If Coastal Carolina University were a long-established school with a vast repository of wealthy alumni and donors, its leaders would just buy a golf course for the professional golf-management program. But Coastal is a relatively new school in a community with relatively few well-heeled alumni and donors - most of whom already are helping the university.

To advance its academic goals, therefore, Coastal leaders must leverage needed facilities with well-thought-out partnerships. Their proposal to lease the Quail Creek Golf Course for five years, beginning July 1, shows how this process works. The challenge is getting S.C. politicians who control Coastal's fate - in return for dwindling state financial support - to let the lease take effect.

The politicians in question sit on the S.C. Budget and Control Board. They'll decide next month whether the university gets the use of the course. Its members are Gov. Mark Sanford, Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom, Treasurer Grady Patterson, Sen. Hugh Leatherman and Rep. Bobby Harrell.

These members should adopt Coastal's request because it makes sense. The golf course is adjacent not only to Coastal's Conway campus but also to the campus of Horry-Georgetown Technical College. As Coastal students are learning management strategies and tactics, HGTC's turf-management students also would learn their craft.

Coastal would have to come up with $354,000 per year to cover the cost of the lease, which is renewable for two additional five-year terms. But it would be the university's responsibility, not the state's, to come up with that money - which actually is less than Quail Creek's income average for recent years. The owner of the course, Chestnut Holdings LLC, has made the university a generous deal.

Indeed, Coastal's proposed revenue streams might bring in more than $354,000. Money sources would include faculty, staff, alumni and corporate memberships; greens fees from walk-on golfers; restaurant and pro shop sales; and course-registration fees from students of the professional golf-management program.

In the unlikely event of a shortfall, Coastal could raise tuition enough to cover any lease-payment deficit. But leaders don't expect to have to do that.

What we have here, in short, is a good deal for the schools, the state and especially the students. The S.C. Higher Education Commission and the S.C. Joint Budget Review Board already have approved the deal. Sanford and the other board members should resolve now to OK it when it reaches their agenda March 3. To thwart Coastal's hope of growing a nationally respected professional golf-management program because the lease arrangement is unorthodox would be shortsighted - and unfair.