Since its origins in the 19th century, US collegiate sport has been gradually evolving from an amateur game to a near-professional standard with crowds of a hundred thousand and television contracts worth billions of dollars. While these changes have occured slowly, the outcome for students remained largely the same. That was until the massive transformation over the last few years.
Driven by football players, these changes may have a strong effect on the sport of rowing going forward.
Transfer Portal
Perhaps the largest shift to have been seen so far in rowing, the changes in rules on transferring between universities have reshaped the student athlete experience.
Previously, transferring between programmes came with many restrictions. With a few exceptions, swapping schools meant that you would have to forgo a year of eligibility.
Over the last five years, a series of lawsuits and compromises have seen a loosening of those rules. Now, athletes can transfer multiple times in their careers.
This, alongside both a new online ‘transfer portal’ which makes the process easier and a cultural acceptance of the process, has led to a massive increase in transfers with thousands of athletes ‘hitting the portal’ each year.
In the sport of rowing, the transfer portal had rather limited use, but the floodgates opened last year. When Southern Methodist University (SMU) head coach Kim Cupini was hired by the University of Tennessee, many of her athletes left the Dallas school, with 15 making the transition alongside her. Riding this momentum to a record smashing third place at the national championship, the Lady Vols proved that this system could work and paved the way for others looking to transfers to help move them up the leaderboard.
Most notably, the University of Washington had six transfers within their two eights at the Head of the Charles this season, gaining talents from the first eights of Yale, Duke, Rutgers, and the University of Cambridge.
Name, image and likeness
Throughout the organisation’s history, the NCAA has fiercely protected the ‘amateur’ status of the sport. Despite the gargantuan sums of money involved, the body imposed stringent rules on what benefits student athletes could receive to avoid even the impression of being paid to play. Athletes could not be paid to sign autographs, endorse local businesses or even be given cream cheese on bagels they ate after practise.
However, in 2021, a Supreme Court ruling changed this landscape when the court unanimously agreed this was an illegal restriction on trade. Subsequently, the floodgates opened. With little regulation on what could be offered, it quickly devolved into ‘collectives’ of donors offering large sums of money for players to join or stay at an institution.
Largely restricted to more popular sports, these collectives have had little impact on rowing, with a potential exception for some men’s programmes who had their spending restricted by Title IX.
House settlement
However, paying the players did not end there as further legal action against the NCAA sprang up on several issues. The largest group of these have been settled this year, with approximately $2.8 billion being paid in damages to student athletes as well as ushering in broad structural changes to the college athletics model with athletes in line to receive up to 22% of athletics-related income.
Beyond this, the settlement in this case eliminates scholarship limits, with roster caps taking their place.
For rowing, this is a double-edged sword. For some large programmes, a roster limit of 68 will close opportunities for novice and walk-on athletes. But if there is the funding, it will allow for far greater levels of support beyond the 20 scholarships that could previously be offered.
However, with money leaving the department through direct payments to athletes, some worry that rowing programmes will be cut to help make ends meet. There has been little suggestion that this will be the case for women’s team, given the increase in football scholarships will need to be balanced out, but already threatened men’s programmes may be in the firing line if there are struggles in this regard.
Pavia lawsuit
The most recent legal shockwave began to rumble just before Christmas as Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia was granted a preliminary injunction in his case against the NCAA. The injunction stopped the NCAA from enforcing its eligibility rules, as the former junior college player played previously under a different governing body and on that basis argued that the NCAA limiting his eligibility within their system was a breach of anti-trust laws.
While only a narrowly defined temporary injunction is in place, its granting suggests there are likely changes coming in the near future to the NCAA bylaws.
What is suggested by Pavia’s lawyers is that the NCAA starts the ‘eligibility clock’ when an individual first enrols at a member institution, allowing junior college and NAIA athletes to maintain their four years of NCAA eligibility. If implemented, this would be the biggest change to collegiate rowing that the sport has ever seen.
Directly, Orange Coast College is the only junior college that has a significant rowing programme. But, by starting the clock on enrolment, it would allow athletes who have raced non-US varsity programmes – including in the UK within the BUCS system – to enter the system as older, more experienced athletes and still be eligible for the full four years.It remains to be seen if the NCAA can overturn this on appeal. If not, the nature of collegiate rowing will be severely altered, upturning recruiting and the collegiate system as we know it.
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