Cutting Tennis First: The Quiet Redefinition of Who Belongs in College Sports

OPENING STATEMENTS

Three tennis programs disappeared from the Division I map in a matter of days. Arkansas. Saint Louis. Illinois State. My feeds have been full of screenshots, farewell statements, and stunned reactions from players who woke up in season and went to bed without a program. It feels less like a random bad week and more like the moment when something that’s been quietly cracking finally starts to give way.

From a narrow budget lens, tennis is one of the first sports that gets circled. Ticket sales are minimal at most campuses. Crowds are modest. Travel costs add up. Rosters are compact and, at many schools, skew heavily international. And unlike swimming or track, college tennis is no longer the central route to a U.S. Olympic or pro career. To a budget officer working through post‑House spreadsheets, tennis can read like an obvious cut: substantial spending, little that shows up on the revenue line, and limited immediate impact on the Title IX math.

But the Arkansas decision shows how incomplete that story is. According to public financial reports and Matt Brown’s detailed work at Extra Points, Arkansas’ men’s and women’s tennis programs together cost the department in the low‑ to mid‑seven figures annually, including coaching salaries, scholarships, travel, recruiting, support. The revenue line, in contrast, is almost comically small, measured in thousands, not millions. If all you see is the tennis line on the NCAA report, it reads like money going out the door with no meaningful revenue attached. What that same page doesn’t shout is that Arkansas’ overall athletic budget is approaching $200-million. Eliminating tennis trims only a sliver off the total spend.

That’s the dissonance I can’t shake. When departments want to pay coaches more, build facilities, or expand collectives, they find the money. Creative fundraising appears. New partnerships materialize. The cap on revenue sharing becomes a floor to build on, not a ceiling to respect. Yet when it’s time to “tighten belts,” the targets are sports like tennis, programs that cost a fraction of a coordinator’s salary but serve as lifelines for dozens of athletes, many of them far from home.

This week’s news doesn’t come out of nowhere. Since the House settlement, more than 40 Olympic‑sport programs have already been eliminated as schools rework budgets and chase competitive advantages in football and men’s basketball. I warned in 2025 that without real guardrails, we’d see exactly this pattern: big numbers splashed across headlines for a small group of athletes at the top, and quiet cuts for the many who rely on college sports for opportunity, education, and, in the Olympic context, an entire national pipeline. That’s what we’re watching unfold.

Tennis occupies a particularly vulnerable spot in that ecosystem. Men’s and women’s participation numbers are often similar, so dropping both doesn’t obviously blow up proportionality under Title IX the way cutting, say, only a women’s sport might. Many rosters are majority international (some estimates put international representation in Division I tennis comfortably above 50%), so there’s less political backlash when local stakeholders don’t see “their kids” losing spots. And because tennis talent at the highest levels increasingly flows through global academies and ITF circuits rather than NCAA programs, it’s harder to argue that a single college team is essential to the U.S. Olympic pipeline in the same way a swimming or track program might be.

Put all of that together and you get a perfect storm: a sport that is relatively expensive on a per‑athlete basis, generates little visible revenue, doesn’t obviously move Title IX math when you cut it, and can be framed, implicitly or explicitly, as serving “somebody else’s” kids. That’s not an accident. It’s a set of structural incentives that point the scissors in one direction.

The question is whether tennis is the iceberg or just the tip. Look across the landscape and you see other sports that share similar traits: men’s golf, men’s soccer at some schools, rowing, rifle, certain track and field squads. Or Quinnipiac slashing its perennial-champion women’s rugby team. They are essential to the broader Olympic movement or to access for underrepresented athletes, but they don’t produce big media rights checks. They travel. They have roster structures that can be tweaked or trimmed without immediately triggering a proportionality crisis. They live in the same danger zone.

All of this lands on real people. At Saint Louis, 19 tennis student‑athletes learned via announcement that their programs were gone, effective immediately. Five are graduating this spring. The others are now scrambling: Do I enter the transfer portal and hope there’s a roster spot somewhere else? Do I stay, finish my degree, and give up the sport that brought me here? How do I navigate immigration if I’m an international student whose visa is tied, practically if not legally, to my identity as an athlete? At Illinois State, men’s tennis will end after this semester; for a roster heavy with seniors, the “choice” is largely illusory. Those are not just financial questions. They are academic, legal, and mental‑health questions.

Administrators will say, and have said, that these are “difficult choices” forced by a changing landscape. Some pressure is real. House did introduce new obligations. Coaching salaries and facilities races are not going backwards. But this was a choice that wasn’t driven by spreadsheet economics. There was a decision about which sports, and which athletes, are essential to their vision of college sports, and which are expendable. And we haven’t even seen the real effects of private equity demands yet.

Tennis is sending us a message. If we keep solving budget problems by shrinking the universe of athletes who get a chance, we will hollow out the very Olympic and non‑revenue pipelines that make college sports more than a minor league for two men’s sports. And we’ll fundamentally alter the foundation of the college experience where varsity sports teach critical life lessons. We don’t have to accept that as inevitable. Schools can choose to protect and endow these programs. Conferences can choose to make “no cuts” a condition of revenue sharing. Lawmakers can choose to tie protections for football’s runaway train to safeguards for the sports that quietly feed Team USA and change lives far from the spotlight.

What this week’s tennis cuts really ask is simple: In this new era of college sports money, who gets to belong, and who do we leave behind when the spreadsheet is done?

EXHIBIT A

Brendan Sorsby is now the face of college sports’ gambling problem, but he won’t be the last headline. Thousands of online bets, an NCAA investigation, and a leave of absence for treatment are not an aberration; they are the predictable result of a Gen Z culture where microbetting is normal long before kids ever step foot on a college campus. If the NCAA and its member schools don’t build real education, monitoring, and support systems around this reality, they’re not just failing athletes. They’re putting themselves in direct legal and compliance jeopardy as this culture arrives in full force.

EXHIBIT B

The NCAA struck down another one of its old rules this week, agreeing to pay just over $2 million and scrap pre‑enrollment prize‑money limits to settle the class action led by UNC tennis star Reese Brantmeier and former Texas player Maya Joint. As part of the deal, athletes in all sports will be allowed to keep prize money earned before they enroll in college, undoing the very restriction that once forced Brantmeier to forfeit most of her $48,913 U.S. Open check. But it doesn’t alter the rules to allow payers to earn money while in college. We’ve talked about this hypocrisy before, but it bears repeating: why is the system still built to punish athletes in tennis, golf, track, and other individual sports for actually earning money by playing their sport, when football and basketball players can command seven‑figure NIL deals without touching a prize‑money cap?

ON THE DOCKET

If you are someone inclined to place a wager, there may be nothing safer right now than betting on a fresh wave of eligibility lawsuits if the NCAA moves ahead with a five‑years‑to‑play‑five‑seasons model that is not fully grandfathered. The most obvious plaintiffs are the 2026 class, who will be told they get less than the class ahead of them that already banked an extra COVID year. More broadly, once you extend the window but draw arbitrary lines about who benefits, you’ve created a clean, NIL‑era antitrust target: the NCAA coordinating when and how long athletes can sell their services.

FOOTNOTES

$12.5 million

Big 12’s capital infusion from Red Bird Capital Partners to aid with revenue generation, with schools able to access an additional $30 million