I drew this a long time ago.

It was the Competitor Group (CGI) era. Rock ‘n’ Roll was the biggest marathon series in the world; Competitor magazine was still landing in mailboxes and free at specialty retail stores; Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, and VeloNews were on the newsstand; and every strategy conversation in the building came back to the same question: how do we turn a race entry into a relationship?

We were, at the time, very good at the top of the funnel. We knew how to buy runners into the start line. What we could not quite figure out, and what the whole industry could not quite figure out, was what to do with them once they said yes, and how to bring them back after they crossed the finish line.

So I started doodling and sketching what I saw as the connected runner consumer journey.

A single connected loop, with transactions marked wherever the runner was already reaching for a wallet, and a scribbled note at the bottom that has aged better than almost anything else on the page: everyone is on some type of journey.

For years, this map was directionally right and operationally out of reach. The industry knew the journey existed. It just did not know how to price it, staff it, or own it.

The 2026 RunSignup midyear report is the first time I have seen clean, industry-scale evidence that this is finally changing.

The Number That Matters Is Not the Participation Number

Almost every trade write-up of the RunSignup data leads with and focuses on the same line: races grew 5.9% per event in the first half of 2026, on top of 5% in 2025. Large events with more than 5,000 participants grew 8.2%. Race churn is running below pre-pandemic norms. Running, as an industry cliché goes, is back.

All true, not surprising, but not the most interesting or relevant data.

The most interesting number, and the one that made me stop and think, is that per-race revenue grew 9.9%, nearly two full points faster than participation (RunSignup). Revenue outpacing bodies is not a headline about a running boom in progress. It is a headline about a change in the business model. Something other than “one more runner in the start corral” is finally growing the bottom line.

Look at what else moved in the same report:

• 5Ks now average 1.3 price increases per race, up 30% year over year. Marathons average 2.5, up 13.6%. Even 10Ks and half marathons are seeing significant increases (RunSignup).

• The average marathon price range moved from $84.01 to $111.22 in 2025 to $89.16 to $120.19 in 2026 (RunSignup). The “same race, same product, one fee” model is quietly dying.

• Registrations 120+ days out jumped to 16.4%, up 84.2% year over year. Race-week registrations fell 26.6% to 17.4% (RunSignup). Marathons are now 55.4% pre-booked more than four months in advance.

• 63% of transactions are on mobile. And get out your iPhone: 31.9% of May payments were made via Apple Pay (RunSignup).

Read down the list and the story is very clear. Runners are committing earlier, on the device they carry through every stage of preparation, at prices that vary meaningfully across a tiered ladder. Events are finally being paid for the journey, not just for the bib.

The Top-of-Funnel Trap

I think back to understand why this matters, and I remember what we were actually doing at CGI, and what almost every large event company was doing at the same time.

We were spending an enormous share of our marketing energy at the very top of the sketch, the “marketing / advertising / decision” cone in the upper-left corner. National magazine media buys. Search. Direct mail. Local media. Ambassadors. Registration promos to fill the next race in the series. That work was measurable, defensible in a budget meeting, and immediately connected to a registration transaction.

Everything else on the page was, in practice, someone else’s business.

Training plans lived on third-party sites and in coaches’ inboxes. Training gear was at the specialty run retailer. Photos were from a separate vendor, with its own logo on the picture or as a watermark. Charity dollars flowed through Crowdrise, Charity Miles, and dozens of platform partners. Travel and lodging were handled by hotels and OTAs. Nutrition was at a booth at the expo. The “post-event glow” was part of an emerging trend on social media, mostly in blogs and online reviews. Re-engagement belonged, mostly, to whichever race the runner heard about next from a friend.

The event owned the transaction. Everyone else owned the journey.

This was not a moral failing; it was the incentive structure that drove us to fill corrals and drive EBITDA. Filling the top of the funnel was legible and rewarded. Serving the converted runner, the person who had already said yes, was diffuse, cross-functional, and hard to attribute. So the industry did what industries do when the metrics are misaligned with the strategy. It overinvested in acquisition and underinvested in the customers it already had in the database.

The runner, meanwhile, kept living the whole journey. She just did it across a dozen apps and vendors, none of whom were the event she was training for.

Ahead of Our Time

The group at CGI was keenly aware of the trends, the opportunity, and the pressure. To the chagrin of private equity owners who wanted to squeeze the most out of what we already had, we tried to shift the trend and reinvent the model from within.

We took a strategic stake in MapMyFitness, joining Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners in the company’s $9 million Series B in June 2012, to give runners a GPS and training-tracking home connected to the events they were training for. We built a co-branded runner-travel platform with Travelocity, offering race-specific hotel blocks, bundled air and lodging, and itineraries built around early race-day starts for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon cities, because we knew a destination marathon was a trip before it was a race. We launched Gear Buzz, a flash-sale platform and short-form gear-review video segment pushed through Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, VeloNews, and Competitor magazine, with brands including Brooks and The Sports Authority, because a runner training for a half marathon was going to buy shoes, and we did not see why those dollars should leave the ecosystem. We ran an entire charity department that worked hand in hand with cause partners to build real programming, not just a fundraising minimum. We leveraged our own media to launch SportsCenter-style online segments: RunCenter, TriCenter, and VeloCenter. We understood that the athlete’s attention between races was as valuable as the race itself.

It was an incredible group of people reinventing an industry, redefining a business, and bringing outside business practices into what had, until very recently, been a mom-and-pop trade.

Some of those bets were early. Some were the right idea at the wrong altitude of capital, technology, or organizational patience. What they all had in common was an accurate read of the map. The runner’s journey was a business, not a marketing funnel, and the event company that owned it would compound value in ways the pure registration model never could.

The industry, and its owners, were not quite ready to hear that yet.

What the 2026 Data Actually Shows

A decade later, reframe the RunSignup numbers using the same journey map, and they no longer look like a pricing story. They start to resemble the ownership story we were trying to write.

Revenue growth outpacing participation is what happens when the converted runner is finally asked to spend on more than the entry fee: merchandise, hospitality, deferrals, insurance, add-ons, premium experiences, photos, team fees. The gap between 9.9% and 5.9% is where the middle of the funnel is finally showing up on the P&L.

More price steps per race is what happens when organizers stop treating registration as a single transaction and start treating it as a designed pricing ladder. It is not a punishment for late buyers. It is a recognition that the early buyer and the late buyer are different customers with different jobs to be done.

Earlier registration is the most important structural shift of all. When a marathoner books more than four months out, the organizer inherits a long, high-intent engagement window that used to belong entirely to third parties. That is the exact stretch of the sketch, from Registration through Preparation, Training, and Milestones, where the industry historically had no product. Now it has time, permission, and a mobile checkout waiting.

Large events pulling ahead is what “sense of belonging / community” from the bottom of the napkin looks like when it hits the top line. Scale, brand, and identity are once again worth paying more for. Runners are not buying a course. They are buying a place to belong.

Mobile and Apple Pay are the connective tissue. The connected journey was always going to require a device the runner carried through every stage. Now she does, and she pays with a glance.

None of this is being announced. It is happening inside the pricing pages and product roadmaps of every large event company in the country, and the data has finally caught up.

What Is Still Missing

Staring at the sketch ten-plus years later, I see that the industry is finally monetizing about half of it. The other half still has holes.

• Preparation and training are still overwhelmingly owned by third parties: Strava, TrainingPeaks, Runna, coaches, YouTube. Events have the intent data and the goal date. Very few have a training product runners actually use.

• Sponsor activation at milestones, the “sponsor incentives” box on the sketch, still consists mostly of banner ads and expo tables. Useful, contextual, journey-aware sponsor product is largely unbuilt.

• The spectator is still, for most events, a free user. Live tracking exists. A spectator product does not.

• Post-event glow and re-engagement is the highest-intent moment in the entire calendar year, and most events waste it with a “save the date” email and a discount code.

• The handoff back to the next goal, the loop from Post-Event Glow back to Decision, is the weakest link in almost every portfolio. Retention still leaks to the next shiny race and the next third-party platform.

Each of those is a business, not a feature. Each is a place where an organizer who understands the journey can build durable margin and, more importantly, a durable relationship.

The Standard the Sketch Sets

There is a version of this shift that is just yield management with better branding: squeeze the procrastinator, charge more for the same t-shirt, and call it a tiered experience. If that is where the industry lands, the runner will notice, and eventually so will the churn number.

The sketch, for all its scribbles and dated thoughts, still sets a higher standard. Everyone is on some type of journey. Weight loss. Personal best. Team building. Altruism. Vanity. Belonging. The job of an event company, and the actual product, is to help the runner complete their journey, not to extract from it.

The 2026 data shows the industry now has permission and the tools to build for the whole map. Earlier commitment, mobile-native checkout, tiered pricing, higher revenue per runner, healthier large events, low churn. That is the enabling environment we would have paid real money for at Competitor. It is also, arguably, what let CGI sell to Calera Capital for close to $250 million in December 2012, on the back of a five-year revenue CAGR of 26% and an adjusted EBITDA CAGR of 39%, even though the connected journey we were sketching would take another decade, two more owners, and a mobile checkout to arrive at scale.

The question for the next five years is whether the industry uses this new environment to comfort the afflicted, the runner who has already said yes and is waiting for us to show up for the rest of her journey, or whether we go back to afflicting the comfortable by buying strangers into the top of a funnel we still do not own.

The sketch, drawn a decade too early, still points the way.

In my career, I have had a front-row seat to much of the growth and trends in the endurance and participatory sports industry, from Rodale’s publications Runner’s World, Bicycling, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Backpacker to the build and explosive growth of the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon Series. I’ve worked on building event marketing platforms, from media empires to leading an endurance event portfolio, to become the world’s largest endurance sports platform, all tapping into destination experiences, charity platforms, and cultural moments.

The lessons have never been about more miles.

The lessons have been about people wanting a reason to train, a reason to travel, a reason to gather with friends and family, a reason to support a cause, and a reason to believe they were capable of more than they thought.

I’m viewing HYROX as the fourth wave of this movement, which is gaining attention and serious consideration for significant capital investment.

It is easy to call HYROX the next big fitness trend. Many would say we are well beyond it being a trend. HYROX may be the most visible early expression of the fourth wave of mass-participation fitness: a standardized, global, hybrid sport built around year-round training, shared experiences, destination travel, measurable progress, and repeat participation.

But I see an inherent warning embedded in its rise.

The opportunity is enormous. So is the risk of becoming culturally “cringe” before the brand becomes emotionally durable.

The Waves That Built the Market

The first wave was the original running-and-endurance boom. Beginning in the 1970s, running became accessible to ordinary people on a large scale. Local 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, marathons, and early triathlons gave people a clear challenge and a finish line.

IRONMAN emerged from that era, with its first race held in Hawaii in 1978. The brand transformed an extreme endurance test into one of the most powerful achievement identities in sport. It taught the industry that hard could be aspirational. A participant did not simply sign up for a triathlon. They committed to a transformation that involved training, equipment, coaches, travel, sacrifice, and a finish-line moment that changed how they saw themselves.

Mike Reily’s iconic voice proclaiming “…you are an IRONMAN” became more powerful than “I finished a triathlon.”

The second wave came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when participation events became branded, global, destination-led experience series.

Rock ’n’ Roll was part of that movement, with the first Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego in 1998, bringing music, running, and community together for nearly 20,000 participants. It was not just a marathon with bands. It was an effort to make the entire experience bigger than the race itself.

Crossing the finish line and the athletic accomplishment still resonated. But the event expanded to include live entertainment, sponsor experiences, spectator energy, charity, medals, city identity, travel, and a reason for friends and family to become part of the weekend.

At the front of the race were elite athletes like Ryan Hall, Kara Goucher, Shalane Flanagan, and Meb Keflezighi. They brought legitimacy, aspiration, and real competitive drama.

At the back were “jolly joggers” and walkers stopping at mile after mile to dance to the bands, smiling and soaking in the full experience.

That was not a contradiction. That was the product.

A Rock ’n’ Roll race could be a personal-best attempt, a first-half-marathon breakthrough, a charity fundraiser, a destination weekend, and a citywide celebration, all on the same course.

The third wave took fitness into physical gyms, the community, and spectacle.

CrossFit transformed training into identity. It created coaches, local tribes, benchmark workouts, measurable progress, and the feeling that the gym was a sport.

Obstacle course racing, through Tough Mudder, Spartan, Rugged Maniac, Color Run, and others, made physical challenge social. The proposition was simple: recruit friends, get dirty, overcome obstacles, take photos, and celebrate together for social currency.

CrossFit built a powerful, cult-like training culture. OCR built powerful shared moments.

But each had limits. CrossFit could feel technical, intense, and culturally intimidating. OCR relied heavily on novelty, expensive outdoor operations, complicated logistics, and uneven repeat participation.

HYROX has the opportunity to combine all the strengths from the prior phases.

Why HYROX Is a Fourth-Wave Platform

HYROX gives people a clear, repeatable test: running combined with functional workout stations, in a standardized order, against a clock.

That standardization is not boring or easy. It is the operating system.

A marathon is meaningful because 26.2 miles means something. A half marathon is meaningful because 13.1 miles means something. The city, the crowd, the weather, the course, and the memories may change, but the distance remains recognizable.

That common standard enables training plans, personal records, qualifications, coaching, clubs, content, and lifelong participation.

HYROX brings that same logic to hybrid fitness.

A participant knows what they are training for. Coaches know how to prepare them. Gyms can organize programming around the race. Friends can train together. Athletes can compare performances across cities.

Similar test. Different story.

That has made a powerful foundation for a global participation platform.

The fourth wave will be defined by brands that connect local training behavior to global experience. People will train at their neighborhood gym with friends and coaches, then travel to compete in a recognizable sport with a meaningful score, a global community, and a destination worth remembering.

HYROX is well positioned to lead that wave if it builds the system around the race, not just the race itself.

Race in the Front, Party in the Back

The mass-participation formula has not changed.

The front of the field needs to be credible. HYROX needs elite athletes, consistent standards, transparent judging, meaningful rankings, a championship pathway, and stories that make the best athletes worth following.

Elite competition gives a sport aspiration.

But the back of the field must feel welcomed, not tolerated.

The first-time participant should not feel like an extra in an influencer’s highlight reel. They should see a place for themselves from the moment they register. Doubles and team formats must remain central. Gym groups should feel like a place where they belong. A parent returning to fitness, a runner learning to lift, a former athlete rebuilding confidence, or two friends making a shared commitment should all see themselves in the event.

The best HYROX participant may never contend for a podium.

But they may train for months, race with a friend, bring family, travel to another city, raise money for a cause, share their result, recruit others, and register again next year.

That is the real participation flywheel.

Charity Can Deepen the Meaning

Rock ’n’ Roll became more powerful because it was never only about running.

Nonprofits used the series as a platform to support participants and raise millions of dollars for causes that mattered. Runners did not merely buy an entry. They publicly committed to something bigger than themselves.

Choose a cause. Set a goal. Ask people to support you. Train through the hard weeks. Cross the finish line knowing that your effort created an impact beyond your own accomplishment.

HYROX has a natural opportunity to build this into its culture.

The physical challenge is real. That gives people a powerful reason to connect their effort to a mission, a person, a community, or a cause. A meaningful charity strategy could create an on-ramp for new participants, deepen emotional commitment, bring nonprofits into the ecosystem, and create stories that are more human than another personal-record graphic.

“I am racing HYROX” says something about fitness.

“I am racing HYROX for this cause” invites a community into the story.

Destination, Not Just Location

Rock ’n’ Roll participants did not simply travel to a race.

They traveled to a destination for a race weekend.

They came with friends, family, training partners, and fundraising teams. They chose cities they wanted to experience. They explored neighborhoods, booked restaurants, planned celebrations, and turned a personal athletic goal into a shared cultural moment.

The race was the anchor.

The destination created the story.

That distinction matters for HYROX. A race can be transactional: register, arrive, compete, leave. A global experience series gives participants a reason to choose the city, coordinate a group, stay longer, train together, celebrate together, and leave with a memory that lasts beyond the result.

Rock ’n’ Roll used city-specific medals and multi-event rewards to make this behavior visible. Participants collected locations, earned recognition across the series, and turned a race calendar into a personal quest.

Which city is next?

HYROX can build the same loyalty behavior. City-specific achievements, regional circuits, global challenges, travel programs for gym communities, and rewards that feel earned can turn an event schedule into a map of personal achievement.

A medal should not be a promotional trinket.

It should be proof of commitment, travel, friendship, and accomplishment.

The Residency Opportunity

HYROX’s residency concept could become one of the most consequential ideas in the category.

Traditional mass-participation events create a powerful but compressed weekend spike. Flights fill up. Hotels become expensive. Restaurants, roads, venues, and airports are strained. Everyone arrives, races, and leaves in the same narrow window.

That can create energy. It can also create friction.

A residency creates a different relationship with a host city.

Rather than forcing every athlete, spectator, sponsor, and activation into a single weekend, HYROX can spread participation over a longer period. Athletes can arrive and depart at different times. They can train in local gyms. They can attend community workouts. They can explore the city, eat in local restaurants, recover locally, and build a real trip around their race slot.

The city becomes part of the experience, not just the backdrop.

This creates a more sustained impact:

• Participants have more flexibility and a richer destination experience.

• Friends and family can enjoy the city without navigating it on an overcrowded weekend.

• Local gyms, studios, coaches, hotels, restaurants, and retailers gain more ways to participate.

• Sponsors have more meaningful touchpoints than a single expo activation.

• Host locations benefit from a more distributed visitor economy.

• HYROX develops a deeper, more authentic local connection.

Done right, a residency is not an operational workaround.

It is a new kind of destination product.

Scale Without Losing Exclusivity

The hardest challenge for every successful participation brand is preserving the feeling that created demand as it grows.

Growth can become a trap.

Registration turns into a frantic scramble. Prices rise. Race waves become crowded. Hospitality becomes a transaction. The event feels less personal. The participant feels less like a member of a community and more like a unit of volume.

That is how a differentiated brand becomes a commodity.

The residency model can provide an answer. It allows HYROX to expand access while protecting the quality of race waves, athlete services, local programming, hospitality, and community moments.

Scale does not mean simply adding more people.

Scale means preserving the quality of the experience while creating more ways to belong.

Premium does not have to mean exclusionary.

A first-time doubles team can choose a standard race slot and a community workout. A returning athlete can earn earlier access, location rewards, or a limited-capacity training experience. A gym group can build a complete travel package centered on racing, local programming, hospitality, and celebration.

Everyone takes the same core test.

But everyone has a path to a deeper relationship with the brand.

HYROX’s Cringe Problem

Here is the risk.

HYROX’s greatest near-term threat may not be a competing race series. It may be cultural overexposure.

Every fast-growing participation brand develops a language, aesthetic, and set of rituals. Those can create belonging. But they can also become a shortcut to parody when the brand takes itself too seriously.

HYROX is already exposed to that risk.

The name itself, commonly interpreted as “Hybrid Rockstars,” carries a high level of built-in self-regard. The social feed often amplifies the most performative version of the category: shirtless selfies, dramatic finish-line collapses, cold plunges, protein stacks, cinematic training edits, and declarations of warrior-like transformation.

To critics, the event can become an expensive indoor workout staged in a convention center and presented as an epic heroic odyssey.

The low-skill, repetitive movement profile creates another opening. CrossFit purists may dismiss it as watered-down functional fitness. Endurance purists may see it as fitness theater. Others may read the entire category as first-world manual labor: paying to push sleds, drag weights, and carry sandbags indoors.

Those reactions should not be ignored.

The parody reel around “HYBRID ROCKSTAR” is a small but useful warning. The community already recognizes that the language can tip into comedy.

This does not mean HYROX is failing. In fact, brands only become targets of parody once they have entered the culture.

But the internet is fast. A status marker can quickly become a cliché. Ironman’s M-Dot tattoo is both a meaningful symbol of a major accomplishment and a familiar target for cultural jokes. HYROX needs to understand that dynamic before its own symbols get defined by outsiders.

Take the Race Seriously, Not Yourself

Gen Z and younger consumers do not reject ambition.

They reject unearned gravitas.

They want brands that understand two things can be true at once:

This is hard.

And this is also a little ridiculous.

That is the shift HYROX needs to make quickly.

The brand should move from “Hybrid Rockstars” toward a more grounded proposition: train, show up, do the work, laugh at the chaos, and come back better.

The tone should be more self-aware and more human.

Less cinematic self-mythology.

More honest truth.

The content should celebrate:

• The athlete who underestimated the sled.

• The doubles partner who disappeared during wall balls.

• The post-race limp down the hotel stairs.

• The person who said they were “just doing it for fun” and then immediately checked the rankings.

• The family member who still cannot explain what a SkiErg is.

• The friend group that turns a race into a weekend they will talk about for years.

The message should be simple:

Take the test seriously. Do not take yourself too seriously.

That is not a retreat from elite sport, premium experience, or high performance. It is what makes those things believable and sustainable.

Build a Sporting Life, Not a Personal Brand

The early adopter “hybrid athlete” has helped HYROX grow. That influencer archetype will not be enough to sustain it.

The durable hero is not always the person with the perfect physique, sponsor code, and dramatic finish-line collapse.

It is the person who trains with a sibling. The gym community that travels together. The parent returning to fitness. The former runner learning to lift. The former lifter learning to run. The first-time doubles team. The athlete raising money for a cause. The participant who misses their target, laughs, and enters again.

Rock ’n’ Roll worked because it could hold elite legitimacy and mass inclusivity on the same course.

HYROX should aim for the same thing.

At the front, sport.

Throughout the field, humanity.

The Real Opportunity

The commercial opportunity far outweighs the entry fees.

The fourth wave will be built around the full participant journey: training, coaching, gyms, apparel, footwear, equipment, recovery, nutrition, charity, travel, hospitality, content, community, recognition, and repeat participation.

HYROX athletes live in several consumer categories at once. They run. They strength train. They attend group classes. They buy performance products. They follow coaches. They use health data. They travel for events. They share their journey publicly.

A HYROX athlete does not simply need generic running gear or gym apparel with an event logo. They need products that work through running, sled pushes, burpees, carries, lunges, and wall balls. Apparel must manage sweat, stay in place, resist abrasion, and allow full movement under fatigue.

That is not merchandise.

That is a real product category.

The brands that win will not simply sponsor the race. They will make preparation, race day, recovery, travel, and the decision to come back better.

The Test Is Retention

Every participation boom has a first finish line.

The durable ones create a second, third, and tenth.

IRONMAN proved that hard can become an identity. Rock ’n’ Roll proved that a race can become a destination, a charity engine, a city celebration, and a global experience series. CrossFit proved the retention power of local training community. OCR proved the appeal of shared challenge and social adventure.

HYROX has the chance to bring those lessons together.

The key measure is not first-time registrations.

It is whether people return.

Do they train between races? Do they improve? Do they bring friends? Do they fundraise? Do they travel to another city? Do they collect meaningful achievements? Do they build a relationship with a local gym community? Do they laugh at themselves along the way?

If the answer is yes, HYROX will become more than a fitness boom.

It will define the fourth wave of mass participation fitness: a global platform where people train with purpose, race with friends, travel for experiences, support causes, earn meaningful recognition, and come back for the next story.

Randy Levine’s recent opinion piece in the Sports Business Journal, “Trump council’s Randy Levine: Congress must act to fix college sports,” got me thinking and sent me back to two articles I wrote earlier this year:

“An Executive Order Won’t Save College Sports. Here’s What Might.” and “The Broken Pipeline: How the Collapse of College Sports Threatens U.S. Olympic Dominance.”

Levine is right: Congress needs to get involved.

The current system is a mess. NIL rules vary by state. The courts keep changing the operating environment. The transfer portal has become a full-time roster-management issue. Revenue sharing is here, but nobody has confidence that the current structure will hold. Meanwhile, the gap between the schools that can spend at the top of the market and everyone trying to keep up continues to widen.

Nobody is operating with real certainty. Athletes do not know what rules will apply from one year to the next. Schools are trying to make decisions about rosters, scholarships, staffing, and sports sponsorship without knowing what the rules will look like in six months. Conferences are caught in the middle, trying to create standards they may not have the legal authority to enforce.

The people most likely to feel the consequences are often the ones with the least leverage: women’s and Olympic sports, especially at schools where football and men’s basketball consume the resources and attention required to compete at the top of the market.

So yes, Congress should act.

But before it does, we need to be clear about what we are trying to save.

Are we trying to build a modern college-sports system that recognizes where the market, the law, and athlete expectations have already gone? Or are we trying to put the old system back together with a federal seal of approval?

Those are not the same thing.

An Executive Order Won’t Fix This

The White House can make college sports a priority. It can direct agencies, push for coordination, and elevate issues such as athlete safety, transfers, eligibility, women’s sports, and Olympic-sport opportunities. That matters, and the recent executive actions did exactly that.

But an executive order is not a durable solution.

It cannot resolve the antitrust questions now at the center of the college-sports business model. It cannot create a national NIL system that survives the next administration or the next court ruling. It cannot fully resolve the conflict between state laws. And it cannot answer the basic question that keeps coming back: what rights should athletes have in an enterprise that depends on their performance, their identities, and their ability to draw an audience?

That requires Congress.

The new revenue-sharing model only reinforces the point. Direct payments have begun, but the system is still provisional, with unresolved questions around compensation limits, NIL enforcement, Title IX, and long-term athlete protections. As Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione put it, the current arrangement is “not, in its current form, a long-term solution.” That is why Congress should not treat the settlement framework as an endpoint. It is a bridge to whatever comes next.

The danger is that Congress sees the chaos and tries to solve it by giving schools, conferences, and the NCAA a version of the authority they once had, without confronting why that authority stopped working in the first place.

That would create order. It would not necessarily create a better system.

We Have Been Here Before

The closest comparison may be the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

The original Amateur Sports Act of 1978 brought order to a fragmented Olympic system. It created the governance structure for the U.S. Olympic movement, empowered national governing bodies, and gave the U.S. Olympic Committee a central role. At the time, that was important and necessary.

But the Act was built around an amateur model just as the business of the Olympics was changing. Television rights were becoming more valuable. Sponsorship was becoming more sophisticated. Professional athletes were entering the Games. Athlete endorsements and commercial opportunities were growing. The Olympics were becoming a global media and commercial enterprise, while much of the governance language and institutional thinking still reflected an amateur-era model.

The law eventually had to catch up.

The 1998 amendments removed amateurism as a formal eligibility requirement and more fully integrated the Paralympic movement. Congress later passed the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act in 2020, strengthening oversight, safety, and athlete representation. Athletes now hold at least one-third of voting power on USOPC and NGB boards, including representation from recent competitors.

Those changes were meaningful. They also came after the world around the system had already changed.

That is the point college sports should take seriously.

The Ted Stevens Act was not a mistake because it created structure. The problem was that the structure was built for an economic reality that did not last. By the time the law adjusted, the market had already moved well ahead of it.

Congress should learn from that.

Do not write a law for the version of college sports people wish still existed.

The Business of College Sports Has Changed

There is still a tendency to talk about NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, and athlete marketing as if they are temporary distortions of a stable amateur model.

They are not temporary.

They are the market catching up with the value athletes have been creating for decades.

Football and men’s basketball are not simply campus activities. They are major media and entertainment businesses. Their economics drive conference realignment, coaching salaries, facilities, donor behavior, recruiting, scheduling, and increasingly the entire strategic direction of athletic departments.

NIL has made athlete marketing a legitimate part of the landscape. Revenue sharing has made it even harder to maintain the fiction that athletes are not central economic participants. The transfer portal has exposed what many people were reluctant to call a labor market, even though athletes have been making labor-market decisions all along.

They look at playing time. They look at coaching stability. They look at the roster. They look at money, academic fit, location, brand opportunity, and what each decision means for their future.

That is not going away because coaches, administrators, or fans are tired of it.

The Olympic movement went through a similar shift. The IOC generated $7.6 billion in revenue during the 2017–2020/21 cycle, a reminder that the Olympics stopped being a pure amateur enterprise long ago.

College sports is now in their own version of that transition.

The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

The biggest problem with the current debate is that it tends to start and end with football and men’s basketball.

That is understandable. They drive the money. They are the reason Congress is being pushed to act. They determine which conferences grow, which schools get left behind, and how the industry thinks about revenue sharing.

But they are not the entire system.

For swimming, track and field, gymnastics, wrestling, rowing, volleyball, water polo, fencing, skiing, and many other Olympic sports, college athletics is still the main pathway between youth competition and elite international sport.

There is no deep professional system waiting to take its place.

A handful of professional teams, prize purses, clubs, training centers, and sponsors cannot replace the number of roster spots, scholarships, coaches, facilities, competition opportunities, and academic support that colleges provide.

This is no longer a forecast. It is the operating model. Schools that opted into the House settlement can distribute up to $20.5 million per year directly to athletes, but that amount covers all sports in the department. Early allocation plans for a number of major programs have indicated that football will receive roughly 75 percent of available direct-payment pools, with much of the remainder flowing to men’s and women’s basketball. The exact allocations will vary by school, but the direction is clear: everyone else is competing for the margin.

We can call this revenue sharing, market correction, or modernization. But the math does not change. Unless a school finds new money, every new dollar committed to the revenue engine increases pressure on sports that lack their own media leverage.

When a school cuts a swim team, a wrestling program, a gymnastics team, or a track program, it is not just cleaning up a budget.

It is taking capacity out of the American athlete-development system.

That reduction moves through the entire pipeline. Fewer college opportunities affect recruiting. They affect club teams and coaches. They affect the choices families make when they are deciding whether to invest time and money in a sport. They affect whether a talented athlete can keep developing after high school.

Then, years later, they affect the national-team pool.

This is the hard truth: a school may be making a perfectly rational decision when it sends more money toward football, men’s basketball, facilities, coaches, and revenue-sharing obligations. But when every school makes the same rational decision, the result is a much weaker Olympic-development system.

The damage will not always show up in next year’s budget. It will show up years later, when fewer athletes enter the system, and the national-team depth that once looked automatic is no longer there.

That is what I meant by the broken pipeline.

What Congress Should Actually Do

The Protect College Sports Act has useful components. It attempts to establish national NIL standards, reduce conflict among state laws, and provide limited antitrust protection in defined areas.

That is a start. It is not the end of the conversation.

A law that gives institutions more control, limits athlete mobility, and protects schools from legal exposure may make athletic departments feel more stable. But it will not create a durable solution if athletes have no real say in the system, if Olympic-sport protections are just language on a page, and if schools receive legal protection without clear obligations in return.

If Congress gives college sports national preemption or limited antitrust protection, it should receive enforceable commitments in return, not aspirational language, advisory committees, or promises that disappear when the budget tightens.

That should include:

• Clear national NIL rules, including contract disclosure, agent standards, education, and protection from bad deals.

• A real athlete voice in governance, with voting power rather than another advisory group.

• Narrow antitrust protection tied to measurable obligations, not broad immunity.

• Scholarships, medical care, insurance, mental-health support, and degree-completion protections that do not disappear because an athlete transfers, gets hurt, loses a coach, or is caught in a roster cut.

• Sport-by-sport transparency on spending, roster opportunities, scholarships, and program cuts.

• Real enforcement around women’s and Olympic sport participation, not another promise that disappears when budgets tighten.

• A serious funding strategy for athlete development as more of the money concentrates at the top of college sports.

The U.S. cannot keep asking colleges, national governing bodies, and nonprofit sports organizations to carry out a national athlete-development mission without ensuring economic support for it. The Olympic system has lived with that tension for decades: a public-facing national responsibility carried largely by private organizations with uneven resources and uneven commercial leverage.

The new system is already testing the limits of institutional rulemaking. The College Sports Commission is intended to enforce the direct-payment framework, while the Deloitte-operated NIL Go clearinghouse is designed to review certain third-party NIL arrangements for valid business purpose and market comparability. Challenges to compensation restrictions, NIL enforcement, and Title IX allocation decisions are already part of the landscape. That is not a side issue. It is evidence that the current model is an interim structure, not a durable settlement.

The Question Congress Has to Answer

The most important question is not whether the biggest athletic departments feel more stable after a new federal law passes.

The question is whether the system still works for the athletes and sports that do not have the same media leverage.

Will a young swimmer still have a path to college? Will a wrestler have meaningful opportunities outside a shrinking number of programs? Will a gymnast, rower, skier, volleyball player, track athlete, or water polo player still have a bridge from youth sport to elite competition?

Will athletes have real influence over the rules that affect their health, compensation, eligibility, and careers?

And will schools that receive legal protection be required to uphold their side of the bargain?

Those are the questions Congress should answer.

Levine is right that Congress needs to act. But Congress should not pass a 1978-style answer for a 2026 sports economy, protecting the revenue engine while the athlete-development pipeline beneath it slowly disappears.

College sports needs a national framework. It needs rules, accountability, a sustainable funding model, and a governance structure built for the market we actually have, not the amateur model we keep pretending is still there.

This is about more than the future of intercollegiate athletics. It is about the broader infrastructure underneath it: the physical-education teacher introducing a child to movement, the school program that makes sport accessible, the unstructured play that builds confidence and curiosity, the community coach, the local club, and the young athlete who discovers a sport before anyone tells them there is a business model behind it.

College sports sits in the middle of that system. It gives young people something to pursue, creates a bridge from youth participation to high-level competition, and supplies a critical part of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline. If we hollow it out in the name of protecting the revenue engine, the damage will not be confined to the college campus. It will travel backward through the entire system and eventually show up in the athletes who give us a reason to cheer for Team USA every two years.

Not the kind you see from the stands. Not the highlight-reel version of the Instagram posts I made during the event, where everyone is smiling, crushing their starts and swims, and the athlete is holding a ribbon at the end.

I mean the real version.

The early alarms. The pullout couches. The meal planning. The warm-up schedules. The recovery gear. The checking and rechecking of heat sheets. The drop-off, the time, the anticipation before the first race. The pride welling up into tears as you see them in “the zone” with headphones on, looking like Michael Phelps staring down the competition. The quiet moments before a race, when you are trying to look calm while your heart is doing something entirely different

A week at Nats in Ocala, Florida, with my son was good for the soul.

Somewhere between my early morning miles and his hotel-room recovery routine, I was reminded of something important about sports parenting.

Our job is not to carry the pressure for them.

It is to create enough calm around them so they can learn and grow to carry their own.

The Parent’s Race

Parents have their own version of competition week.

We feel the nerves before they do. We replay the possibilities. We look at the meet schedule one more time, even though we already know exactly when the session begins.

We worry about sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, traffic, lane assignments, goggles, suits, weather, and whether the athlete is really as relaxed as they say they are.

We want to help. Of course we do. And, many of us want to race!

But there is a fine line between being prepared and making the experience heavier than it needs to be.

The young athlete already knows what is at stake. They have put in the work. They have shown up for the early practices, the hard sets, the dryland sessions, the missed weekends with friends, and the long season that brought them to one week in Florida.

They do not need us to add another layer of anxiety.

They need stability. They need a wingman.

That does not mean indifference. It means being attentive without becoming overbearing. It means having the snacks packed, the ride ready, and the recovery tools available, then letting the athlete decide whether to read, rest, watch bad television, or sit quietly in the hotel room before a race.

Let Them Own It

My son’s morning routine was different from mine because it should be.

I needed a run to settle into the day. He needed stillness. Summer reading. Texting friends and social media silliness. Compression boots. Shoulder recovery. A little mindless TV.

His approach was not a lack of seriousness. It was his way of preparing.

That is one of the harder lessons in youth sports. Parents can confuse their own preferred routine with the athlete’s best routine.

The truth is that young athletes need room to discover what works for them.

They need to learn how to prepare when the stakes rise. They need to learn how to manage nerves, recover after a disappointing swim, and reset before the next opportunity.

Those are not just athletic skills. They are life skills.

The goal is not to create a perfect performance environment. The goal is to give them enough space and support to figure out how to perform when things are not perfect.

At a meet like Y Nats, everything can feel bigger and heavier.

The pool deck is bigger. The arena is larger. College coaches are walking around in their school gear. There are more fans, and the cheering is louder. The competition is deeper. The margins are smaller.

A great swim can bring exhilaration. A missed goal can bring frustration.

Both are part of the experience.

The athlete who learns how to navigate those moments is building something more durable than a time on a scoreboard.

The Moments Between Races

The best parts of a trip like this are not always the races.

Sometimes it is the early quiet in a hotel room before the day begins. Sometimes it is the drive to the pool. Sometimes it is the post-race meal, when the conversation has nothing to do with a split, a place, or what comes next.

Those moments matter because time and youth sports move fast.

Seasons overlap. Training schedules fill up. Travel becomes routine. It is easy to let the calendar turn the whole experience into a transaction: effort in, result out.

But that is not why most of us got into this.

We want our kids to find something that challenges them. Something that teaches leadership, sportsmanship, competitiveness, and humility. Something that gives them friends, structure, confidence, resilience, and a relationship with hard work.

We want them to experience the satisfaction of doing something difficult well, as well as the humility of falling short and coming back for another try.

The podium, the time, the cut, and the ranking can all be meaningful.

But they are not the whole story.

The whole story is the shared experience: the early alarms, the hotel breakfasts, the forgotten snacks, the recovery gear spread across the room, the nervous energy, the proud moments, and the simple privilege of being there.

Good for the Soul

A week in Ocala reminded me that sports parenting is not about trying to make every moment perfect.

It is about being present.

Be prepared, but do not project your anxiety.

Offer support, but do not take ownership of the performance.

Celebrate the work, the teammates, the experience, and not just the outcome.

And remember that, eventually, they will not remember every heat, every split, or every place. They may remember the hotel room, the terrible television, the smoothies, the early morning quiet, and the fact that you were there.

That is good for the soul.

Last week, I spent five days in the chlorine tank at the FAST Aquatic Center in Ocala, Florida, where thousands of parents and families, coaches, volunteers, and officials gathered to support young athletes from over 95 YMCAs competing at the YMCA National Long Course Championships.

It was exhausting. It was emotional. It was extraordinary.

And I would do it again tomorrow.

This was a big one for him. Five days of long-course racing at the end of a summer he had worked so hard to qualify for and be ready to represent his new team. So, in true Pool family fashion, we overprepared.

We packed one entire bag for the trip with Hyperice gear (the massage gun, the X2 shoulder system, his Normatec Elite compression boots), a Magic Bullet blender, and his specific nutrition preferences (Skratch Labs drink mix, Clif Bloks, Honey Stinger Waffles, and assorted other items). He recovered from a big injury earlier in the year and put in the hours upon hours of work, so if we were going to Ocala for five days of championship swimming, we were going to treat it as it should be treated: FIVE DAYS OF CHAMPIONSHIP SWIMMING!

We arrived at the Courtyard Marriott on Monday and set up camp to be ready for the first events Tuesday morning.

He got “the big bed.” I got the pullout couch.

We unpacked, hit the nearby Publix for the other essentials, and then I set up an athlete’s table in the room with all the essentials for the week. It looked less like a hotel room and more like a small performance lab for a healthy NIL athlete run by someone with no sleep and no budget discipline.

Every morning, I was up at 5:00 a.m. I would tiptoe to the bathroom, get my running gear on, guzzle down my IM8, grab a bar, and slip out unnoticed for a run.

That was my time to clear my head, catch up with mom back home, and run out the butterflies.

Then I came back, made smoothies, got breakfast together, packed snacks, checked the schedule, checked it again, and started getting him ready for the day.

He had a better plan.

He would sit on the bed, work through his summer reading, watch terrible TV, and cycle through the Normatec boots and the X2 shoulder system.

Monday evening, we arrived at FAST for a team warm-up session. I walked towards the stairs up to the stands and saw something that stopped me.

This is cool. Is this part of the facility, or is it here for the meet?

Then, at the top of the stairs, on the concourse under the stands. There it was.

Hyperice had set up a full recovery station on the concourse.

Row of chairs. Normatec boots. Products to try. Products to buy. A legitimate recovery experience in the middle of the YMCA National swim meet.

Not a professional event. Not a college championship. A youth swim meet with athletes 18 and under, and Hyperice was treating it like the big time.

The photo I took of the empty chairs was the last time I saw them empty. For the rest of the meet, the recovery space was full. Athletes were in line. Coaches were using it. Officials were using it. Parents were using it. I watched people walk away carrying newly purchased Hyperice gear.

That is what good event activation looks like.

It is not a logo on a banner or someone handing out a free sticker. It is showing up with something people need, in the moment they need it.

I caught up with Grant Geisler, who was running the Hyperice program, and we had a great conversation. We also shared some appreciation for Jess Miller, who recently left the company and, I’m sure, played a role in deciding that this was a great place for Hyperice to have a presence.

I was already a Hyperice customer. I swear by the products. My son swears by the products. But seeing the company show up in Ocala at YMCA Nationals and give young athletes the same kind of recovery experience typically reserved for professionals or more well-known events gave me a new level of respect for the brand.

The swim meet is over. We made it home (a whole other story about a brand - goes by AA - that is on the opposite side of the brand respect spectrum). The pullout couch is behind me.

My ‘Sports Parent Rehab Program’ is very much underway, wearing MY Normatec compression boots!

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