Adaptive Athletics Needs an Accountability Standard
OPENING STATEMENT
My younger brother has Down syndrome. As a family, it has been our blessing. Before I made a career out of helping athletes navigate college sports, I learned a much more basic lesson while navigating his educational and athletic development: opportunity is never handed over simply because it is fair.
We saw what happens when families decide that “there isn’t a program” is not an acceptable answer. We worked alongside the Special Olympics, supported efforts to widen the circle, and watched sport do what it does at its best: give someone a team, purpose, and a chance to excel publicly. That experience has stayed with me through every conversation about college athletics, because it forces a question that is both simple and uncomfortable.
This spring, Alabama won its sixth consecutive women’s wheelchair basketball national championship. Sixteen teams competed in that championship: 12 men’s teams and four women’s teams. Some of those athletes will likely wear USA across their chests at the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. They are elite athletes. They train, compete, represent their schools, and play for national titles.
Yet college adaptive athletics exists largely outside the legal and institutional structure that governs the rest of college sports.
The NCAA and conferences do not govern these championships. Many programs are housed in recreation services or student affairs, not within athletics. At Arizona, which hosted this year’s national championship, adaptive athletes practice in the campus rec center, and the program does not receive athletics funding or offer full athletic scholarships. They are varsity athletes when celebrated, but not when budgets are built.
That distinction has consequences. That pipeline was built through advocacy, litigation, and families refusing exclusion. In Illinois, a high school athlete named Mary Kate Callahan helped spur a federal case seeking qualifying standards for athletes with disabilities. The Office of Civil Rights’ 2013 guidance made clear that students with disabilities are entitled to an equal opportunity to participate in extracurricular athletics. States began to move. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida followed with settlements or championship divisions.
A student may now have a path to compete and win in high school. In college, that path can disappear.
The legal problem is not difficult to describe. Title IX gave women’s athletics a way to measure exclusion. For all its flaws, Title IX requires institutions to count participation and answer for disparities. Numbers turn equity into an enforceable claim.
The ADA and Section 504 can require access to an existing program; they rarely require a school to create one.
College athletics is being remade around revenue sharing, NIL, roster limits, litigation, and the financial demands of the House settlement. Athletic directors are making hard choices, and non-revenue sports are often the first place they look for savings. Swimming, tennis, track, rowing, and other Olympic sports have protections adaptive programs often do not. They appear in participation reports. They count toward Title IX. They have conference structures, alumni networks, established budgets, and potential plaintiffs.
Adaptive athletics often has none of those safeguards. Its athletes are not reliably visible in federal athletics reporting. They do not affect a school’s Title IX proportionality analysis. They may have no conference voice, no dedicated scholarship structure, and no clear legal claim if a program is cut. In the coming era of smaller rosters and tighter budgets, that may be an existential problem.
A college can celebrate a wheelchair basketball team’s national title on social media in April and eliminate the program from a spreadsheet the following spring. There may be no public reporting requirement, no compliance consequence, and no one positioned to force an explanation.
We should not solve this by forcing adaptive athletics into Title IX. Title IX is a sex-equity statute, and its current battles are difficult enough without treating disabled athletes as an add-on to a different legal fight. But we do need a participation-opportunity standard under Section 504: a requirement that institutions assess disability-sport interest, disclose what they offer, and explain why meaningful opportunities do or do not exist.
This is not a mandate for every campus to field a team but an accountability standard. Count students who want to compete. Count the opportunities offered. Count the gap.
College sports is currently consumed by a debate over how to divide money. Adaptive athletes are asking for something more fundamental: a place on the organizational chart, the roster report, and the budget line.
They do not need our sympathy. They need institutions to stop pretending that excellence does not count if it happens outside the sports they already know how to measure.
EXHIBIT A
I’m excited to see ESPN extend its Women’s Sports Sundays initiative through the fall, as it seems to be another meaningful vote of confidence in both the athletes and the audience. Beginning Sunday, the network will program 11 consecutive weeks of women’s sports, anchored by 10 college-volleyball matches and supplemented by NWSL, WNBA playoff, women’s college basketball, WTGL and MVPW boxing coverage. Summer results gave ESPN a business case to build on. A Fever-Aces game drew 1.6 million viewers, while four NWSL telecasts averaged 255,000 viewers, 106% above ESPN’s 2025 NWSL regular-season average. Yes, it will compete with Sunday Night Football. But that’s the point: women’s sports belongs in premium windows.
EXHIBIT B
Last week, I mentioned New York Magazine’s sharp look at the escalating cost of youth sports, including the finding that families spent 46% more on a child’s primary sport in 2024 than they did just five years earlier. That was certainly top of mind when I saw the trailer that dropped this week for Kim Kardashian’s new series, Team Moms: Baseball, which follows parents at an elite Arizona baseball academy. Hard to imagine a more perfect—or more troubling—cultural reinforcement of what has gone wrong than the parent drama it looks to portray. Youth sports has become an arms race of access, money and parental anxiety, sold as opportunity but increasingly built to reward those who can afford the escalation.
ON THE DOCKET
A little late in getting to this, but important Title IX news to follow given two very different interpretations of when a university exercises enough control over a third party to trigger liability for student-on-student or third-party sexual harassment. In Doe v. Eastern New Mexico University, the Tenth Circuit revived claims brought by women’s basketball players who alleged sexual abuse by their coach’s husband, an outside provider without a formal university role. The court applied the same Davis Supreme Court precedent that governs Title IX deliberate-indifference claims, but took a functional view of institutional control: Could the university realistically protect its athletes by ending referrals, limiting the individual’s access, directing staff, or intervening sooner? That approach contrasts with the Third Circuit’s more formal, status-based test. Same precedent; different conceptions of institutional control.
FOOTNOTES
“It's impossible to deal with LSU right now. They are unserious."
An unnamed SEC administrator in an ESPN story about the friction between the SEC and LSU
