Guest Editorial: Swimming Is the Sport College Sports Can’t Afford to Lose
By Alex Versen
Every American Olympic swimmer has a story that starts at about 5 a.m. A parent warming up the car. A bag that smells permanently of chlorine. A coach on the deck with a stopwatch, a whistle and a cup of coffee that has gone cold since the first set.
For most of the last half-century, the middle of that story has happened in college. In Paris, the University of Virginia’s swimmers alone came home with 11 Olympic medals. Bob Bowman, the coach who built Michael Phelps, now runs the program at the University of Texas. Across all sports, 184 of the 257 Americans who won medals in Paris came up through NCAA programs. In swimming, college isn’t one path to the Olympics. For most Americans, it’s the path.
That path is narrowing, and this week it lost the one protection that was on the table.
The House settlement replaced scholarship limits with roster limits, and Division I swimming is now capped at 30 athletes per gender. Schools are paying athletes directly for the first time, more than $1.77 billion in the first year, most of it to football and basketball players. Athletic departments that were already losing money are looking for things to cut, and swimming, with its pools, coaches and travel, is an easy line to find. Cal Poly cut men’s and women’s swimming and diving in 2025, citing the cost of the new era. A report from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office counted more than 100 women’s and Olympic sports programs eliminated since 2023.
The Protect College Sports Act would have helped. At the urging of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, it would have required most schools to keep the Olympic-sport roster spots and scholarships they had in 2024-25. It passed the Senate in September. After this week’s election, it is very likely dead.
Swimmers are resourceful. As Swimming World previously reported, some displaced athletes have landed in college club swimming, and Cal Poly’s club team had 49 swimmers a year after the varsity program closed. That’s a credit to the sport’s grit. It is not a plan for producing Olympians.
Here’s the part that worries me most. College swimming doesn’t just produce Olympians. It produces the people who produce Olympians.
Walk onto almost any age-group pool deck at dawn and look at who’s holding the stopwatch. A lot of them swam in college. They learned the sport at the highest level, finished their eligibility and came home to coach 9-year-olds through their first legal flip turn. Cut a college program and you don’t just lose a future Olympian. You lose the coach who would have found the next one. And youth sports is already short on coaches: across youth team sports, the number of coaches in America fell from 8.4 million in 2022 to 6.9 million in 2025, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, even as more kids signed up.
Fewer college programs mean fewer elite training environments, fewer swimmers who stay in the sport, fewer coaches on club decks and a thinner pool of kids for the next college team to recruit. Every lap of that cycle makes the next one harder.
And the timing could not be worse. Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Olympics. USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland has pointed to participation growth of 25% to 35% in some Olympic sports after the 1996 Atlanta Games. When Americans watch swimmers win gold at home, kids beg their parents for lessons. In 2028, a lot of them are going to show up at the pool. The question is whether there will be a coach waiting.
Congress isn’t coming to fix this. The good news is that swimming has never waited for anyone to hand it a lane. Here’s what the sport can do now.
Ask conferences for a floor. If a conference can cap spending at the top, as the Big Ten just did, it can require every member to keep a minimum number of Olympic sports. Swimming should be first in line.
Make Team USA a paying customer. USA Swimming and the sponsors who benefit from college-trained Olympians should help fund the college programs that produce them, starting with matching money for programs at risk.
Turn graduating swimmers into coaches before they leave the water. College programs and clubs should certify seniors as coaches in their final season and connect them with age-group teams now, before Los Angeles sends the wave.
Every Olympic swimmer had someone on the deck at 5 a.m. Somebody who didn’t have to be there, but was. If college swimming disappears, so do a lot of those somebodies. Keep the program, and you keep the coach. Keep the coach, and you keep the kid in the pool. That’s how America has always won in this sport, and it’s how we’ll keep winning.
Alex Versen is Executive Director of The NOVA Foundation, a national nonprofit that helps former college athletes stay in sport, and a business-school lecturer in sport management.
