What’s the Future of College Athletics?
In the wake of the recent news that the Ivy League sports association will not hold any competitions in the fall semester due to COVID-19, many college athletes are worried as to what the rest of their college sports careers will look like. With many schools going completely online, or others working with hybrid classes, or only allowing some portion of the student body to return to campus in the fall, college athletics were sure to be changed due to the virus. For many schools and countless individuals, athletics are an integral part of their college experience. The news that sports will not resume until at least 2021 came as a disappointment to college athletes from around the Ivy League.
The Ivy League sports association includes the eight Ivy League schools: Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Harvard, and Yale. The Ivy League sponsors conference championships in 33 men's and women's sports that these eight schools compete in over the course of the year. All of the schools in the Ivy League conference are also part of the NCAA Division I as well.
However, the fall season cancellation due to COVID-19 is not the only thing changing for many athletic programs at these schools. At the end of May, Brown University announced that it was cutting 11 of their varsity sports and changing them to club sport status. Dartmouth announced a few days ago that they too would be cutting 5 varsity sports in order to better balance the incoming undergraduate classes and help ease the budget deficit. Stanford, in an open letter to students and the community on July 8th, announced that they would be cutting 11 varsity sports from their program. This is devastating news for the student athletes that compete on these teams—major pushback from athletes and their families has been seen in the aftermath of these announcements.
Many other schools around the country have also seen budget cuts hitting their athletic departments as schools struggle to combat the financial strain due to COVID-19. Old Dominion University cut their entire wrestling program in April, the University of Cincinnati discontinued the men’s soccer program, and University of Connecticut cut four varsity sports from their program. As of June 7th, 2020, 18 Division I schools, 8 Division II schools, and 6 Division III schools had made permanent cuts to their varsity programs.
These decisions will have lasting impacts on current college athletes as well as admissions practices for years to come. Playing a sport at a collegiate level is a huge commitment in every aspect of the athletes life. Collegiate NCAA Division I athletes report spending an average of 34 hours a week related to their sport—that’s almost 5 hours a day on average. Many student athletes have felt blindsided by these schools athletic cuts, and are outraged and upset that the sport that they committed so much of their time and energy to is no longer funded or even in existence.
It will be interesting to see how these varsity programs that have been cut in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic play out. Will they be reinstated when schools regain the funding needed to finance them? Or is the scope of college athletics changed for good?