People who administer collegiate athletic programs are struggling. They’ve known for a while their train was on the wrong track. But what can they do about it now, or should they do about it?
The challenge is House v. NCAA, the recent 2.8 billion court settlement over antitrust claims in collegiate athletics. It’s just another punch of many in recent years to the midsection of collegiate sports.
The only plus that might come out of these series of events, if there is a plus, when the NCAA invariably begins placing roster limits on non-revenue sports, mid-major athletes will start looking for schools where they have a chance of wrestling.
That could help to even out the very lop-sided playing field we see today in college wrestling. And then you have those exceptional athletes who are backing up exceptionally better athletes at the major programs. They’ll have two options; transfer to lesser productive schools so they can compete, or two, stay where they are and become star performers at the intramural level.
Budget cutting roster limits could be as draconian for wrestling as 15 athletes per team. Or, administrators could just opt to drop the sport all together. The latter is often preferred because like a toothache, eliminating the problem is less painful than continually dealing with red ink.
The House v. NCAA ruling also said that major schools must create revenue-sharing models to distribute roughly $20 million per year, per institution, directly to athletes. In other words, athletes are about to become salaried employees.
As you might imagine, football and basketball will be the first in line to receive remuneration. But proponents of Title IX might have something to say about that, and why not? What’s good for the goose. . .
And, if we take that thinking to the next level, if these payments are defined as employee compensation, then might not all non-revenue athletes have a legal right to receive renumeration as well?
Time will tell where all this goes, but you can bet things are about to get dicey.
Adding to that, colleges are having to deal with the tremendous loss of institutional revenue that the NIL (name, image and likeness) has caused.
And, let’s not forget what the RTC’s (Regional Training Centers) are doing to redirect money away from athletic departments? These are the sort of actions by our coaches that will invariably increase the number of teams in the NCWA (National Collegiate Wrestling Association).
Now, given that some very uncomfortable changes are about to happen in collegiate sports, why is our leadership sitting on their hands?
The answer is; wrestling doesn’t have leadership.
What we have instead, using a typical corporation as an example, is multiple divisions of a company with leadership but no Vice President or President overseeing the financial health of the business of wrestling.
We have the NCWA, USAW, the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, the AAU, the NCAA Rules Committee, the NWCA, the National High School Athletic Association and so on. But each of those entities are independent of one another.
What we need is to create an over-arching division of Amateur Wrestling that’s made up of representatives from each of those governing bodies. Their job would be to oversee the health, safety, and growth of the sport as a whole.
We have to be able to stand on our own two feet and become a consumer driven revenue producer.
And currently, we’re not.
No longer can we expect athletic departments, or generous alumni to carry our water for us.
This has to be a ‘all hands on deck’ approach to redesigning, reimagining, and rebuilding what we call wrestling.
