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Somewhere in America, a college president will sign a memo eliminating a varsity athletic program. The memo will be reasonable. It will cite the House settlement, the new $21.6 million revenue-sharing obligation, roster economics and travel costs inflated by conference realignment. It will make sense.
Somewhere else in America, a president will sign a memo announcing a new sports program; almost certainly it will be in a niche sport, say, fencing, for example, that drives net positive enrollment and financial growth for the university.
And nobody in either room will fully appreciate the broader consequences of those decisions.
I write as an outsider to higher education—I run a national sports governing body, not a university—watching the same decisions get made inside it, over and over, without the national stakes ever appearing in the memo. As Bloomberg reported, more than 40 Division I Olympic sports programs disappeared between May 2024, when the House settlement terms were announced, and July 2025 alone. The casualties included women’s tennis at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and men’s volleyball at Grand Canyon University; Washington State University scaled back its track program, announcing that it would stop supporting field events (such as jumps and throws) in favor of a “distance-focused” approach. This past spring, the University of Arkansas cut its men’s and women’s tennis teams, then reinstated them when donors rallied with short-term money—which tells you the decision was reversible, and also tells you what the plan may be when the donors’ checks stop.
The Protect College Sports Act, passed by the Senate earlier this week, would go some way toward addressing future damage, prohibiting the National Collegiate Athletic Association from reducing the number of sports (and associated roster spots) that colleges must field to participate in Division I or the Football Bowl Subdivision and protecting scholarships for nonrevenue sports at the wealthiest institutions—although it still leaves Olympic and Paralympic sports vulnerable at the vast majority of other institutions. In a welcome move, the bill also incentivizes colleges to earmark at least $5 million in revenue-sharing for retention in Olympic and women’s sports.
At the same time some colleges have been cutting athletic opportunities, other universities are taking the approach of combating the enrollment cliff by adding new sports—fencing, rowing, acrobatics and tumbling, triathlon— all of which come without the heavy costs of some of the top-line revenue sports. In fencing alone, we have new programs at places like Arcadia University, Denison University, Fairleigh Dickinson University and Trinity College, as well as a new program at a historically Black college and university to be announced later this month, all of which stand to provide enrollment benefits to the colleges themselves and more opportunities to train and attract talent to the U.S. fencing system at large.
Most national governing bodies, my own included, rely heavily on the NCAA to incentivize sport participation and provide the requisite funding, expertise and training to develop future Olympic athletes. Unlike in some other countries, where sports systems are (largely) government-funded, 75 percent of American Olympians who competed in Paris in 2024 came through collegiate athletics. In my sport, the pattern is even starker: For our recent 2024 Olympic medalists, Lee Kiefer and Nick Itkin came through the University of Notre Dame, while Jackie Dubrovich, Lauren Scruggs and Maia Weintraub came through Columbia, Harvard and Princeton Universities, respectively.
So, when a campus cuts fencing, or wrestling, or gymnastics, or swimming, it is not just trimming a co-curricular activity. It is removing a segment of national infrastructure that no other body owns and no other body will rebuild. The president is making a budget decision. The country is losing a training center.
This is a genuine collective-action failure, and I want to be fair about it. No individual institution is obligated to carry a national burden. A university facing a $21.6 million revenue-sharing bill and ballooning football travel budgets is not behaving irrationally when it looks hard at programs that generate no broadcast revenue. The irrationality lives at the level of the aggregate: hundreds of separately defensible decisions summing up to a national outcome that nobody chose, nobody voted for and, worse, nobody is accountable for. Two years before Los Angeles hosts the Olympic Games, the United States is quietly dismantling the system that produces its Olympians, one reasonable budget memo at a time.
So, what should those of us who care about the future of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic sports do now?
First: Institutions should evaluate these programs on the measures where they actually perform—admissions, academic profile and international reach—not on revenue they were never designed to produce.
Judging a fencing program by ticket sales is like judging the physics department by merchandise. The honest ledger looks different. Olympic- and Paralympic-sport athletes are, at most institutions, tuition-positive: Many receive partial scholarships or none at all, and they often arrive with academic credentials that lift the class profile rather than strain it. They draw disproportionately from international applicant pools at a moment when international enrollment is a strategic worry on nearly every campus. In fencing specifically, the recruiting footprint runs straight through the demographic and academic cohorts that admissions offices are desperate to reach. A president who cuts these programs to fund revenue-sharing may be spending enrollment-management money to solve an athletics problem—and nobody has priced that trade because the two budgets never meet in the same spreadsheet. So put them in the same spreadsheet. Some programs will still lose that analysis. Fine. At least the institution will be weighing all the relevant factors.
More proactively, those who are looking at their college and asking, “What do I do about this enrollment cliff?” should take a look at sports like fencing, rowing, triathlon and water polo—sports where there is sufficient desire in the youth-sport area to drive students toward their institutions.
Second: National governing bodies—my organization included—should put real resources on the table, not just letters of concern. That might mean fundraising through our communities, which are already stretched thin on asks.
When a program lands on the chopping block, the reflex across Olympic sport has been to lobby the college: statements, campaigns, appeals to legacy. Lobbying a college is noise, and campuses know it. If the NCAA pipeline is genuinely existential for us—and it is—then national sports governing bodies (and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee) should behave like it and build further on existing actions. I don’t have all the solutions, but at USA Fencing we are hosting the Division III championship, and we keep in touch with athletic directors to figure out ways we can help on an individual college basis. Multiple national governing bodies, including fencing, have grant programming, and there are good examples of proactivity in a number of sports such as men’s gymnastics, women’s triathlon and volleyball. National governing bodies and collegiate programs may also be able to help each other by pooling event and referee resources.
None of this requires anyone on campus to become sentimental. It requires the opposite—a fuller accounting. There’s nothing villainous about the current wave of cuts; it is simply what happens when a national sports-development system is funded locally and nobody is assigned to see the whole board. Universities respond to the incentives in front of them. The task, before Los Angeles and after it, is to change those incentives.
