck of a lot closer than those guys in Miami, and so you're 100 percent right."
