Could the unlikely savior of US college sports be … Donald Trump? | College sports

Female athletes and Olympic sports athletes, two overlapping groups that have long thrived in US colleges, are facing an uncertain future on campus. These athletes’ college prospects may lie in the hands of a surprising savior …

Donald Trump.

Yes, the same Donald Trump who invited the US men’s hockey team to the State of the Union address and joked that he’d have to invite the women under threat of impeachment. The same Donald Trump who invited Georgia’s women’s tennis team to the White House and released a photo in which he and several men are standing in front of the women. And on a less superficial level, the same Donald Trump whose Department of Education ensured that Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) compensation need not be equitably distributed under the principles of Title IX, the landmark education law that got the ball rolling for women’s sports in the USA.

In and out of the sports world, Trump isn’t celebrated as a defender of the marginalized. But he also loves to be involved with a wide variety of sports – owner of the New Jersey Generals in the USFL and ringleader of a brash effort to challenge the NFL that eventually backfired, namesake of cycling’s Tour de Trump, 2004 Olympic torch relay participant, guest at the 1991 draw for the English soccer tournament then known as the Rumbelows Cup, MMA host/influencer, and high school soccer player in an era well before youth soccer was commonplace. Regional soccer organizer Concacaf was once based in Trump Tower, along with two apartments for its general manager and eventual Fifa whistleblower Chuck Blazer – and his cats. The president also has been known to golf on occasion.

And unlike a lot of today’s sports leadership, he and his staff have recognized that sports exist beyond the realm of big-money football and basketball, culminating in an executive order that would surely be deemed socialist if it were drafted by any administration other than his.

“Without a national solution to protect the future of competition and opportunity in all college sports, it is possible that the largest college football programs will be forced to seek stability through a negotiated solution that may result in the withdrawal of financial and other resources from women’s and Olympic sports,” the April 2026 executive order reads. “The Congress is strongly encouraged to expeditiously pass legislation that satisfactorily addresses these issues.”

The concern is legitimate and widely shared. In March, three University of Louisville administrators wrote an essay warning that “Olympic sport student-athletes face reduced cost-of-attendance stipends, diminished Alston payments (money for education-related expenses), and the very real threat of scholarship reductions – or outright program elimination.” The ACC’s spring meetings were abuzz with concern about protecting programs. Several college tennis programs were eliminated in a matter of weeks this spring, though Arkansas won a reprieve when donors stepped in to keep the balls bouncing at their school. And even college football coaches like Georgia’s Kirby Smart are concerned.

“My biggest concern for our sport is we’re going to ruin all the other sports,” Smart said.

Men’s tennis has already dropped significantly in Division I – 258 programs in 2010, down to 237 in 2025. Men’s wrestling isn’t declining as steeply as it did in the 1980s and 90s but continues to lose its foothold in many schools. Several other Olympic sports are stagnant or slipping.

Even if the president isn’t motivated specifically by tennis players and swimmers, he is someone who revels in protecting the old world order. With this executive order, he’s looking backwards.

“I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court,” Trump said.

“What we had” was steady growth in all NCAA sports and explosive growth in women’s sports in college. While men’s participation in NCAA sports has roughly doubled since 1982 (167,055 to 318,949), women’s participation has nearly quadrupled (64,390 to 235,349), and much of the growth has come in sports that have mainstays of the Olympic programme such as track and field and soccer.

But “what we had” also was a world that didn’t have NIL deals and direct payments from universities to athletes. The executive order doesn’t put the toothpaste all the way back in the tube, but it does place a few restrictions on athlete earnings.

Which is why Arizona State sports historian Victoria Jackson sees an ulterior motive – avoiding any further push to professionalize college football.

“The thing that they are focused on is football,” Jackson said. “Women may get a good deal out of that as a result.”

So there’s a potential for a nice unintended consequence for athletes who aren’t football or basketball players, but the key word in Jackson’s statement is “may”.

“I do think we’re going to see a number of universities cutting a lot of teams,” Jackson said.

At the very least, the Trump 2.0 approach to college sports is incoherent. The executive order insists that colleges should report the number of roster spots and the amount of money spent on men’s and women’s sports, with the Secretary of Education pushing this effort “through rulemaking where necessary”.

But in terms of women’s sports, the “rule” exists. It’s Title IX. And Trump’s administration has weakened it.

“Without strong Title IX guardrails, many schools will continue to pour money into men’s athletics while under-resourcing women’s sports,” Shiwali Patel, the National Women’s Law Center’s senior director of education justice, said in a statement to The Guardian. “If the Trump administration cared about women’s sports, they would not be undermining Title IX enforcement, they would be ensuring that women athletes are paid fairly and given equal access to facilities and resources. Trump’s Department of Education scrapped Title IX NIL guidance shortly after issuing an anti-trans sports ban EO early last year, so it’s clear they are using the excuse of ‘defending women’ and ‘protecting women’s sports’ as a cheap cover for targeting trans people and rolling back civil rights protections.”

The administration also hasn’t challenged the settlement of House v NCAA, which will award $2.8bn in retroactive NIL earnings to hundreds of thousands of current and former college athletes – if it survives a legal challenge by some female athletes to block the settlement on Title IX grounds. In that agreement, 90% of retroactive money goes to football and men’s basketball players, another 5% goes to women’s basketball players, and the remaining 5% goes to everyone else.

Going forward, schools now have a limited amount of money – $20.5m in 2025-26 – to split among their athletes at their discretion, but it’s likely that these distributions will be similarly skewed toward football and men’s basketball as well. One estimate at nil-ncaa.com, a site run by accountant and veteran sports-spending analyst Patrick O’Rourke, suggests men’s basketball players in major NCAA conferences will average more than $200,000 a year, and the average football player will make six figures. Women’s basketball players would average around $16.7k, well under one-tenth of their male counterparts’ earnings but still the envy of fellow female and Olympic-sports athletes.

On one hand, the new landscape isn’t bad for Olympic-sports athletes – a $1,000 check is better than nothing beyond the cost of a scholarship, simultaneous changes to college rules mean that more scholarships are available, and exceptional athletes (including teenagers who’ve already won Olympic medals) don’t have to choose between scholarships and sponsorships.

On the other hand, if forced to choose between paying for a couple of basketball players and paying for a wrestling team, colleges would likely lean toward the former.

This example isn’t a hypothetical. The giants of the SEC or the Big Ten, like Texas and Ohio State, make enough money in football to fund a small country, but the typical college sports program is a money-losing proposition, propped up by student fees, taxpayers or money from the rest of the school. Data from 2024 at the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database shows that the median college in what were then the Power Five Conferences (SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12) lost money – $153.5m in total revenue (including $6.1m in institutional/government support) against $167.2m in total expenses.

Throughout Division I, athletics departments are propped up in part by the rest of the student body, not through ticket sales but through mandatory fees – sometimes in the thousands of dollars per year.

And these numbers were calculated before colleges started paying athletes directly and scholarship limits were eased.

To be sure, sports add to student life and alumni loyalty in ways that are difficult to calculate. Notre Dame’s football folklore is a key reason why the university is better-known than its peers. Basketball helped build Duke’s brand.

But how long will students and taxpayers be willing to subsidize a large rowing team that no one ever watches? Or an equestrian team that gives economic aid to families that can already afford to participate in equestrian events that aren’t even in the Olympics?

A key selling point for Olympic sports is the Olympics themselves. The USOPC reported that 75% of the 2024 US Olympic team played college sports. Even in the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, 91 members of US teams and 161 athletes from other countries played NCAA sports, especially ice hockey. The NCAA doesn’t have many skiing programs, but they accounted for 50 skiers in the 2026 Games, 25 from the USA. Team USA also had 15 former track and field athletes, most of them converted to bobsleigh.

Yet not all of these athletes were varsity athletes who were eligible for scholarships, let alone the direct payments that have come into the game since they played in school. Some athletes, including many rugby players, were on club teams that aren’t sponsored by the athletics department and are generally student-run.

And while most US Olympians are former college athletes, only a small percentage of college athletes will ever get close to the Olympics. In sports like women’s gymnastics, athletes tend to be Olympians first and then collegians.

If Trump’s efforts succeed, for whatever his motivations may be, some of the status quo will be maintained. If not, schools will be free to make choices of which sports they’ll fully fund – or participate at the varsity level at all. We already see some Olympic sports that only have a handful of varsity programs, and potential Olympians flock to those schools. Perhaps 25 schools will use all of their allotted track and field scholarships while letting the swimming program skate by with less, and vice versa. Colleges may opt for quality over quantity, focusing on fully funding five or six sports and doing the bare minimum in others – or letting those sports become popular clubs rather than secondary varsity sports.

“What we have right now will not be what we’ll have 20 years from now,” Jackson said. “That’s probably a good thing, but we’re going to have a lot of casualties to get there.”