USOC hires new director to focus on NCAA sports programs

With preparations for the 2016 Olympics heading into their final stages, the U.S. Olympic Committee has taken a step that it hopes will aid its program for many future Games: It has hired a college athletics administrator to organize help for financially threatened NCAA sports programs.

Sarah Wilhelmi, a member of the West Coast Conference’s staff since 2008, is becoming the USOC’s first director of collegiate partnerships, the organization will announce Tuesday.

Her job will be to bring full-time attention to long-discussed, but mostly scattershot, efforts at coordination among the USOC, national sports governing bodies and an array of college constituencies, including the NCAA’s executive staff, its member schools and conferences, and various coaches’ associations.

This comes at a time when the pipeline of athletes from NCAA Division I schools to U.S. Olympic teams could be threatened by the financial pressure many schools are experiencing as they try to stay as competitive as possible in the high-profile sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.

Schools’ increasing spending on salaries for coaches, lavish facilities and cost-of-attendance-based scholarships has the USOC sufficiently concerned about a threat to Olympic sports teams that its November posting for this new position said it wanted the person selected to work with the NCAA and the national governing bodies “to develop actionable plans to reduce expenses associated with sponsoring sports” while maintaining quality experiences for athletes.

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The posting also said the new hire would be asked to coordinate the engagement of national governing bodies “in all NCAA championships, including signage and sponsorship agreements” and to develop metrics and data to determine the impact of various initiatives “to better understand future direction and (return on investment) for the NGBs and the USOC.”

Wilhelmi, a distance runner while attending the University of Iowa, has been a USOC intern but has spent most of her career in college sports compliance and governance. Her understanding of the myriad levels of bureaucracy and personality types that comprise the NCAA and NGB worlds – plus her own outlook on life -- make her well-suited for the new position, West Coast Conference commissioner Lynn Holzman told USA TODAY Sports.

“Sarah is a perpetually optimistic person, which is going to very helpful,” Holzman, who spent 16 years as a member of the NCAA’s national office staff, said with a knowing chuckle.

Holzman said that during the past two years, as a WCC associate commissioner, Wilhelmi has been heavily involved with the implementation of a conference strategic plan that has brought her into contact with university CEO’s, athletics directors, faculty representatives and coaches while making sure “everyone is executing against the plan. One of her greatest strengths is the way she engages with people. It may not sound like the most glamorous thing, but it’s vital for an organization to move forward.”

And after seeing multiple task forces, dating from the mid-1990’s, talk and write reports about the USOC’s interaction with college sports, USOC officials say they want forward motion.

“Collegiate sport is absolutely critical to the success of Team USA,” USOC chief of sport performance Alan Ashley said in a statement. “Sarah will be a key driver of increased collaboration between the USOC, NGB’s and all of the NCAA member institutions and conferences.”