As the June issue of the print magazine Rowing News went to press in mid-May, the NCAA-dominated world of college athletics braced for the settlement of the House vs. NCAA lawsuit. It’s expected to cost universities, which have been collecting record revenues from broadcast deals to show their student-athletes playing football, and to a lesser extent basketball, billions in payments to student-athletes and to reshape how college sports are paid for.
One possible outcome would require $20 million in payments from big-time football schools like Iowa State, whose athletic director halted plans for a new wrestling facility as well as renovations of the school’s Hilton Coliseum.
“With this lawsuit getting ready to be settled, you just can’t go forward with projects like that,” Iowa State Director of Athletics Jamie Pollard told The Des Moines Register. Other athletic directors have laid off staff already and are preparing for reduced budgets.
College rowing programs are well aware of the potential threat to their budgets—and existence. The best, as we report in the June issue, are doing something about it already.
No one has won more James Ten Eyck Memorial Trophies, for team points at the IRA National Championship Regatta, than Washington (17). The Huskies recently announced the establishment of their first endowed coaching position—in any sport–in honor of Blake Nordstrom, joining the growing crowd of endowed rowing coaches.
UCLA, the reigning men’s ACRA club national champions, has launched a $10-million endowment effort—with more than half already raised or committed—specifically aimed at “permanently establishing the opportunity that we all benefited from—a chance for young men and women to share life-defining experiences through the sport of rowing.”
In honor of two-time NCAA Division I champion coach Kevin Sauer, whose retirement announcement came out in May, University of Virginia rowers—men and women, club and varsity—gave over a million dollars last year to start a rowing endowment.
None of these programs, and the others already endowed, waited for either an NCAA-dependent athletics department or a cash-strapped student-activities budget to cut their funding, or entire program, before taking action to ensure that the opportunities of rowing continue.
And it’s not just the college programs that are taking their financial futures into their own hands. Regatta organizers—including USRowing, the Intercollegiate Rowing Association, and the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association—have sold the exclusive rights to their live video feeds to Overnght, a video-streaming service begun by former college student-athlete Kevin McReynolds.
As I wrote in this space last month, the only way to succeed in rowing is to work hard and to work together, and you couldn’t give a young person two better lessons. The only way our sport can continue to teach those lessons is to figure out how to pay for it.
As McReynolds says, “This is what the sport needs.”
