After Conferences, Huge Ten, SEC Are Engaged on Roster Limits of 23 Males/35 Girls

The SEC and Huge Ten are discussing roster limits of 23 males and 35 ladies, respectively, for his or her swimming & diving packages, with each swimmers and divers counting as 1 athlete on these rosters. These new roster limits would take impact for the 2025-2026 season, with no important easing-in-period.

In line with sources, the SEC met about three weeks earlier than the US Olympic Trials, in late Could, and got here up with quite a lot of 23 males and 35 ladies. Huge Ten coaches met two weeks later and got here up with numbers of 30 males and 35 ladies, with each conferences anticipated to finally match on the decrease quantity for males.

Whereas different conferences received’t be certain by these numbers, as the 2 energy brokers in faculty athletics, the SEC and Huge Ten are anticipated to drive what occurs elsewhere.

Final Friday, these numbers, together with numbers for different sports activities, went to mediation or arbitration to be finalized. SwimSwam couldn’t verify that the numbers have been finalized.

These numbers are similar to the 22 and 35 that SwimSwam first reported in Could as an SEC proposal. The quantity for soccer groups is predicted to land between 100 and 110 athletes.

The strikes are all in response to ongoing litigation and guidelines modifications concerning student-athletes and their share of revenues generated by athletics departments, together with them being declared workers. Athletics departments throughout the nation at the moment are rating their packages by totally different standards and evaluating how they may cut back sports activities and/or budgets for these packages to take care of new guidelines, laws, and settlements.

What stays to be seen is whether or not scholarships will depend as ‘income sharing,’ and the way Title IX laws will likely be utilized to subjects of income sharing and Identify, Picture, and Likeness.

Beneath, SwimSwam has compiled, and averaged, the variety of athletes on every Huge Ten and SEC roster for final season to present an thought of what number of roster spots will likely be impacted. This data relies on federally-submitted information, which means that it received’t at all times replicate completely what occurs on the bottom (swimmers getting injured, quitting the staff, and so on.) however is the very best depend accessible.

In each conferences, males’s rosters are, on common, barely smaller than ladies’s rosters. Whereas a number of ladies’s rosters, like Indiana, will likely be impacted fairly considerably by the brand new roster limits, many others received’t be impacted in any respect.

A number of coaches that SwimSwam spoke with mentioned that the affect on the lads’s rosters is extra important – each as a result of the quantity is so low, and since males typically develop extra as soon as they arrive in faculty than ladies. A roster of 23 would dramatically affect the flexibility of males’s packages to carry varsity spots for developmental swimmers, although some have floated proposals about utilizing a non-varsity membership staff to skirt a few of that.

Some colleges might implement tighter restrictions as a value management measure. There may be at the moment no mandated roster restrict, although colleges usually use roster limits in sports activities like swimming for budgeting and Title IX balancing functions.

Finally, these new guidelines are going to have an unlimited affect on collegiate athletics, barring any last-minute reprieve by an American congress that has been wont in latest months to cross any substantial laws.

Huge Ten Rosters, 2023-2024

SEC Rosters, 2023-2024