Shouts From The Stands: A Diver’s Perspective on Virginia Cutting the Sport

SwimSwam welcomes reader submissions about all topics aquatic, and if it’s well-written and well-thought, we might just post it under our “Shouts from the Stands” series. We don’t necessarily endorse the content of the Shouts from the Stands posts, and the opinions remain those of their authors. If you have thoughts to share, please send them to [email protected].

This “Shouts from the Stands” submission comes from Hunter Hollenbeck, a fifth-year diver at Stanford University.

I’m Hunter Hollenbeck, a fifth-year diver at Stanford University. Beyond diving, I’ve had the gratitude of being the co-president for Stanford’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee since 2023, assisting in our transition to the ACC. This position puts me in constant conversation with the major stakeholders of our athletics department, including our athletic director, university president, NCAA president, and others as I advocate for our student-athlete body. This experience is what makes me both immensely knowledgeable of—yet immensely worried for—the state of diving in the upcoming era of college athletics.

The news about Virginia cutting its diving program, while shocking and disappointing, is neither novel nor unexpected. The most important part behind this decision is in the layers of nuance that surround it. It’s likely that many, many collegiate swimming and diving programs across the country will face the same uncertainty regarding their diving programs and their relevance to the bottom line: team scores and scholarship caps.

Let me preface by saying that I love the combination of swimming and diving for many reasons. Being connected with swimming has given me so many brothers and sisters throughout the years and people that I can’t imagine living life without. It’s great to have a team to root for and fight for at conference and NCAAs. More pragmatically is the fact that this combination has likely led to more diving programs (and more diving wells, clubs, and access to the sport) until this point: it’s infinitely easier for title IX and budgetary reasons to add in a larger, 20-30 person team instead of a marquee group of about five men and five women. It’s also why diving teams haven’t gotten formally “cut” in the past.

This hasn’t stopped programs from getting informally cut, however. Some of the more notable times this has happened in high level programs include Bob Bowman’s tenures at Michigan and Arizona State, where in both cases he forced the diving coach out through confrontation and refusal to support their presence and participation at conference, zone, and NCAA meets. Tangential to this is the recent occurrence of the 2021 men’s swimming and diving championships, where Cal beat Texas in swimming, yet the Texas divers were able to cover the difference and secure the team victory which generated much commotion about the role of diving.

So then, why is this unexpected now, given a history of animosity and “quiet cutting“ programs? Money, and rosters. With revenue sharing and unlimited scholarships, schools can divvy up about twenty million dollars to student athletes and additionally provide as many scholarships as desired to the cap set by the NCAA in a few months. While Texas has recently announced that they will be giving all student-athletes full rides, most schools (including Stanford and other high fidelity athletics programs) operate at a loss and such an expenditure would hemorrhage money. At this point, every roster spot counts in the attempt to catch up to the giants of the college sports industry who can fund their program to the gills. Currently, diving lives in a significant limbo that puts us at a disadvantage to the new system put in place.

If you’re unaware, divers count as half a person towards the NCAA meet roster limit. This is consolidation for not being able to score relay points. However, where this does not create consolidation is within the money being spent on a diver. Indeed, even though a diver is half a person at NCAA’s, that doesn’t mean their scholarship is half off. In a sense, this is saying that a diver is worth less than a swimmer because you would need two scholarship-funded divers to equate the scoring potential of a single scholarship-funded swimmer. While the scoring math adds up, the checkbooks don’t balance.

Objectively, what must be done is reconcile this scoring difference and provide divers with ample events to gain an equal scoring potential with a swimmer by having team events, synchro, an all-around competition, or other ideas that have seen varied success through the years. This would, on paper, create a level playing field such that the diving contingent on the team is not seen as a waste of money compared to filling those spots with swimmers for saving on scholarships per roster spot at NCAA’s.

But nothing is objective. The second issue is that of control—swim coaches like to be able to control how the meet is going to go, and having an autonomous body of diving alongside their team means they have less control over the end product. People like Bob Bowman and Todd DeSorbo would see that, regardless of money, it’s preferred to have a full roster of swimmers instead of dealing with having some uncontrollable divers on the other side of the pool. These new issues with money and roster sizes merely make it easier and easier to axe the entire diving program.

In the end, what’s vital for us to do as divers is to advocate for equal representation and point earning potential within the swimming and diving ecosystem to allow for justification in the existence of diving programs. While this won’t fix the overarching issues with diving being auxiliary to swimming, it creates hope that divers could provide serious firepower to big competitions and contribute a significant share of the team score, proving our worth and value to swim coaches who would rather cut us.