USA Triathlon grants $2.6 Million to support women’s college programs

USA Triathlon, the national governing body of the sport, has committed over two and a half million dollars to establishing women’s triathlon programs at the NCAA level, according to a release on the USA Triathlon site.

Women’s Triathlon was just approved as an NCAA Emerging sport earlier this year, meaning it has a 10-year window in which to establish enough programs to potentially stay on as a full-time NCAA sport.

Schools can apply for USA Triathlon grants to get a piece of the $2.6 million to help start their own women’s triathlon team. USA Triathlon says it will already begin giving out grants for the 2015-2016 season. Programs that earn the grants would receive them for three seasons, starting in 2015 and extending through the 2017-2018 season.

A second application process will select more schools to earn grants for the 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 seasons.

This hearkens back to some recent statements by the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) suggesting that it was looking for ways to support college athletics, believing college sports to be a major piece of the Olympic pipeline within the United States.

The USOC would be supporting multiple Olympic sports, with swimming potentially among them, but CEO Scott Blackmun said in USA Today that he didn’t see the USOC giving grant funds directly, the way USA Triathlon is doing now.

If swimming were to set up a similar system, the onus would likely fall to USA Swimming as it did to USA Triathlon. The difference, of course, is that triathlon is just getting its start as an NCAA sport, and USA Triathlon’s support is at this point slated to only run for four total seasons, which the organization hopes will be enough to get the sport on its feet at the college level.

Triathlon could certainly find a niche in athletic departments looking for women’s sports to fulfill Title IX gender-equality mandates. Then again, with the ever-changing rules on athlete compensation, NCAA athletic departments might be forced to make cuts in order to pay their athletes, making the additions of new sports a tall order. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact USA Triathlon’s grants have on the early years of NCAA women’s triathlon.