College athletics faces crisis without national rules in place

Gymnastics taught me that a routine is only as good as the parts nobody applauds: the conditioning, the reps, the season you sit out because your body needs to heal. It took me longer to realize the same is true of the sport itself. College athletics runs on its own unglamorous infrastructure with scholarship lines, training budgets, and a governance structure that’s supposed to hold it all together.

Stanford has built its athletic program around the idea that the infrastructure shouldn’t come at the cost of an education, and for most of my time here, that’s worked. The school hasn’t gone a year without a national championship since the 1970s, but it is getting harder to sustain that.

Roster limits, revenue sharing, and an unregulated transfer portal have made a lot of decisions come down to money in a way they didn’t before. More athletes are faced with the decision between a bigger revenue-share number somewhere else and loyalty to a school that invests just as heavily in what happens after their eligibility runs out. Stanford won’t outbid a program that puts everything into one or two revenue sports. What it can do is make the case that the education is worth it against those short-term financial solutions. Unfortunately, that case is getting harder to make every year. Today, there is no shared framework for what “worth it” even means across the sport, and the uncertainty puts a lot of programs and student-athletes in jeopardy.

My time at Stanford as a student athlete has been nothing short of remarkable. Throughout my three years here, I have been poured into both as an athlete and as a student from my teachers and coaches. I........

© The Hill