Covid-19 swept through the entire United States and took many precious things with it. Its most significant toll was in the Hundreds of Thousands of lives it took too soon. Another way it affected the country was in the many college sports programs that had to be cut due to lack of funding. The pandemic meant that schools could not sell tickets, bring in as much TV revenue, or fulfill other promotions that usually net them millions of dollars a year. The result of this was that many schools had to cut the teams and programs that many athletes dream of playing for.
On May. 30th, 2020, just a few months into the pandemic, The Los Angeles Times published an article reporting that 100 college sports programs had already been cut. In fact, 3 schools were forced to shut down their entire institutions as a whole because of the financial impact of the pandemic. Although the impact had harsher effects on smaller schools with lower annual revenues, larger and better-funded universities were also forced to cut programs.
Stanford University, one of the most prestigious schools in the world, was forced to cut 11 various sports programs including Volleyball. The University of Minnesota announced that they have been forced to cut all Tennis, Gymnastics, and Track teams due to financial complications brought on by the pandemic. And after constructed a brand new state of the art into swimming and diving arena, Dartmouth has announced that they will be cutting both programs.
The virus seems to be having the greatest effect on Olympic sports. These sports typically rely on revenue brought in from larger programs such as Football, Baseball, or Men’s Basketball to help support them each year. But with those sports not being able to cash in on ticket sales and TV revenue, it's the smaller programs that suffer the most. In 2016 almost 80
