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RALEIGH - Women's volleyball isn't the first thing that comes to mind in the discussion of big-time college athletics and full-ride scholarships.

But for UNCG, it's one of the sports that may be caught up in an argument over whether taxpayers should subsidize the efforts of athletics boosters to recruit athletes at UNC system campuses.

Rep. Pricey Harrison , a Greensboro Democrat, is leading the charge to repeal a 2005 budget provision that allows athletics programs to get more athletes for their scholarship dollar.

Under that law, booster clubs who give full scholarships to athletes from outside North Carolina pay the in-state tuition rate. For the current academic year, that's a difference of $11,494 for students attending UNCG and $15,206.24 for students at the Chapel Hill campus.

"It has been extremely positive legislation for us, especially for our women's sports," said Nelson Bobb, UNCG's athletics director . "In volleyball we went from a bottom-dweller to a top competitor. In two of the past three years we played for the championship in the tournament."

Bobb said the provision Harrison wants to repeal also has helped women's tennis, softball and soccer.

He acknowledges that being able to hand out more scholarships will also help the men's basketball program, which he describes as undergoing an "absolute renovation and enhancement." The Spartans next season will begin playing home games at the Greensboro Coliseum.

But statistics gathered by legislative staffers show that of the 37 full-ride athletics scholarships given at UNCG, 24 have gone to female athletes.

At N.C. A&T, athletics director Wheeler Brown said the 2005 law had helped stretch recruiting resources.

"It would definitely be somewhat of a blow to us," he said of Harrison's bill.

Across all the system's campuses, budget writers estimate the in-state tuition exception for athletes on full-ride scholarship will total $7.7 million this academic year. Although that is relatively little compared to the $2 billion or more budget gap faced by the state, Harrison said, it's spending taxpayers can no longer afford.

"This is simply a budget priority for me," she said. "It's almost impossible to justify subsidizing athletes when we're looking at things like cutting back on library hours."

To help sell the measure, Harrison's bill would allow those paying for full academic merit scholarships to continue receiving the in-state tuition break. That tweak helped garner support from Republicans and Democrats in the House in 2007 when a similar measure passed 93-13. But it was never heard in the Senate.

Backers of the repeal hope the state's declining fiscal fortunes will force senators to give the bill a hearing this year, despite the Senate's reputation as more sympathetic to the UNC system, particularly to requests from UNC- Chapel Hill and N.C. State.

Political action committees representing alumni from those two campuses have given more than $1 million to state politicians in the past two campaign cycles, with the bulk of that coming from the Citizens for Higher Education group associated with UNC- Chapel Hill.

It should be noted those groups have other interests before the General Assembly. Also worth noting, the PAC in 2006 sent Harrison a $1,000 contribution, which she returned.

Still, that giving combined with the exuberance surrounding college basketball and football have set up the debate over the repeal as one that pits ACC basketball against academic priorities.

But those two Triangle campuses account for only a third of the 692 full-ride scholarships that take advantage of the athletics provision. The rest are at campuses such as UNCG and A&T, which have smaller sports programs and less access to scholarship money.

"If I could recruit all of my kids in the state, pull all of them from the 15 counties around us, we would do that," said UNCG's Bobb. "But in this state there is such competition for the same student-athlete, we can't stay in state."

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com