I once asked a professor who was originally from New Zealand what he thought about American college athletics. He said that he found it a bit perplexing, since in his country, “college was for studying, not playing sports.”

Sports are big on many campuses, from football and basketball teams in the national spotlight to small sports like rowing, wrestling, and volleyball. Are they sustainable? Or should backers look to a new model to keep them going?

In today’s Martin Center article, George Perry argues for a separation of school and sport, with regard to the “niche” sports anyway.

He notes that a number of those sports that were put on hold during Covid have been revived, writing:

The restored programs demonstrate that motivated and organized alumni will put money behind the sports that are dismissed as non-revenue-generating or otherwise non-monetizable. That should shift the onus to the people and institutions in those sports — such as coaching associations — to make those sports self-sustaining, not only passively via endowments but actively in the non-college-sports marketplace. In other words, the moment for a major college-sports evolution is now.

Rather than pleading for some scraps from the school, why not get entrepreneurial and seek voluntary support? Perry says that could work.

Read the whole thing.