Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick, speaking on the Olympic and Women's Sports panel Wednesday afternoon at the ’14 IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum, said Title IX has been used as an excuse too many times to cut programs. Before his current role at Notre Dame, Swarbrick was on a task force about 15 years ago formed by the NCAA and USOC to do a deep analysis of why certain Olympic sports programs were being cut. “I couldn’t help but be struck by … the number of times Title IX had been used as an excuse to cut a sport,” Swarbrick said. “I fear the same thing now. I’m not dismissing the pressures. They’re real. But I also fear people will take advantage of the environment of those pressures to cut sports that don’t need to be cut -- that you can save through other approaches.” Swarbrick spoke on a panel alongside USOC Chief of Paralympic Sport & NGB Organizational Development Rick Adams, Alabama AD Bill Battle, North Carolina AD Bubba Cunningham and Texas women’s AD Chris Plonsky. Swarbrick used the analogy that nobody at Notre Dame is trying to cut the theology department, even though it does not make as much money as the business department. “When you buy the sports paradigm, and you only talk about these sports in those (financial) terms, you lose every time,” Swarbrick said. “They do so much more, they have so much more potential. I’m proud of our fencing program, but what I’m most proud about is when the American delegation walked into the Opening Ceremony at the London Olympics, the person carrying the flag was a Notre Dame fencer. That’s real value to the university. It’s not about the budget for the program or how much money they bring in. There’s so many ways to look at the programs, but we get sucked into this track of talking about them as revenue or non-revenue or how many people attend an event, and that has nothing to do with it in the context of our educational mission.”
IMPORTANCE TO TEAM USA: The panel also discussed how important these sports are to the Olympics and Team USA's success. Adams: “They mean everything to us. Two-thirds of our team in London came out of the collegiate system. Even on the winter side, where we only have eight sports, a third of our team came from the collegiate side. It isn’t just the athletes. It’s the coaches. It’s the facilities. It’s the infrastructure. At a time for us when Canada and other countries are focusing on fewer sports, fewer athletes, really drilling down to areas where they can win medals, we’re struggling. We’re not nationally funded, so we have scarce resources, and we need to deploy those resources in a way that is best. It would be extremely difficult for us if there were to be a cascading of Olympic sports at the collegiate level.”
QUICK HITS
* Plonsky, on how UT rowing can potentially help the Austin economy: “Alabama and Tennessee added rowing for the same reason as Texas in the ‘90s. It was participation proportionality and scholarship offering requirements. Now, they want to create a haven for rowing in Austin. We would love to hold this AQ event in rowing that could be the Mecca. That’s business for Austin. That’s hotels and revenue for Austin.”
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Battle has a real soft spot in his heart for the Olympic
sports student-athletes
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* Battle, on how he views Olympic-sport athletes: “I had a good idea of what being an athletic director was, but the biggest surprise to me is that I have enjoyed gymnastics, swimming and diving, tennis and all the Olympic sports. The people are model student-athletes. They’re great athletes, great students, pulling 3.8-3.9 GPAs. They’re appreciative of everything they get and they have a real soft spot in my heart.”
* Adams, on amateurs versus pros competing in the Olympics: “There has been a real partnership between the NCAA and Olympic Committee to allow athletes to do things to receive operation payments if they perform at the Olympic Games, be eligible for elite athlete health insurance, have expenses be reimbursed. From our perspective, a lot of progress has been made and we very much appreciate how the NCAA has worked with us. I spent a lot of my life working in hockey, and the Miracle on Ice was obviously the pinnacle moment for us. There were a lot of people in international federations that began defining amateurism differently. You have the Dream Team, you have the NHL guys playing, and there was a lot of thinking that that model would tank the Olympianism. It wouldn’t stand for fair play and sportsmanship. But I don’t think that’s happened. The Olympic movement has never been stronger, even though we have professional athletes.”
