Volleyball boss Craig Carracher plans $20m fund to save his sport
Craig Carracher, the boss of Volleyball Australia, plans to start a $20m investment fund to keep his cash-strapped Olympic sport afloat.
Scape Australia co-founder and Volleyball Australia president Craig Carracher plans to start a $20m investment fund to keep his sport afloat, amid growing worries about the financial sustainability of Olympic sports.
Carracher, at the Olympics in his Volleyball role and as an Australian Olympic Committee executive member, said he will contribute several million dollars himself to the fund, designed to shore up volleyball’s future leading to and hopefully after the Brisbane 2032 Games.
He plans to launch what he says will be a legacy fund similar to a philanthropic charitable foundation that will eventually generate more than $1m for a cash-strapped sport constantly battling for government funding.
“I want to kick it off with $10m and get it to $20m pretty quickly,” Carracher told The Australian in Paris.
“I’ll seed 20 per cent of it myself and I believe I can convince several others to put in $2m each and then you’re pretty quickly past $5m and then you get to $10m soon after that.
“With $10m in the fund you can very quickly generate $500,000 to $800,000 annually in income, and believe me in our sport that can go a hell of a long way.”
Volleyball Australia receives federal government funding but Carracher points out that it has receives roughly the amount in high-performance funding as it did more than a decade ago, despite a string of strong global results including beach volleyball pair Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho Del Solar winning silver at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Carracher, a former executive in the Packer family empire, says he personally writes a cheque for between $500,000 and $1m annually to help keep his sport afloat, and is battling for government funding to host the Beach Volleyball World Championships in Adelaide next year after previous deals fell through.
Volleyball is also one of four Olympic sports that billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart puts money into, via direct athlete grants and payments.
Mrs Rinehart is set to attend beach volleyball matches in Paris, where the sport is being held at a temporary stadium built at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
The stunning backdrop was the setting for another Carracher Olympic moment on Sunday morning Australian-time, when Carracher’s son Izac debuted with playing partner Mark Nicolaidis in a straight sets (14-21, 19-21) loss to Swedish world number one pair David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig.
The younger Carracher and Nicolaidis next play in Paris on Monday.
Meanwhile, Craig Carracher says he will launch his volleyball fund after Adelaide hosts the world championships in November next year.
That event has a budget of about $15m and Carracher is optimistic it will be commercially and financially viable, even if mooted federal government funding is yet to eventuate.
“I think volleyball ticks a lot of boxes, including that you’ll have people now talking about the sport given its taking place right next to the Eiffel Tower,” Carracher says.
“But it is also gender equal and diverse, it is a progressive sport and in geopolitical terms it plays well across Oceania where it is widely played in communities and villages.”
He is also hopeful of signing sponsorship deals, and says Scape is likely to be a commercial partner of the event.
The Scape student accommodation business Carracher runs with business partner Stephen Gaitanos has more than 33 student housing projects around the country and in excess of 16,000 apartments in a rapidly growing portfolio.
Scape this year also closed a joint venture with Dutch pension fund APG and Canadian property giant Ivanhoe Cambridge to develop 3000 new student accommodation, including 1000 at a project at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne.
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