When the U.S. Olympic Committee and its sports teams map out funding and strategy for the next four years, the NCAA feeder system will be a bigger priority than in the past.
Sarah Wilhelmi, Team USA’s new collegiate partnership director hired in May, will be involved. Her job is to identify ways the nation’s Olympic movement and college programs can cooperate more effectively.
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WILHELMI
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That won’t necessarily come in the form of direct funding from the USOC to college sports. But if a project primarily designed to benefit NCAA schools and competitions can be proved to lead to Olympic success, Wilhelmi and the USOC are prepared to back it.
“We think a lot of the work I’m doing will weave into the [high-performance funding process],” Wilhelmi said. “They keep telling me, we’re not boiling the ocean, so slow down and get some priorities.”
Two existing partnerships, one in gymnastics and one in wrestling, are a good reference point for the USOC’s goals, Wilhelmi said.
For instance, USA Gymnastics has helped the NCAA shorten the duration of its national championships to save money, scheduled local USA Gymnastics events around the same time as the NCAAs to help drive attendance, and helped with local ticket sales and marketing efforts.
Separately, USA Wrestling has created a system of regional training centers, many on campus at major NCAA wrestling programs such as Penn State and Wisconsin, where college students and Olympic wrestlers can train in the Olympic freestyle discipline with each other without violating NCAA rules.
Each sport has its distinct challenges, but the USOC wants to spread good ideas across every sport to the extent possible, Wilhelmi said.
“There are 47 NGBs,” she said. “If they’re all trying to get a message out, or all trying to influence how championships are structured, they’re probably not as effective as if we come in as a single source and leverage that with the NCAA or with a conference,” said Wilhelmi, who was previously on staff at the West Coast Conference.
She thinks conferences, rather than individual schools or the entire NCAA, may be the most effective partners for the USOC. The Pac-12 in particular has reached out to talk about new ways to collaborate, said Pac-12 Chief Marketing Officer Danette Leighton, citing the conference’s long record of producing Olympic medal winners.
When it comes to NCAA-Team USA collaboration, officials are starting from square one. Wilhelmi’s first project was to determine how many Team USA athletes in Rio had competed for NCAA programs — basic biographical information that no one had ever bothered to collect or publish. The results illustrated the significance of the NCAA-USOC connection: 411 athletes from 140 schools competed for an NCAA championship before heading to Rio, or nearly three-quarters of the U.S. contingent.
Wilhelmi’s position was created out of years of talks between top college sports officials and the USOC over ways to address the long-term decline in Olympic sports on campus.
