As the head coach of USA Olympic Diving, the new NCAA revenue-sharing model worries me

The Summer Games marked 120 years of Olympic diving . During this time, the world has seen two superpowers in this sport: the USA and China .

Yet USA Diving came home from the Paris Games last month with just one silver medal . According to The Indianapolis Star, "It is the fewest diving medals by the United States since a back-to-back shutout at Beijing 2008 and Athens 2004."

Chinese Diving swept the podium , winning all eight gold medals available.

We've been trying to resurface, building on the strength of the NCAA and its strong financial and competitive support of sports like diving. U.S. divers have been going to universities all over the country, using the NCAA as a way to support their passion for diving while getting a world class education.

Because of this, I believe the USA has a great chance to overtake China in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles . We have the talent, the coaches, the facilities, the technology and, in L.A., we will have the full support of the nation as we compete.

Even so, I write this out of great concern. The recent impact of the new revenue-sharing model faced by the NCAA is having unintended and potentially damaging consequences to diving. It could lead to many NCAA universities reducing or even eliminating the financial support now given to our sport.

I'm the head coach of the USA Olympic Diving Team

The NCAA has just agreed to a landmark revenue-sharing model that will pay billions to student-athletes. This is part of a legal settlement to resolve multiple antitrust lawsuits that have been filed against the NCAA, and there seems to be no end.

This is great news for anyone lucky enough to land a spot in a lucrative sport, but it could be bad news for student-athletes participating in a broad base of lower-profile Olympic sports.

Top colleges now must decide how to fund their athletic programs with much lower budgets going forward. They could lose 20-25% of their funding ‒ and the easy way to cut costs is to eliminate sports with lower financial value and audience engagement.

Fencing, lacrosse, diving, wrestling, and men’s swimming and gymnastics are in real jeopardy. More sports could be, too.

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I’m the head coach of the USA Olympic Diving Team for the fourth time in a row. I sweated bullets, but only partially about how best to support my divers to the gold at the Summer Games.

For the past decade, I’ve been the diving coach at Indiana University ‒ one of the country’s most storied collegiate programs ‒ and yet now that I'm home from Paris I'm worried that my profession could be over. As our athletes competed for medals on the world stage, all across America, colleges and university administrators have been deciding which sports to fund and which sports to abandon.

How can we save USA Diving?

Diving has no advocate in the room when these decisions are being made. I don’t even know what room I should ask to join. Conference meetings? NCAA meetings? College swim coach association meetings? I have asked to join them all and have been told no.

The horrible irony is that this is happening only four years before the Los Angeles Olympics, where I hope American diving will break through again and win more medals than the Chinese ‒ a dream I have been pursuing for more than 30 years.

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The support and recourses in the NCAA have been the backbone of a lot of our Olympic sports: world class facilities, professional coaching positions and educations for our athletes. Now I am afraid that diving and many other Olympic sports will have all but vanished from the NCAA scene by 2028, and that Team USA may lose the medal count at our home Olympics in L.A.

How can we save our Olympic sports? I only see a few ways out:

• Return to the “old model” of having private programs at the junior and senior level taking over where the colleges had been so effective in supporting our Olympic sports.
• Turn the “nonrevenue” Olympic sports into revenue producers for athletic departments.
• Litigation to stop the unfair treatment of divers and coaches at the conference, NCAA and professional sports organizations.
• A new NCAA structure allowing diving to be its own sport outside of the swimming umbrella. This could at least keep diving as an affordable, high-profile viable sport at colleges and universities.

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How can the old model work? This requires private investors and coaches to start their own programs training young athletes (starting as early as age 5 or 6) with a dream of playing a sport in college and possibly gaining a scholarship to defray the rising cost of tuition.

Parents will have to subsidize the effort significantly, because it will require “renting” pool time and space from colleges. Examples of this approach include a program that I built in the mid 2000s, the U.S. Elite Diving Academy , and the private program that Ron O’Brien built around Olympian Greg Louganis .

However, this appears to be a step backward. Although colleges could collect funds to support the cost of their swimming and diving pools by leasing the facilities to private diving coaches, it would prove very expensive for parents and athletes.

We could turn the nonrevenue Olympic sports into revenue producers for athletic departments. Open these facilities to the youth in the community and run programing that has proved to be profitable in support of the Olympic sports on our campuses. This would allow for development of young coaches with mentorship and oversite from the varsity coaches on campus. It would also allow the most knowledgeable coaches in our sports to work with our top talent at a younger age.

How can litigation save our Olympic sport? Probably not in time for the 2028 Games, but perhaps it can break the cycle of unfair treatment of my profession at the NCAA and conference level and give equal opportunity to diving student athletes.

With no voice on the conference level, and after decades of little to no growth in our sport working through the NCAA level and the professional swim coach association, litigation may be the only way we can separate and save our sport.

Diving has a unique challenge: It is a well-regarded and highly visible Olympic sport supported by a large number of universities and colleges. If we can find any way to gain our own voice, I believe we can build this sport as a unique, highly watched and spectacular sport for our Olympic future.

But as a small adjunct to swimming programs, I am very afraid that this sport will disappear from our colleges altogether.

Drew Johansen is the head diving coach at Indiana University .

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As the head coach of USA Olympic Diving, the new NCAA revenue-sharing model worries me