Ahead of 2028 Los Angeles Games, It’s Time for NCAA to Promote Olympic Sports

Rivalries and untapped marketing potential already exist at the college level, but tapping into year-round interest in these sports still lacks.

Torri Huske and Gretchen Walsh share the American flag and the podium after medaling in the 100-meter butterfly at the Paris Olympics. / Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated

One of the indelible images of American triumph at the Paris Olympics came courtesy of Torri Huske’s spontaneity and Simon Bruty’s camera lens. Huske, the 100-meter butterfly gold medalist, was handed a United States flag after the medal ceremony. She turned and gave one corner of the flag to silver medalist and teammate Gretchen Walsh, and together they did a star-spangled skip-a-long on the pool deck with Old Glory fluttering behind them. Brutycaptured the moment for Sports Illustrated.

The photo does more than portray American athletic exceptionalism. It presents an opportunity for the NCAA, the Atlantic Coast Conference and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to capitalize on the robust audiences that tuned into the NBC platforms for 17 days. Huske and Walsh are current college athletes and, specifically, current ACC athletes—at Stanford and Virginia, respectively—who should be marketed to the public like football or basketball stars.

The 21-year-olds are, thanks to a perfectly snapped photo, literal and figurative flag bearers for NCAA Olympic sports. 

The two fastest women in American history in the 100 butterfly likely will compete against each other at ACC championships in February and the NCAA championships in March—Walsh has the world, Olympic and American records in the event, but Huske has the gold medal. Huske was the most decorated American Olympian, with three gold medals and two silver, while Walsh was close behind with two gold and two silver.

They are likely to face off in other events as well during the college season, and their teams have won the last six NCAA titles combined. They’re friendly rivals, something that can be built upon for casual viewer interest.

Could this be the swimming version of Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese? Maybe Caitlin-Angel Lite? It’s worth a swing, and worth all the considerable promotional work ESPN and the ACC Network can deliver. Unfortunately there is no duel swim meet scheduled between the Virginia Cavaliers and Stanford Cardinal this season, nor will they be at the same fall invitational—opportunities missed—but they will compete come championship season.

This is just one example of untapped Olympic carryover. Gymnasts Jade Carey (Oregon State Beavers), Jordan Chiles (UCLA Bruins) and Fred Richard (Michigan Wolverines) are expected to be college athletes in 2024–25. Same with a bunch of other medalists: runner Kaylyn Brown (Arkansas Razorbacks), 3x3 basketball player Hailey Van Lith (TCU Horned Frogs), wrestler Kennedy Blades (Iowa Hawkeyes), fencers Lauren Scruggs (Harvard Crimson) and Maia Weintraub (Princeton Tigers). Plus a bunch of other swimmers, male and female.

It’s time for college athletics to take advantage of the surge in Olympic viewership, carrying it over to NCAA Olympic sports. Thirty million viewers a day can’t be wrong, can’t just completely lose interest overnight, right?

“What we just saw validates our common interest in a wide variety of sports,” USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland says. “Frankly, it had been a long time since we saw that kind of engagement [in Olympic sports] from the public. And the college piece of that is really important—college sports continues the development of our athletes. It’s a difference maker for those who compete at the highest level. That college system matters.”

The timing of that messaging is acute. With the House vs. NCAA court settlement poised to suck up to $22 million a year out of individual school athletic budgets, cutbacks are inevitable. And if you saw the news earlier this week that Alabama is re-framing the salary market for football general managers by paying Courtney Morgan more than $800,000 a year, you know which sports aren’t going to make those sacrifices. 

The money will continue to pour into football empire building. Which means the Olympic sports better duck.

They also better fight for their share of the pie. As long as the media-rights revenue is still coming in torrents, the power-conference schools are likely to do what they can to avoid cutting sports. That’s a political bloodbath that most athletic directors don’t want to take on. But quietly de-emphasizing and de-funding them remains a possibility in the post-House settlement world. And the second and third tiers of the NCAA Division I membership might be faced with eliminating programs.

Some sports already have been ravaged over time. The U.S. men’s gymnastics team was a big hit in Paris, winning a surprise bronze in the team competition, but at the NCAA level just 15 men’s programs still exist—12 Division I universities and three in D-III. Just 319 men competed in NCAA gymnastics in 2023–24. (No wonder, then, that pommel-horse hero and Penn State Nittany Lions graduate Stephen Nedoroscik did his part to lobby for his sport’s survival on social media, with photos of himself in action as both a collegian and an Olympian and the caption, “If you want MGYM at your school also shoot an email to your athletic director.”)

Stephen Nedoroscik helped the U.S. men’s gymnastics team win a bronze medal because of his expertise on the pommel horse. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Given the threatening climate for college Olympic sports, it was interesting to see individual schools, conferences and the NCAA itself proudly send out daily promotional material about the medal count their alums and current athletes were racking up in Paris. (Some of it a bit specious, given the ravages of realignment. Like the ACC claiming Katie Ledecky, who last swam for new conference member Stanford in 2019.) They’re fighting the PR battle; we’ll see if that translates to waging a competitive funding campaign.

The ACC is better positioned than any league to champion its Olympic sports. The arrival of all-sports powers Stanford and Cal, and a not-too-shabby SMU, is a selling point in that area. With the new lineup, the league has the Nos. 2 (Stanford), 5 (Virginia), 7 (North Carolina), 11 (Notre Dame), 12 (Florida State), 17 (Duke), 20 (Cal) and 21 (North Carolina State) departments in the 2023–24 Learfield Directors Cup all-sports standings.

“It’s time to double down on what we’re doing with Olympic sports,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips says. “And that’s something that’s been in the DNA of the ACC since it came into existence. When we went through expansion and we discussed the pros and cons, one of the incredible benefits was having those three schools join a conference that is already committed to Olympic sports. It’s time for all of us to reinvest in something that’s been an Olympic development program for the United States and around the world.”

The league is at least putting its programming where its mouth is. In fall sports alone, the ACC Network recently unveiled plans to broadcast 28 women’s soccer games, 23 men’s soccer games, 20 women’s volleyball games and 16 field hockey games. 

“That’s a commitment,” Phillips says. “That’s not just stating that you’re going to be supportive. We’re preparing our biggest asset, our network, for promoting Olympic sports.”

All the conferences need to get onboard with promoting those sports, if they actually care about them surviving. As does the NCAA, which has an all-sports advocate in charge now in president Charlie Baker. His engagement with Hirshland and the USOPC has been productive.

But this is a campus-by-campus issue as much as a holistic one. Hard decisions must be made as king football becomes both more lucrative and more expensive.

With an Olympics looming on American soil in 2028, the first since 1996, expect an urgency to perform well. That has to translate to an urgency on both the grassroots and college levels.

“The NCAA is the lifeblood of our program,” Hirshland says. “I don’t have concerns about the flow [of athletes through the college ranks] stopping. I have concerns about how it changes. We’re past the point of whether it will change—now it’s a matter of how.

“We want people to understand how a change to college football might impact fencing and swimming and track and field. You’ve got to think about the mandate of the university to provide broad-based opportunities to students. Presidents have to think about sport the same way they think about other areas of the university.”

And the people involved in sport have to think about how to take advantage of the biggest popularity wave for the Olympics in at least a dozen years. An audience for those sports existed in July and August; can universities market their stars of the summer and tap into that interest year-round?