It's really interesting that something most would see as positive (Paying NCAA athletes) is removing scholarship opportunities for athletes in the niche sports. Very interesting read David!
Kieran, I agree! I certainly don't mean it to criticize football players getting paid, but rather was just interested in this potential side effect that I hadn't even considered before.
I thought it was going to be a positive thing for all athletes, and still have hope that it will end up still working out. There were very few scholarships in diving to begin with.
Hi Stacey, indeed there were few scholarship for diving. But when you add up the scholarships from smaller sports (and some bigger ones, like track) that are going to disappear, it's going to be a big number. That doesn't mean this shouldn't go ahead, as I don't think the NCAA's previous arrangement was justified, but it will have an impact. As Drew mentioned, some coaches have already been told to stop recruiting.
Thanks for bringing this discussion to the forefront. My daughters found diving through the NVSL, which is one of the largest summer dive program in the country. A summer sport became their main sport and they have worked very hard to get where they could compete at a National level through our local club program (Dominion Dive Club where Olympian Greg Duncan grew up).
Most divers get their start doing club and high school diving (which is under swim as well). Some transition from gymnastics as they get into high school. But NCAA is where most peak and finish what they began.
We learned during the pandemic how dependent the sport is on NCAA facilities when colleges shut down their youth programs or pushed out the small businesses that managed programs out of their pools, in order to protect their athletes from COVID exposures. Those programs were developing some of the greatest Junior divers we have and offsetting the cost of the facilities. Some of those coaches left junior diving and gave up on their small businesses to seek out college coaching for more stability.
Some junior programs were welcomed back in to NCAA facilities when COVID restrictions were lifted, but many amazing coaches lost their athletes and have had to rebuild from scratch. Four years later, there are still gaps in availability. There is growing demand for the sport each year in the DC metro area for sure, but there is not enough pool time and coaches to keep up with the demand.
Pool access has been especially difficult on divers who compete platform diving. My daughter was a national semifinalist in her age group, and the next year we had nowhere to train on platform due to COVID so she lost that momentum.
She is off to a D1 college program this Fall and having access to platform diving was a big part of her college decision making. I hope having pressure of hosting the Olympics in front of us will be enough motivation to invest in the sports that need NCAA to survive.
Stacey, thanks so much for sharing this. This is a really interesting, albeit unfortunate story that shows the human dimension of the abstractions Drew and I were discussing. That's wild to think that your daughter was a national semifinalist and the suddenly without a place to train. I'm glad to hear she'll have a chance to go for it in Division I, though. For all my misgivings about the structure of college sports in general, DI track and field was a really a life changing experience for me. Given that I expect spots for divers to decrease — whether a little or a lot, I think, is the question — I wonder if perhaps there could be some momentum to do like Australia and build way more community pools. In any case, thanks so much for sharing this. It's a perk of having this newsletter that I learn more than I provide!
They have so far, but the money that will go to revenue sharing now will represent probably about one-fifth of the budget of a large athletic department, and it has to come from somewhere. I think one aspect that tends to be under-reported is that expenses for football have become enormous. So the big revenue sports also eat up quite a lot of money with their own expenses. Frankly, if the driving force behind all of this were purely profit, colleges would do better to toss their money in an index fund and lose the password.
I think the messaging (which the NCAA has been pushing heavily backed by a PR company & lobbying they hired) that reforming the system will take down Olympic sports & non-revenue sports & hurt student-athletes is incredibly distorted because it assumes that the system has to stay the same instead of rethinking how and why we got here. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't spin off revenue-driving sports from non-revenue sports and operate them under a different structure, or reconsider the entire system of why our academic institutions are so tied up with commercialized for-profit sports structures, or have the USOPC regulate and fund some development programs instead of just counting on ballooning college football TV contracts to fund Olympic medals in other sports.
I also think that if we acknowledge that the youth sports industry has gotten incredibly distorted as well — largely because of how those college opportunities are dangled in front of desperate parents and kids who have gone so far down that road they don't feel like they can really evaluate their reasons for doing their sport anymore — then we maybe can acknowledge that a lot of the benefits of youth sports actually should and can be disconnected from the NCAA pipeline.
Basically, yes, there are going to be casualties in the immediate, but that doesn't mean we should cling to a broken system but rather that we should rethink it.
Kelly, I agree with all of that, and I don't think the NCAA system as it was made sense, so definitely don't think we should cling to it. But I do find it worth raising some of the repercussions that I myself hadn't really thought about. In any case, I think everything you said here is wise, and hopefully this will be a chance for some creative rethinking that will be productive in the long run, even if painful in the short or intermediate term.
I didn't realize how severe the "under the radar" issue in swim programs was until talking with Drew. Regarding NIL, what impact do you expect it to have on divers? I haven't kept particularly informed about NIL in general, other than the very basics...
Regarding NIL and divers, of course having a program helps. (Diving is to swimming what field events are to track.) But maybe I have more questions than hard statistics:
1. What is the distribution of NIL funds between sports?
(I'd assume the big ones take the most money--no surprise. Folks give the money. It's not required.)
2. Do the best athletes get the most money? Or just those with a strong Instagram presence?
(I follow college swimming and professional swimming, but by extension, other sports pop up on my suggested topics. I wonder about whether these athletes are actually "good.")
>>> Bottom line, I'm assuming the top recruits from the top sports get it. The 80-20 Rule, I suppose. So I'm not saying anything new. 🤷♂️
Adam, I think you raise a great question about performance v. Instagram performance. My sense is that there is some alignment between those things at the very top, but that pretty quickly beneath that Instagram performance dominates athletic performance.
Thanks for writing this and I am glad the message is getting out there and better understood. Losing NCAA programs is truly a scary prospect for non revenue sports. My sport is/was skiing, which is a niche sport and also crippling expensive, driven by many factors including the youth-centric NGB. The only really viable path for non-prodigies to develop is through the NCAA. If skiing gets dropped, the sport is only for billionaires and child prodigies.
Ugh..."the sport is only for billionaires and child prodigies" is truly a worst-case scenario. I was a Division I walk-on in track and field and ended up a university record holder and just had an incredible experience. I expect that opportunity will be endangered, if not extinct as well.
I agree. NCAA attracts a lot of athletes from all over the world, and at least from what I saw in diving, and when they compete together on the world stage, there is a lot of encouragement and camaraderie because the athletes see each other throughout the NCAA season. There were several divers at the Olympics who train through NCAA (Kentucky, Purdue, Miami, and UNC all had Olympians from other countries). if NCAA abandons Olympic sports, our country won’t be the only won’t that ends up losing Olympians. Wonder if there is any data on the value of international tuition tied to Olympic sports training?
These international divers are almost all on scholarship--they recruit the Olympians and national champions from other countries, and they are rewarded with scholarships--which incidentally leads to less scholarship money and roster spots available for American divers. Why is this a problem? I can only speak about female diving in the US, but here is what my research shows:
The number of international female divers recruited and competing in the NCAA has grown in the last 10 years at an expediential rate. For example, in this year's NCAA D1 championship, there were 11 freshman female divers who qualified. Only 4 of the 11 were American, the other 7 were international--that's roughly 1/3 American and 2/3 international--so that shows you where most of the talent is coming from. These "freshman" international divers are older and more experienced (usually around age 21 when starting as a freshman), better trained, have more international experience (these international divers participate in many more international meets through their countries (because they are better funded) than USA Diving sends their athletes to) and have developed through a state-sponsored, well coordinated and organized, fully funded programs--which I know you are aware does not exist in the United States. (My 18 year old diver was diving against several 25-27 year olds at the conference championship this year). What does all this mean? It means the odds are stacked against female American divers.
Back to my research about woman's diving at the NCAAs this year: at least 50% of the A, B finalists in women's diving on 1, 3, and platform were international divers --I literally researched every A and B finalist to derive this figure--and in tower it was even higher--pushing closer to 60%. All three titles this year were won by international divers. (Incidentally, my diver tells me that US Olympic Trials are less competitive than the NCAA Champs--and NCAA Champs are like the Olympics. )
What does all this mean? The rapid growth in the international diver recruiting (because of the better trained/experienced divers coming from organized state sponsored programs), combined with the new roster limitations--which will absolutely limit the number of divers a team will carry, will make it very tough to be a D1 female American diver in the future. Those days of recruiting a diver with potential and working to develop them over time will be gone. Any roster spots on a D1 power 4 team that happen to be set aside for divers (and I wouldn't be surprised to see some swim teams carry no divers) will go to divers that can produce on day 1. This will lead to even more international recruitment, which will lead to less opportunity and development of female American divers. So you can see the rapid downward spiral here.....
Thanks Trudy. The sport in the US is definitely growing as my daughter’s club has had to hire more coaches and be more creative in how it uses its limited pool time.
Your post made me think of one more interesting change. My daughter was exposed to so many colleges growing up because that’s where many of the junior meets were held. If we don’t have a healthy NCAA system, I can see many kids not widening their aperture of college options. She definitely wouldn’t have spent as much time in Bloomington at camps if it weren’t for the programs offered there by Drew.
The fact that kids will play less as they get older brought to mind Jon Haidt and the whole get out and play that kids are missing .Have u ever spoken with him ? With less opportunity I can only see more kids being devoured by the Screen !!
There is a curious contradiction in this article. I think we all agree youth sports moving towards higher costs is a bad outcome, and yet in order to save a college diving team you suggest opening up the facilities to youth camps to raise additional funds. I’m not pointing this out as a criticism or gotcha, but just commenting on how someone has to pay the bag for all the resources that go into sports development.
Hi Matt, it's not my suggestion, just to note. In my opinion, though, if the supply of youth sports programs were larger, the cost to participate should presumably be lower. I think the hope would be that the scale could generate revenue while also offering reasonably priced options. If the supply didn't appreciably increase, then my guess is that you'd end up with more higher-income families paying, so basically a similar situation to what you have now, but with marginally more spots, and some of it going to help pay for NCAA programs. I don't think that latter scenario is ideal, but even that I think is some improvement on the way we're going now. In sports like track, the one I participated in, I think you could take a huge number of kids for a very low fee, and ideally I think those who can't pay could still participate. There are some countries that have public sports programs like that. Appreciate the thoughtful comment, and critique is always welcome here!
Hopping on this reply to note that this is something I see at the high school level for track and field for example. TCU, UNT, and UT all host high school meets alongside their collegiate meet to which we (the high schools) have to pay entry fees to the school/program to participate. Definitely generates revenue and it keeps my high school athletes hungry to want to advance to the next level, seeing that it is attainable. Just my two cents.
Appreciate it coach! I hope scale allows those entry fees to be reasonable, and if the college helps with logistics that high schools would otherwise have to bear, perhaps a true win-win? In any case, this seems like a no-brainer to me. The facility can tolerate it, the kids enjoy it, and it's an implicit marketing opportunity for the college to have high school students and perhaps families on campus. Thanks for sharing this. It seems to me that a variety of creative partnerships might be worth trying, particularly in sports (like track), where you can have a high ratio of competitors to organizers.
Roberto, thanks! I had heard of him but didn't really know any of this detail. I love how he lays out his process here. Really appreciate you sharing this.
What is also making things worse is conference consolidation largely because of football and to some degree basketball. The travel costs for the west coast teams that I have joined the Big 10 and ACC will be huge for other sports. Will Stanford continue to support all the 'minor' sports (I think they have more sports teams than most of the other Div 1 schools). I don't mind that they chase the TV revenue opportunities for football and basketball but they should have preserved the PAC 10 conference for all the other sports. I wonder if any Big 10 or ACC school have water polo programs to cite one example.
Oregon has a great track program but the Big 10 is not nearly as strong as the SEC in this regard. How many dual meets will the Big 10 hold that Oregon have to fly to? The example of swimming is a good one. I was a grad student at IU back in the Doc Counsilman days and had a couple of swimmers in my Freshman chemistry lab (they were very good students). When he retired, IU never was the same major power that they had been. Again, it was mainly some SEC schools along with Stanford, Cal, and UCLA that became stronger programs.
Alan, I hadn't thought about this and you make an excellent point. I wonder if we're going to end up back with the Ivy League being our Olympic development program. I'm more concerned with mass participation than Olympic medals, but I think those things are ultimately aligned, and I don't think this bodes well for either one. I'm sure we'll spend a lot of money making sure we win a lot in 2028, but in terms of sustaining opportunities for broad participation in a variety of sports, I'm not so sure.
Belated comment (I’m just catching up on a load of newsletters)… I’ll be interested to see if there is a trickle down effect on international scholarships. Even a small country like mine (NZ) has a huge number of kids on US college scholarships across a really diverse range of sports and it’s a strong pathway to Olympic selection, let alone the academic benefits.
While the school and athletic director were deliberately vague about its reasoning, it was pretty clear this was a cost-saving tactic, and perhaps a way to funnel/invest more funds into men's basketball, in the hope that it could generate revenue for other sports (though, maybe not, I think the school is usually happy if it comes close to breaking even re men's basketball).
Kevin, you touch on a point here that I think is severely under-appreciated: that the dreams of big revenue (or, big profit I should say) remain little more than dreams for most colleges. And even for those that do make substantial profit, they'd typically be better of with other types of far simpler investments. I think it's past times for colleges to ask where sports fits into the strategy of their mission, and perhaps using that as a bit more of a guide.
This is something that I think we've heard some rumblings about since 2020 when schools started trying to use the pandemic as a way to cut Olympic and other non-rev sports. It's only getting worse now that schools are in the position of having to properly compensate players while also keeping the athletic departments solvent. The new college sports environment has forced ADs to run the whole athletic department as a business in its entirety than as an opportunity for students to compete at the highest levels of their sport in college. For the revenue generating sports, it's always been a business, but when everything's looked at in terms of profit and loss, Olympic sports are going to be the first ones cut.
It's all coming to a head at possibly the worst time for the USOPC, because the most embarrassing thing in the world for them would be for the US to fail to finish at the top of the medals table for the first time since 1992 at the Games that they themselves are hosting, but that's what we may be up against in four years.
Alexandra, well put and I agree. Seems like it might make sense for some of these operations just to split up already. I'm guessing given what is already in the pipeline — and perhaps a willingness of USOPC to spend some money directly on development? — the U.S. will still lead the medal table in LA. (In track and field, we can cut a lot and still have many more athletes in development than the rest of the world.) And of course there's the general home advantage in the Olympics where athletes don't have to travel, and the host adds sports that it is likely to medal in. But I definitely think we'll start to see an impact in the most vulnerable sports. And I think it's well past time for colleges to define the purpose of their sports offerings.
I have a question and may be devils advocate here. With 2 teens who loved sports but weren’t superstars I saw them quit earlier than they should’ve simply because the hyper-specialization that is encouraged made it impossible for them to even remotely compete. When kids are getting private pitching lessons year round, the kid who’s a little smaller or slower just gets dominated. All in the name of the holy college scholarship. Ironically most of the early developing kids won’t actually keep developing to get scholarships but don’t tell dad that.
Anyway, with the college train leaving the station is it possible youth sports could go back to where kids play simply because they enjoy it? Play multiple sports, all year round, and play locally for fun with friends not on some super competitive travel team that is really just a money maker for the person running the team or tournament.
Mark, I'm always happy to have a devil's advocate! Although I don't think this rise's to the level of devil's advocate, as it is so clearly sensible. Just above this Kelly O'Mara left a comment that I think makes a lot of sense about this. I think it's possible that, because the youth and college systems got so tied up, the unwinding could destroy youth opportunities, but I also think it could restore them. I don't think the fate of youth sports is locked in here, so I'm hoping for creative thinking (as well as some thinking about what it is we as a society hope to get from sports) that might turn into long-term good, even with short term pain. In any case, I'm much more concerned about broad participation than elite participation, although, in the end, I think they are aligned. (I like the Norwegian model, for example: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/keep-the-talent-funnel-wide-22-02-22)
Other countries usually have a centralized sports development operation, with a sports ministry or something like it that funds athletes and coaches in an Olympic development pipeline, and may also help with sponsors. Only in the U.S. is the higher ed system also Olympic development system, so only in the U.S. will a change to the higher ed system also change the Olympic development system.
Speaking as someone who ran track in high school at a national level in Australia, I didn't at the time realize just how spoilt I was. My family's personal cost was incredibly low, in large part because I had a coach who worked at a state agency. Apart from straight up government support for sports, though, there is also the culture. I wonder if there are ways to change that. Two memories from my childhood are pertinent here: 1) the Australian parliament stops for a horse race, and 2) when Australia won the America's cup the prime minister went on TV and said "any boss who sacks someone for not turning up to work today is a bum". Obviously very idiosyncratic examples, but they do speak to how sports are revered Down Under.
Do you know of ideas that are focused on how public figures/politicians can/should help on this front. As an outsider the linking of sports to universities honestly feels weird. I get that the outcomes have been positive (and I admit to being very surprised by how many kids on my daughter's swim team were motivated by thoughts of college) and maybe it does something for promoting well rounded people, but just as often I've seen kids on sports scholarships struggling academically and academic students resenting the scholarship kids for taking places. Having taught at a few universities of different calibers I can also atest to it being a lot less fun if you are in an institution that you out of place for academically.
What has been the recent “change to the higher ed system”?
Depending on the answer to the first question, would a model non-attached to college ever emerge in America?
The Canadian model is bad. Sports are centralised in the way you describe, Australian or American style athletic scholarships are prohibited, and that athletes should be grateful to receive $25,000 per year.
The change is the entire subject of this post, the new NCAA revenue-sharing model. And the point is that, indeed, the American model has been great for athletes, and now it is facing historic change.
Many excellent Canadian (and Australian) divers come to the United States and dive in the NCAA.
The problem is that the United States right now has no other model available to athletes and no funding has been identified to develop one. The divers I know dream of having a nationally funded and sponsored program (like Dive Canada) that takes young promising junior divers and puts them on a state sponsored developmental track.
If an American diver does not go to the NCAA, there is no other funding or opportunity to train for them. Of course they can choose to train at a club and pay for a coach and pool time (as they did as a junior diver, even if they are on Team USA), but it's at their own expense--and there is no coordination/supervision/etc of their training--it's whatever coach they can find, whatever pool time and facility access they can get. Unlike other countries, there is also no developmental funding or organized or coordinated training for them as a rising junior diver, even if they win national titles, qualify for Team USA, and represent the US in international meets. That is why USA divers are slipping in their prominence on the international stage.
The NCAA is the only current viable vehicle the US has to develop senior International/Olympic athletes. By participating in a NCAA program, a diver gets access to facilities, coaches, athletic trainers, nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches and development, etc. None of this is available to a United States diver through national coaches or a national program--as there is no national program. USA Diving does not even have a pool they own, and the main OTC in Colorado springs does not even have a diving facility. USA Diving relies almost exclusively for the NCAA to train and develop their divers.
The new NIL model could lead to some NCAA schools cutting non-rev sports to fund the revenue sports. If swimming and diving does not get cut and remains at a university, the new roster limits combined with divers being "worth less" on a swim and dive team than a swimmer could lead to very limited to no dive spots on a D1 team (there have been teams that have won Power 5 conference championships without any dive points.) This means very few divers will get the opportunity to develop via the NCAA, which could potentially be the nail in the coffin for diving in the United States.
Trudy, you and Drew Johansen are definitely on the same wavelength! I'm not sure how realistic it is, but I hope that, perhaps, if this goes ahead as expected, maybe the NCAA unwinds from some of our sports development pipelines in a way that leaves room for broad access community programs? I don't see that as particularly realistic in the short or even medium-term, however. Thanks for this insightful and detailed comment.
There will be a vast void opening up if the NCAA no longer is the training grounds for many of our Olympic sports, because at least in diving, there is no funded and developed national program to backfill this. Diving has leaned on the NCAA for many years to develop their competitive Olympic/international athletes. And typically, swim and dive teams with strong dive programs have carried additional divers on their roster (look at the rosters of IU, Purdue, Texas to name a few) simply because these (and a few others) schools are training our next diving Olympians.
Add in the increasing trend to bring in well trained, well seasoned international divers to NCAA teams-which takes roster spots, (see my other comment); coupled with the likely diminished number of diving programs and roster spots available with the new roster cap; and the reality that there is no national diving training center/national training and developmental program and no funding identified to make this happen; and the future of diving in the United States is truly in jeopardy.
It's really interesting that something most would see as positive (Paying NCAA athletes) is removing scholarship opportunities for athletes in the niche sports. Very interesting read David!
Kieran, I agree! I certainly don't mean it to criticize football players getting paid, but rather was just interested in this potential side effect that I hadn't even considered before.
I thought it was going to be a positive thing for all athletes, and still have hope that it will end up still working out. There were very few scholarships in diving to begin with.
Hi Stacey, indeed there were few scholarship for diving. But when you add up the scholarships from smaller sports (and some bigger ones, like track) that are going to disappear, it's going to be a big number. That doesn't mean this shouldn't go ahead, as I don't think the NCAA's previous arrangement was justified, but it will have an impact. As Drew mentioned, some coaches have already been told to stop recruiting.
Really appreciate you bringing this up. As a parent of a collegiate diver myself, I’m definitely worried about the potential impact.
Thanks for bringing this discussion to the forefront. My daughters found diving through the NVSL, which is one of the largest summer dive program in the country. A summer sport became their main sport and they have worked very hard to get where they could compete at a National level through our local club program (Dominion Dive Club where Olympian Greg Duncan grew up).
Most divers get their start doing club and high school diving (which is under swim as well). Some transition from gymnastics as they get into high school. But NCAA is where most peak and finish what they began.
We learned during the pandemic how dependent the sport is on NCAA facilities when colleges shut down their youth programs or pushed out the small businesses that managed programs out of their pools, in order to protect their athletes from COVID exposures. Those programs were developing some of the greatest Junior divers we have and offsetting the cost of the facilities. Some of those coaches left junior diving and gave up on their small businesses to seek out college coaching for more stability.
Some junior programs were welcomed back in to NCAA facilities when COVID restrictions were lifted, but many amazing coaches lost their athletes and have had to rebuild from scratch. Four years later, there are still gaps in availability. There is growing demand for the sport each year in the DC metro area for sure, but there is not enough pool time and coaches to keep up with the demand.
Pool access has been especially difficult on divers who compete platform diving. My daughter was a national semifinalist in her age group, and the next year we had nowhere to train on platform due to COVID so she lost that momentum.
She is off to a D1 college program this Fall and having access to platform diving was a big part of her college decision making. I hope having pressure of hosting the Olympics in front of us will be enough motivation to invest in the sports that need NCAA to survive.
Stacey, thanks so much for sharing this. This is a really interesting, albeit unfortunate story that shows the human dimension of the abstractions Drew and I were discussing. That's wild to think that your daughter was a national semifinalist and the suddenly without a place to train. I'm glad to hear she'll have a chance to go for it in Division I, though. For all my misgivings about the structure of college sports in general, DI track and field was a really a life changing experience for me. Given that I expect spots for divers to decrease — whether a little or a lot, I think, is the question — I wonder if perhaps there could be some momentum to do like Australia and build way more community pools. In any case, thanks so much for sharing this. It's a perk of having this newsletter that I learn more than I provide!
PS....cannot believe the NCAA doesn't have enough money from those contracts to go around...they are only getting bigger. What gives ??
They have so far, but the money that will go to revenue sharing now will represent probably about one-fifth of the budget of a large athletic department, and it has to come from somewhere. I think one aspect that tends to be under-reported is that expenses for football have become enormous. So the big revenue sports also eat up quite a lot of money with their own expenses. Frankly, if the driving force behind all of this were purely profit, colleges would do better to toss their money in an index fund and lose the password.
If and when that happens ,I will be more than happy to hold that PW for them .
I think the messaging (which the NCAA has been pushing heavily backed by a PR company & lobbying they hired) that reforming the system will take down Olympic sports & non-revenue sports & hurt student-athletes is incredibly distorted because it assumes that the system has to stay the same instead of rethinking how and why we got here. There's absolutely no reason you couldn't spin off revenue-driving sports from non-revenue sports and operate them under a different structure, or reconsider the entire system of why our academic institutions are so tied up with commercialized for-profit sports structures, or have the USOPC regulate and fund some development programs instead of just counting on ballooning college football TV contracts to fund Olympic medals in other sports.
I also think that if we acknowledge that the youth sports industry has gotten incredibly distorted as well — largely because of how those college opportunities are dangled in front of desperate parents and kids who have gone so far down that road they don't feel like they can really evaluate their reasons for doing their sport anymore — then we maybe can acknowledge that a lot of the benefits of youth sports actually should and can be disconnected from the NCAA pipeline.
Basically, yes, there are going to be casualties in the immediate, but that doesn't mean we should cling to a broken system but rather that we should rethink it.
Kelly, I agree with all of that, and I don't think the NCAA system as it was made sense, so definitely don't think we should cling to it. But I do find it worth raising some of the repercussions that I myself hadn't really thought about. In any case, I think everything you said here is wise, and hopefully this will be a chance for some creative rethinking that will be productive in the long run, even if painful in the short or intermediate term.
Thanks for highlighting this! Divers fly under the radar in swim programs, and NIL certainly won't help.
I didn't realize how severe the "under the radar" issue in swim programs was until talking with Drew. Regarding NIL, what impact do you expect it to have on divers? I haven't kept particularly informed about NIL in general, other than the very basics...
Regarding NIL and divers, of course having a program helps. (Diving is to swimming what field events are to track.) But maybe I have more questions than hard statistics:
1. What is the distribution of NIL funds between sports?
(I'd assume the big ones take the most money--no surprise. Folks give the money. It's not required.)
2. Do the best athletes get the most money? Or just those with a strong Instagram presence?
(I follow college swimming and professional swimming, but by extension, other sports pop up on my suggested topics. I wonder about whether these athletes are actually "good.")
>>> Bottom line, I'm assuming the top recruits from the top sports get it. The 80-20 Rule, I suppose. So I'm not saying anything new. 🤷♂️
Adam, I think you raise a great question about performance v. Instagram performance. My sense is that there is some alignment between those things at the very top, but that pretty quickly beneath that Instagram performance dominates athletic performance.
Thanks for writing this and I am glad the message is getting out there and better understood. Losing NCAA programs is truly a scary prospect for non revenue sports. My sport is/was skiing, which is a niche sport and also crippling expensive, driven by many factors including the youth-centric NGB. The only really viable path for non-prodigies to develop is through the NCAA. If skiing gets dropped, the sport is only for billionaires and child prodigies.
Ugh..."the sport is only for billionaires and child prodigies" is truly a worst-case scenario. I was a Division I walk-on in track and field and ended up a university record holder and just had an incredible experience. I expect that opportunity will be endangered, if not extinct as well.
It's too bad, because for most athletes the NCAA experience really does align well with the original Olympic ideals. Ugh indeed!
I agree. NCAA attracts a lot of athletes from all over the world, and at least from what I saw in diving, and when they compete together on the world stage, there is a lot of encouragement and camaraderie because the athletes see each other throughout the NCAA season. There were several divers at the Olympics who train through NCAA (Kentucky, Purdue, Miami, and UNC all had Olympians from other countries). if NCAA abandons Olympic sports, our country won’t be the only won’t that ends up losing Olympians. Wonder if there is any data on the value of international tuition tied to Olympic sports training?
These international divers are almost all on scholarship--they recruit the Olympians and national champions from other countries, and they are rewarded with scholarships--which incidentally leads to less scholarship money and roster spots available for American divers. Why is this a problem? I can only speak about female diving in the US, but here is what my research shows:
The number of international female divers recruited and competing in the NCAA has grown in the last 10 years at an expediential rate. For example, in this year's NCAA D1 championship, there were 11 freshman female divers who qualified. Only 4 of the 11 were American, the other 7 were international--that's roughly 1/3 American and 2/3 international--so that shows you where most of the talent is coming from. These "freshman" international divers are older and more experienced (usually around age 21 when starting as a freshman), better trained, have more international experience (these international divers participate in many more international meets through their countries (because they are better funded) than USA Diving sends their athletes to) and have developed through a state-sponsored, well coordinated and organized, fully funded programs--which I know you are aware does not exist in the United States. (My 18 year old diver was diving against several 25-27 year olds at the conference championship this year). What does all this mean? It means the odds are stacked against female American divers.
Back to my research about woman's diving at the NCAAs this year: at least 50% of the A, B finalists in women's diving on 1, 3, and platform were international divers --I literally researched every A and B finalist to derive this figure--and in tower it was even higher--pushing closer to 60%. All three titles this year were won by international divers. (Incidentally, my diver tells me that US Olympic Trials are less competitive than the NCAA Champs--and NCAA Champs are like the Olympics. )
What does all this mean? The rapid growth in the international diver recruiting (because of the better trained/experienced divers coming from organized state sponsored programs), combined with the new roster limitations--which will absolutely limit the number of divers a team will carry, will make it very tough to be a D1 female American diver in the future. Those days of recruiting a diver with potential and working to develop them over time will be gone. Any roster spots on a D1 power 4 team that happen to be set aside for divers (and I wouldn't be surprised to see some swim teams carry no divers) will go to divers that can produce on day 1. This will lead to even more international recruitment, which will lead to less opportunity and development of female American divers. So you can see the rapid downward spiral here.....
Thanks Trudy. The sport in the US is definitely growing as my daughter’s club has had to hire more coaches and be more creative in how it uses its limited pool time.
Your post made me think of one more interesting change. My daughter was exposed to so many colleges growing up because that’s where many of the junior meets were held. If we don’t have a healthy NCAA system, I can see many kids not widening their aperture of college options. She definitely wouldn’t have spent as much time in Bloomington at camps if it weren’t for the programs offered there by Drew.
The fact that kids will play less as they get older brought to mind Jon Haidt and the whole get out and play that kids are missing .Have u ever spoken with him ? With less opportunity I can only see more kids being devoured by the Screen !!
Absolutely! Love that you made this connection, and I actually spoke with him not long ago for this newsletter: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/the-anxious-generation
There is a curious contradiction in this article. I think we all agree youth sports moving towards higher costs is a bad outcome, and yet in order to save a college diving team you suggest opening up the facilities to youth camps to raise additional funds. I’m not pointing this out as a criticism or gotcha, but just commenting on how someone has to pay the bag for all the resources that go into sports development.
Hi Matt, it's not my suggestion, just to note. In my opinion, though, if the supply of youth sports programs were larger, the cost to participate should presumably be lower. I think the hope would be that the scale could generate revenue while also offering reasonably priced options. If the supply didn't appreciably increase, then my guess is that you'd end up with more higher-income families paying, so basically a similar situation to what you have now, but with marginally more spots, and some of it going to help pay for NCAA programs. I don't think that latter scenario is ideal, but even that I think is some improvement on the way we're going now. In sports like track, the one I participated in, I think you could take a huge number of kids for a very low fee, and ideally I think those who can't pay could still participate. There are some countries that have public sports programs like that. Appreciate the thoughtful comment, and critique is always welcome here!
Hopping on this reply to note that this is something I see at the high school level for track and field for example. TCU, UNT, and UT all host high school meets alongside their collegiate meet to which we (the high schools) have to pay entry fees to the school/program to participate. Definitely generates revenue and it keeps my high school athletes hungry to want to advance to the next level, seeing that it is attainable. Just my two cents.
Appreciate it coach! I hope scale allows those entry fees to be reasonable, and if the college helps with logistics that high schools would otherwise have to bear, perhaps a true win-win? In any case, this seems like a no-brainer to me. The facility can tolerate it, the kids enjoy it, and it's an implicit marketing opportunity for the college to have high school students and perhaps families on campus. Thanks for sharing this. It seems to me that a variety of creative partnerships might be worth trying, particularly in sports (like track), where you can have a high ratio of competitors to organizers.
David, you probably know of Russell Dinkins, but in case not, he’s relevant to this post and I’m sure you’ll be interested: https://globalsportmatters.com/opinion/2022/10/19/lessons-from-college-track-star-turned-activist/
Roberto, thanks! I had heard of him but didn't really know any of this detail. I love how he lays out his process here. Really appreciate you sharing this.
What is also making things worse is conference consolidation largely because of football and to some degree basketball. The travel costs for the west coast teams that I have joined the Big 10 and ACC will be huge for other sports. Will Stanford continue to support all the 'minor' sports (I think they have more sports teams than most of the other Div 1 schools). I don't mind that they chase the TV revenue opportunities for football and basketball but they should have preserved the PAC 10 conference for all the other sports. I wonder if any Big 10 or ACC school have water polo programs to cite one example.
Oregon has a great track program but the Big 10 is not nearly as strong as the SEC in this regard. How many dual meets will the Big 10 hold that Oregon have to fly to? The example of swimming is a good one. I was a grad student at IU back in the Doc Counsilman days and had a couple of swimmers in my Freshman chemistry lab (they were very good students). When he retired, IU never was the same major power that they had been. Again, it was mainly some SEC schools along with Stanford, Cal, and UCLA that became stronger programs.
Alan, I hadn't thought about this and you make an excellent point. I wonder if we're going to end up back with the Ivy League being our Olympic development program. I'm more concerned with mass participation than Olympic medals, but I think those things are ultimately aligned, and I don't think this bodes well for either one. I'm sure we'll spend a lot of money making sure we win a lot in 2028, but in terms of sustaining opportunities for broad participation in a variety of sports, I'm not so sure.
Belated comment (I’m just catching up on a load of newsletters)… I’ll be interested to see if there is a trickle down effect on international scholarships. Even a small country like mine (NZ) has a huge number of kids on US college scholarships across a really diverse range of sports and it’s a strong pathway to Olympic selection, let alone the academic benefits.
Cuts have already begun. My prediction is that we will see more and more smaller schools without D1 football, make cuts. My alma mater Loyola Marymount University cut several Olympic sports this past year. https://www.laloyolan.com/news/breaking-lmu-athletics-to-discontinue-six-sports-after-2023-24-season/article_1698e3b0-ba5d-11ee-8c9a-bfd34bdc50e8.html.
While the school and athletic director were deliberately vague about its reasoning, it was pretty clear this was a cost-saving tactic, and perhaps a way to funnel/invest more funds into men's basketball, in the hope that it could generate revenue for other sports (though, maybe not, I think the school is usually happy if it comes close to breaking even re men's basketball).
Kevin, you touch on a point here that I think is severely under-appreciated: that the dreams of big revenue (or, big profit I should say) remain little more than dreams for most colleges. And even for those that do make substantial profit, they'd typically be better of with other types of far simpler investments. I think it's past times for colleges to ask where sports fits into the strategy of their mission, and perhaps using that as a bit more of a guide.
It'll be sad if track and field is affected.
Agreed. I expect that at least men's track and field in D1 will be affected, just hoping that the impact is modest rather than momentous.
This is something that I think we've heard some rumblings about since 2020 when schools started trying to use the pandemic as a way to cut Olympic and other non-rev sports. It's only getting worse now that schools are in the position of having to properly compensate players while also keeping the athletic departments solvent. The new college sports environment has forced ADs to run the whole athletic department as a business in its entirety than as an opportunity for students to compete at the highest levels of their sport in college. For the revenue generating sports, it's always been a business, but when everything's looked at in terms of profit and loss, Olympic sports are going to be the first ones cut.
It's all coming to a head at possibly the worst time for the USOPC, because the most embarrassing thing in the world for them would be for the US to fail to finish at the top of the medals table for the first time since 1992 at the Games that they themselves are hosting, but that's what we may be up against in four years.
Alexandra, well put and I agree. Seems like it might make sense for some of these operations just to split up already. I'm guessing given what is already in the pipeline — and perhaps a willingness of USOPC to spend some money directly on development? — the U.S. will still lead the medal table in LA. (In track and field, we can cut a lot and still have many more athletes in development than the rest of the world.) And of course there's the general home advantage in the Olympics where athletes don't have to travel, and the host adds sports that it is likely to medal in. But I definitely think we'll start to see an impact in the most vulnerable sports. And I think it's well past time for colleges to define the purpose of their sports offerings.
I have a question and may be devils advocate here. With 2 teens who loved sports but weren’t superstars I saw them quit earlier than they should’ve simply because the hyper-specialization that is encouraged made it impossible for them to even remotely compete. When kids are getting private pitching lessons year round, the kid who’s a little smaller or slower just gets dominated. All in the name of the holy college scholarship. Ironically most of the early developing kids won’t actually keep developing to get scholarships but don’t tell dad that.
Anyway, with the college train leaving the station is it possible youth sports could go back to where kids play simply because they enjoy it? Play multiple sports, all year round, and play locally for fun with friends not on some super competitive travel team that is really just a money maker for the person running the team or tournament.
I’m on the fence
Mark, I'm always happy to have a devil's advocate! Although I don't think this rise's to the level of devil's advocate, as it is so clearly sensible. Just above this Kelly O'Mara left a comment that I think makes a lot of sense about this. I think it's possible that, because the youth and college systems got so tied up, the unwinding could destroy youth opportunities, but I also think it could restore them. I don't think the fate of youth sports is locked in here, so I'm hoping for creative thinking (as well as some thinking about what it is we as a society hope to get from sports) that might turn into long-term good, even with short term pain. In any case, I'm much more concerned about broad participation than elite participation, although, in the end, I think they are aligned. (I like the Norwegian model, for example: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/keep-the-talent-funnel-wide-22-02-22)
Why are these factors unique to or more relevant in the United States compared to other nations/regions?
Other countries usually have a centralized sports development operation, with a sports ministry or something like it that funds athletes and coaches in an Olympic development pipeline, and may also help with sponsors. Only in the U.S. is the higher ed system also Olympic development system, so only in the U.S. will a change to the higher ed system also change the Olympic development system.
Speaking as someone who ran track in high school at a national level in Australia, I didn't at the time realize just how spoilt I was. My family's personal cost was incredibly low, in large part because I had a coach who worked at a state agency. Apart from straight up government support for sports, though, there is also the culture. I wonder if there are ways to change that. Two memories from my childhood are pertinent here: 1) the Australian parliament stops for a horse race, and 2) when Australia won the America's cup the prime minister went on TV and said "any boss who sacks someone for not turning up to work today is a bum". Obviously very idiosyncratic examples, but they do speak to how sports are revered Down Under.
Do you know of ideas that are focused on how public figures/politicians can/should help on this front. As an outsider the linking of sports to universities honestly feels weird. I get that the outcomes have been positive (and I admit to being very surprised by how many kids on my daughter's swim team were motivated by thoughts of college) and maybe it does something for promoting well rounded people, but just as often I've seen kids on sports scholarships struggling academically and academic students resenting the scholarship kids for taking places. Having taught at a few universities of different calibers I can also atest to it being a lot less fun if you are in an institution that you out of place for academically.
What has been the recent “change to the higher ed system”?
Depending on the answer to the first question, would a model non-attached to college ever emerge in America?
The Canadian model is bad. Sports are centralised in the way you describe, Australian or American style athletic scholarships are prohibited, and that athletes should be grateful to receive $25,000 per year.
The change is the entire subject of this post, the new NCAA revenue-sharing model. And the point is that, indeed, the American model has been great for athletes, and now it is facing historic change.
Many excellent Canadian (and Australian) divers come to the United States and dive in the NCAA.
The problem is that the United States right now has no other model available to athletes and no funding has been identified to develop one. The divers I know dream of having a nationally funded and sponsored program (like Dive Canada) that takes young promising junior divers and puts them on a state sponsored developmental track.
If an American diver does not go to the NCAA, there is no other funding or opportunity to train for them. Of course they can choose to train at a club and pay for a coach and pool time (as they did as a junior diver, even if they are on Team USA), but it's at their own expense--and there is no coordination/supervision/etc of their training--it's whatever coach they can find, whatever pool time and facility access they can get. Unlike other countries, there is also no developmental funding or organized or coordinated training for them as a rising junior diver, even if they win national titles, qualify for Team USA, and represent the US in international meets. That is why USA divers are slipping in their prominence on the international stage.
The NCAA is the only current viable vehicle the US has to develop senior International/Olympic athletes. By participating in a NCAA program, a diver gets access to facilities, coaches, athletic trainers, nutritionists, strength and conditioning coaches and development, etc. None of this is available to a United States diver through national coaches or a national program--as there is no national program. USA Diving does not even have a pool they own, and the main OTC in Colorado springs does not even have a diving facility. USA Diving relies almost exclusively for the NCAA to train and develop their divers.
The new NIL model could lead to some NCAA schools cutting non-rev sports to fund the revenue sports. If swimming and diving does not get cut and remains at a university, the new roster limits combined with divers being "worth less" on a swim and dive team than a swimmer could lead to very limited to no dive spots on a D1 team (there have been teams that have won Power 5 conference championships without any dive points.) This means very few divers will get the opportunity to develop via the NCAA, which could potentially be the nail in the coffin for diving in the United States.
Trudy, you and Drew Johansen are definitely on the same wavelength! I'm not sure how realistic it is, but I hope that, perhaps, if this goes ahead as expected, maybe the NCAA unwinds from some of our sports development pipelines in a way that leaves room for broad access community programs? I don't see that as particularly realistic in the short or even medium-term, however. Thanks for this insightful and detailed comment.
There will be a vast void opening up if the NCAA no longer is the training grounds for many of our Olympic sports, because at least in diving, there is no funded and developed national program to backfill this. Diving has leaned on the NCAA for many years to develop their competitive Olympic/international athletes. And typically, swim and dive teams with strong dive programs have carried additional divers on their roster (look at the rosters of IU, Purdue, Texas to name a few) simply because these (and a few others) schools are training our next diving Olympians.
Add in the increasing trend to bring in well trained, well seasoned international divers to NCAA teams-which takes roster spots, (see my other comment); coupled with the likely diminished number of diving programs and roster spots available with the new roster cap; and the reality that there is no national diving training center/national training and developmental program and no funding identified to make this happen; and the future of diving in the United States is truly in jeopardy.