Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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The scoreboard showed 14-5 and the clock showed 0:00, and the U.S. women’s water polo players on the bench began joining their teammates in the pool. Splash, splash, splash. A few went to grab coach Adam Krikorian and toss him in, too, but first they motioned for him to remove his cellphone from his pocket.
They know the drill. This wasn’t their first gold medal.
It was their third straight, in fact, and continued a streak of medaling in all six Summer Olympics that have included women’s water polo.
For the 14-5 win against Spain on Aug. 7 at Tatsumi Water Polo Centre, they can thank 11 saves from goalie Ashley Johnson, a hat trick from Maddie Musselman and goals from eight other players.
And the NCAA. And Title IX. All 13 members on the roster played at U.S. universities, as has every player in the program’s Olympic history.
“The collegiate system for us, if I could compare it to Hungary or Spain, is essentially our professional system,” Krikorian said. “We don’t have anything else. For me it would be ignorant to stand up here and say that I developed Maggie Steffens. Every single one of their universities plays a huge role in their development.
“Without it, our sport is in jeopardy.”
And that’s the thing, that’s the fear: They may be without it one day.
It won’t happen next year, or in five years, or maybe in 10. But college athletic directors will privately tell you that they see a day, if current trends continue, when universities will sponsor football, basketball, maybe baseball, maybe a couple women’s sports and that’s it. Everything else will be non-scholarship or, worse, relegated to club status.
“I’m really worried about the Olympic sports,” one AD said.
“I’ve been trying to ring that bell and not many seem to care,” another said.
One entity that is hearing it loud and clear is the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which knows an existential crisis when it sees one. It’s the only national Olympic committee from a major, developed nation that is not funded — even partially — by its government, relying on the serendipity of a robust and resourced system of collegiate athletics to crank out the most medalists in seven straight Summer Games.
Seventy-five percent of the 613 U.S. athletes in Tokyo played their sport in college. Twenty teams have at least 80% collegiate participation. For women’s water polo and 10 other teams, it’s 100%. In Rio five years ago, 80% of the medalists were current or former college athletes.
“We need to start thinking creatively now,” Sarah Wilhelmi says. “The sidelines are not going to be friendly to us if we’re not involved and proactive.”
Wilhelmi is the senior director of college partnerships for the USOPC, a position created in 2016 after Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, then a board member, and several ADs mentioned that, by the way, this might not end well for the Olympic movement in the United States. The issue then was the autonomy movement within the NCAA by the power conferences that threatens to split Division I into haves and have-nots, ultimately stressing the budgets of Olympic sports.
It’s only gotten worse, with athletic departments increasing expenses at a time of shrinking revenues. With cost of attendance stipends for athletes that further drain the coffers. With a pandemic that saw 35 Division I schools drop 77 sports to balance budgets. With athletes able to monetize their name, image and likeness, which could mean more for them and less for their schools.
With momentum growing through the court of law and court of public opinion to just get it over with and pay athletes.
The way it works now, athletic departments divert some of the revenue from football and men’s basketball to bankroll the sports that don’t make money and are mandated by Title IX gender equity regulations. Give more of that money to football and men’s basketball players, and there’s less for everything else.
“It’s something that we’re very cognizant of and aware of,” Krikorian says.
The NCAA mandates that schools playing the highest level of Division I football must offer at least 16 sports. But that’s an arbitrary number the NCAA could lower whenever it wants (and several athletic directors, though they’ll never admit it publicly, wouldn’t mind seeing it happen). There are also questions about whether Title IX would still apply if athletes become employees, just as it doesn’t with professional sports franchises.
“We’ve got to tell the story and show that these things are connected and they matter,” said Wilhelmi, who previously was an associate commissioner for the West Coast Conference and worked in athletic compliance at Stanford. “Because if you’re invisible, you’re vulnerable.”
Wilhelmi’s task, then, is twofold. One is to raise awareness of an issue many women’s sports groups have ignored, failing to make the connection that if they support salaries for college football players, they might be signing their own death certificates.
The other is tougher: finding solutions.
Athletic directors are sympathetic to the USOPC’s plight. But they also have a university president breathing down their necks to balance a budget drowning in red ink, and their job description doesn’t include propping up the medal table at the Summer Games in Paris, Los Angeles, Brisbane and beyond.
It’s a bit disingenuous to say the USOPC receives absolutely no public funding. It does, indirectly. Most athletic departments at state universities are heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars and mandatory student fees, used to develop three-quarters of their Olympic team.
In 2018, a USOPC study found, Division I schools alone spent $5.6 billion on Olympic sports. Just over $2 billion was for men’s and women’s basketball, but that still leaves about $3.5 billion for everything else. Swimming and diving got $253 million. Softball got $279 million. Track and field got $577 million.
And that’s just for a single year. Over an Olympic quadrennium, you’re talking north of $20 billion total spent on coaches, staff, facilities, travel, equipment, medical, tutoring, tuition, food, lodging, cost of attendance stipends.
Three members of Spain’s silver-medal water polo team played for U.S. colleges. Anni Espar won an NCAA title with USC in 2013, opting for the U.S. route instead of staying in Spain and playing in a pro league while holding down a job or paying her way through school.
“Everything was amazing,” Espar says of USC. “The facilities, the people, the resources, the money that was spent on sport is something unbelievable compared to Spain. We often have to decide whether to continue playing or study. In the U.S., you can go to the university and it’s easy for you to do both things. In Spain, sometimes it’s harder.
“I’m sure if we could have the same kind of system, water polo in Spain would be even bigger.”
Wilhelmi’s group has lobbied the NCAA to help certain Olympic sports survive collegiately by treating them differently from a legislative perspective; secured permission for athletic departments to use the interlocking rings logo in press releases about their Olympic athletes; formed think tanks with college sports leaders to forge a way forward in an uncertain future.
“We doubled down on that work very significantly in the last 18 months as we continue to watch the impacts of the pandemic really exacerbate and accelerate some of these challenges,” USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland says. “It is a very, very important ecosystem, not only to Team USA, I might add, but to the entire Olympic movement globally. We train in the United States a lot of the world’s athletes.”
“I cannot deny the threats to the system. ... We’ve got a lot of work to do but we’re on the right path.”
She and Wilhelmi use words like “preserve” instead of “reinvent” when referring to the collegiate model. Because it’s not like Congress is going to find a spare $5.6 billion per year to keep winning medals.
“I’ve heard some people proclaim that another country’s model is a preferred alternative,” Wilhelmi said, “but what they’re not understanding is our infrastructure does not automatically match that. I believe we should first understand our space, and before you decide to throw one away, you better understand how you’re going to replace it. Quite frankly, it’s going to be really hard to replace.
“We’re talking billions of dollars. That’s impossible to replicate.”
Mark Zeigler is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
