Doug Gillin didn’t mince words on Thursday: The upcoming financial landscape for Appalachian State athletics will be a difficult one to navigate for the foreseeable future because of the impact of COVID-19.

For every college athletics department, multiple questions will persist in the coming months.

When will the world get back to normal?

When will colleges re-open and allow athletics to resume?

How will spring sports seniors who’ve been granted another year of eligibility fit into a budget that will no doubt be smaller next year?

And those are just a few.

“We’re working all scenarios,” Gillin said during a Zoom call with journalists. “I would hate to put a percentage on it in terms of 'this is what athletics, from a budgeting standpoint, could become,' but certainly our budgets will be lowered moving forward.”

Gillin said that App State is set up to weather the fiscal year 2020 fairly well, but it has come with its own losses. Between a smaller distribution figure from the NCAA, as well as a reduced amount of payout from the Sun Belt Conference — which Gillin said was the decision of all the member schools to save some money for next year — App State is operating with about $1.5 million less than it expected.

According to NCAA financial reports for the three previous years (2017, 2018 and 2019), App State athletics has operated at around $30 million in revenue. That means about 5 percent of this year’s potential revenue is gone.