Vanishing Sports: With colleges paying athletes, lesser-known sports won't get recognition

“Christopher, hurry up!” my mom yelled from downstairs. “Track and swimming are on in 10 minutes!”

Immediately, I grabbed a blanket and a glass of water and sprinted to my living room to snag a seat on the couch for day three of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. 

Despite having zero clue what events were in the decathlon or how swimmers can endure 400 meters of pain, I always looked forward to the variety of sports the Olympics covered.

The Olympics were the one time when one major media corporation covered everything from gymnastics to judo to surfing. 

And it made logical sense that colleges in the National Collegiate Athletic Association offered a similar kind of athletic variety. But after an intense five-year legal battle between the NCAA and former college athletes, Grant House and Sedona Prince about college athletes getting paid, schools now have to allocate a considerable portion of their budget to paying contracts. 

Yes, you read that right. Contracts.

Colleges are now allowed to pay their athletes directly. The next generation of football and basketball players are looking for which college is willing to cut the biggest check, not necessarily who has the best education.

But what does this mean for the other athletic programs that don’t center around gargantuan stadiums and arenas?

Schools must decide whether to fight to keep all their sports teams or cut programs that aren't worthy of being kept around. 

In the past few months alone, according to Volleyball Coaches Association executive officer Jaime Gordon, 32 Division I Olympic sports programs have been cut among colleges across the nation since the settlement was announced on July 6.

Olympic. Sports. 

Across the globe, the U.S collegiate competition across all sports is unparalleled. Yet colleges are using the settlement as the perfect opportunity to show the world which sports matter the most — to them — football and men’s basketball. 

The solution is quite simple. Schools need to pursue alternative revenue sources, including additional fundraising and donations to fend off the salary demands of the “more important” sports. 

But they need to do so immediately. Because if in the next few months, they don’t explore other avenues of funding, youth competitive sports will funnel into a ruthless system where everyone is working for the same goal — to be paid. 

Imagine visiting your local state school, and you just happen to step into the bookstore to grab a shirt as a souvenir. But as you look for a t-shirt and sweatpants that aren’t plastered with football or basketball symbols, all you end up finding is a tiny key chain or a postcard. 

Variety is essential to reach a wider audience. We are fortunate to live in a time when colleges and universities are known for having good teams in a diverse range of sports. For Columbia, that's men's tennis. For Northwestern, women’s golf. And so on and so on. But as these sports reach the ever-present funding problem, some programs have to go. 

Since the settlement, seven men's and women’s tennis programs have been cut: women's tennis at the University of Louisiana-Monroe, the University of Texas El-Paso and the University of California San Francisco, and men's and women's tennis at St. Francis College and Eastern Illinois University.   

And what does this say to the student-athletes who aren’t interested in the supposed “favorite children” of college sports?

They won’t have the opportunities or even the baseline respect from administration to continue swimming, diving, running or playing tennis. 

If colleges and universities don’t make a push for diversified funding within the next few months, the only memory of college athletics that the next generation will have is one of touchdowns and three-pointers.