Track Is America's Opportunity Sport. Colleges Need to Save It

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21 hours ago

Today's guest columnist is Russell Dinkins, executive director of the Tracksmith Foundation.
Olympic sports in college are in danger. With Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) allowing college athletes to receive endorsement deals and pay via collectives, and a just-approved antitrust settlement that will result in colleges having to pay athletes directly, colleges are already making decisions about which sports to keep and which sports may need to be cut.
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And while the loss of any Olympic sport is concerning, the loss of track and field programs will be devastating, not only for the development of elite-level athletes, but also because of the sport's accessibility and racial and socio-economic diversity. In the wake of the House settlement, and with the NCAA Division I track and field championships taking place this week in Oregon, now is the time to discuss these issues.
Track and field is America's opportunity sport. It is the nation's largest high school sport when you include both male and female participation, and it is the cheapest youth sport by far, meaning it's the most accessible and affordable of all youth sports offerings.
It is also one of the few sports where teenage athletes can be recruited by colleges by simply participating on their high school's team.
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Today, youth sports are dominated by expensive club or travel teams that compete outside of local scholastic programs. For many youth sports, an athlete essentially has to be on one of these club teams to be recruited.
However, track and field athletes can get the attention of college coaches just from their local high school meets, because performances are measurable and objective. In fact, nearly all high-school track results are uploaded to a national database, democratizing the recruiting process. The likelihood that a low-income kid from small-town North Dakota, urban Baltimore or rural Texas can earn an opportunity to go to college via sport is far greater in track than in most other college sports.
The NCAA and colleges within their system have enjoyed the perception that the NCAA provides educational pathways to college for those who may otherwise not have that opportunity. For the most part, this perception is the result of clever marketing. However, there's one sport that actually does a great job of keeping that school door open—track and field.
Collegiate track and field is the largest sport in the NCAA by participation. It is also the NCAA's most diverse Olympic sport.
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Nearly half of the NCAA's Olympic sports athletes of color participate in track and field and cross country. No other Olympic sport in the NCAA comes close. And while nearly 70% of Olympic sports athletes in the NCAA are white, track and field stands apart, as over 40% of its athletes are athletes of color.
In addition, track and field provides great opportunities for both men and women. As the largest sport in high school for girls and the largest by participation for women in the NCAA, track and field provides the most opportunities for these athletes to not only experience the benefits of sport but to utilize it as a pathway to college.
For boys and young men, the sport's role in providing a pathway to college is also significant in light of national trends that see significantly fewer young men attending college than women. Track represents one of the few remaining mechanisms that effectively and efficiently bring young men into college classrooms nationwide. And while it is an objective good that more women are going to college, we cannot, as a society, allow young men to fall by the wayside.
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The NCAA and universities writ large should be invested in ensuring that sport remains a viable pathway to an education, especially for under-resourced populations. Allowing college track to be diminished or eliminated works against that goal. Therefore, the NCAA ought to provide college track with special consideration or protected status due to the sport's unique societal benefits.
The sport, however, can also make itself more valuable in the modern collegiate marketplace by enhancing its financial and cultural value.
Olympic sports such as women's gymnastics, volleyball and softball have shown that producing a compelling television product and in-person experience can create value. Adjusting college track meets that take place within a TV-friendly two-hour window, with clear scoring that shows a clear team winner will be a tremendous step in the right direction. Someone should be able to see a quad meet between UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington on a bar TV and clearly tell who's ahead and who the winner is at the end of the meet.
Most NCAA football and basketball teams, outside of the biggest Power Four teams, don't make money but provide cultural value to their institutions and communities. Many colleges, for instance, organize their homecoming and alumni weekends around a football game. Moreover, with football and basketball being fall and winter sports respectively, there's a potential economic void in the spring that track could capitalize on. Here's a thought: Several big-time football schools have abandoned open spring football games, which used to be a sizable event attracting fans and alums to campus, to protect players from being scouted and poached in the transfer portal. Why not build an event around a major track meet instead?
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Collegiate track should elevate the cultural value of the sport by educating the public on why it is of social benefit. If there's a broad understanding of how and why the sport is truly 'the opportunity sport,' the sport can display its worth and be considered as valuable as the unprofitable football and basketball teams.
Sport is often thought of as the great equalizer. Unfortunately, that ideal does not reflect how most sports operate in modern-day America. A truly accessible, merit-based, high school-to-college pipeline does not exist for a great many of the sports we see in the NCAA. Track, though, actually does a great job of providing such a route to an education. It would be a grave disservice to allow these opportunities to be taken away via sports cuts by college administrators who are looking at bottom lines and not the lives impacted by their decisions. The societal cost is too great to allow collegiate track and field, America's opportunity sport, to wither away.
Russell Dinkins is a national track and field advocate and executive director of the Tracksmith Foundation. An NCAA champion and six-time Ivy League champion while at Princeton, Dinkins' advocacy has helped save four Division I track and field programs by leveraging media and historic applications of Title IX and other legal strategies to see the reinstatement of over 200 athletic opportunities.
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