When Tennessee swim and dive graduate Griffin Hadley arrived on the University of Tennessee, he entered a school athletics panorama that was already in flux.
The NCAA had simply handed its title, picture, and likeness (NIL) coverage, permitting faculty athletes to earn money from their model. Swimmers had been simply attempting to make sense of those adjustments.
Now, 4 years later, Hadley has graduated, however the chaos of NIL stays, and the UT swim workforce particularly tries to regulate to a brand new collection of adjustments stemming from the House v. NCAA settlement.
This lawsuit permits colleges like Tennessee, which decide into the deal, to start out paying athletes a bit of the varsity’s athletic division income. The House v. NCAA additionally enforces a roster cap, which restricted swimming and diving to solely 30 athletes, with the SEC now proposing to decrease caps even additional, dropping the lads’s cap right down to 22.
These adjustments convey nice concern for Hadley, who worries it will solely create a divide between Olympic sports activities and the sports activities which can be deemed to be ‘revenue-generating.’
“As far as Olympic sports go, Olympic sports are gonna start fighting for their life,” Hadley mentioned.
With the brand new period of NIL and income sharing, UT swimming and diving is a novel place as a high-performing workforce at an ‘Everything School,’ however a non-revenue-generating Olympic sport within the period of the House settlement. Hadley, fellow graduate and 2024 Olympian Jordan Crooks, and former swim and dive strategic data director Josh Lively imagine in the way forward for this workforce, however acknowledge that the monetary realities of school athletics pose new challenges for applications like this.
Revenue sharing at Tennessee
The House settlement permits UT to allocate as much as 18.5% of the varsity’s athletic income to athletes. Tennessee has chosen to divide this cash, a complete of $215,469,808, throughout all 16 NCAA-sanctioned sports activities.
During an October press conference, Tennessee’s Athletic Director Danny White shared the specifics of this revenue-share cut up. The soccer workforce receives 75% of the share, males’s basketball receives 15%, ladies’s basketball receives 5% and the final 5% is left to “other.”
The different comes out to about $900,000, he famous.
Based on these percentages and price range experiences, in the course of the 2024-2025 season, the soccer workforce acquired $162,539,638 in income, males’s basketball acquired $35,316,920, and girls’s basketball acquired $4,352,348, in keeping with Tennessee athletic public information. Swim and dive earned a proportion of the 5% left, which got here out to $370,687 for the mixed groups.
White mentioned that these numbers are “consistent with the House settlement.”
While swimming & diving’s numbers stay low, regardless of each the lads’s and girls’s groups ending top-five nationally in each of the final two seasons, Lively remains to be impressed that White allotted any cash to swimming and diving. Opting to rev share with these applications, Lively mentioned, emphasizes White’s dedication to the ‘Everything School’ tagline at Tennessee.
“Danny specifically has been all in on day one of ‘We’re gonna be an everything school. We’re gonna try to give everyone a piece of the pie when it comes to rev share,’” Lively mentioned. “And he has never wavered from that.”
UT sports activities research professor and NIL knowledgeable Dr. Adam Love mentioned Olympic sports activities like swimming have at all times confronted an uphill battle for equitable funding and assist, even on campuses like Tennessee’s, the place swimming and diving are nonetheless getting some portion of the revenue-sharing pie.
“There are certainly inequities that exist when it comes to NIL rights,” Love mentioned. “But to emphasize, those are also long-running inequities where there is a long struggle for Olympic sports seeking to carve out a little bit more of the pie.”
One method athletes herald income is thru storytelling, each on the particular person and workforce stage. But on an SEC campus largely dominated by soccer, capturing viewers consideration will be difficult.
Lively’s job was to assist promote a narrative of the swimming and diving workforce that impressed viewers care. He wrote press releases for this system, managed media requests and ran the workforce’s social media account.
While his job now falls to Bryant Avery, these athletes have additionally taken it upon themselves to inform their very own tales via social media in an effort to unfold the phrase in regards to the workforce’s success and generate particular person aspect earnings via model offers and social media promoting. UT even hyperlinks to athletes’ Instagram accounts on the official college roster as a option to drive extra visitors to these athletes’ profiles.
JB Bowling, Tennessee’s chief NIL officer, mentioned that UT is dedicated to serving to athletes capitalize on their expertise as student-athletes at Tennessee within the NIL period.
“The ability to leverage their hard work to build a personal brand and potentially earn money is a tremendous advantage for students at schools like the University of Tennessee,” Bowling mentioned in an e mail. “The benefits of NIL agreements go beyond immediate financial gains; they also include valuable connections with companies and brands that can lead to further opportunities after their athletic careers.”
Gui Caribe leads the lads’s workforce in followers with 44.5K, whereas Mizuki Hirai leads the ladies’s workforce with 8,949 followers as of Nov. 17, 2025. Their content material serves as a further advertising arm for themselves and their program.
“It’s hard to showcase people multiple times, let alone consistently enough to be like ‘OK, let me help you build your brand up,’” Lively mentioned.
Olympian Crooks could be one of the apparent social media and NIL stars amongst the workforce, however Crooks says he, like Hadley, doesn’t have a ton of curiosity in social media or NIL. He finds it overwhelming, particularly given all the things else that he has happening as a student-athlete.
“It was just very confusing to me, and I wanted to just focus on my sport and be able to have a great four years in that aspect,” Crooks mentioned. “I just didn’t really understand it, so I left it alone.”
Crooks completed his profession at UT as a four-time NCAA champion, two-time SEC Swimmer of the Year and an 11-time convention champion. He credit a few of his success to the truth that he selected to not have the distraction of NIL. Instead, Crooks targeted solely on his sport and his research whereas being on scholarship.
That was sufficient for him.
Investing in constructing a private model within the NIL is additional labor that some athletes select to interact with, in keeping with Love, however others like Crooks acknowledge that they aren’t occupied with allocating time to such efforts.
“When I talk to people that have those kinds of followings, they often talk about how it takes a lot of time and effort to build that kind of brand and then develop content that’s gonna keep a large group of followers engaged,” Love mentioned. “So certainly some people have benefited tremendously financially at least from being able to profit from NIL, but of course it’s also given rise to other conflicts, other complications both for student athletes and for athletic departments to deal with.”
These problems might embrace time administration strains, interpersonal conflicts with teammates over model offers and income, or different monetary and private stressors, conditions that Crooks selected to keep away from, regardless of the potential to generate income from his model by pursuing such alternatives.
Future
During Hadley and Crooks’ careers, the lads’s swim workforce progressed from an 18th-place end to 3 top-10 finishes nationally. Meanwhile, the ladies’s workforce positioned inside the highest 10 all 4 years, climbing as excessive as No. 4
While Crooks and Hadley recognize the funding UT has made into swimming and diving as a part of its dedication to an “Everything School,” they nonetheless fear in regards to the potential implications of this altering panorama on the way forward for the game.
Bowling is extra reassuring.
“NIL will always be a part of the landscape, but I don’t believe it will be the primary factor shaping the future of Olympic sports,” Bowling mentioned. “Providing resources and creating opportunities will be crucial, and we will work to maximize those opportunities for our sports. However, we believe that a significant aspect of the future of our sports will continue to be the overall support we offer and the excellence of our coaches.”
Swimming and diving is objectively a part of UT’s future within the House settlement plan, and Twenty first-year swimming and diving head coach Matt Kredich does have $370,687 in income sharing to play with on the recruiting path and inside his workforce.
Kredich is main a stronger workforce, athletically and financially, than he ever has earlier than, however Hadley is aware of in addition to any Vol that a lot can change within the faculty panorama in 4 years.
“This is the modern day of college athletics, and non-revenue and Olympic sports have to respond. It’s up to us,” Hadley mentioned.