Save the Team, Save the Sport: SB 502 and the Fight to Keep Women's College Sports Alive in West Virginia
Madison Bowen is a freshman swimmer at Marshall University. She came to Huntington to compete, to train, to be part of something bigger than herself. Days before their conference championship, she and her teammates were called into a meeting with Athletic Director Gerald Harrison and told, in roughly two minutes, that their program was being eliminated. The meeting happened on the first day of Marshall’s “Week of HERd: A Celebration of Women in Sports.
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Within days, more than half of the team’s 28 athletes had entered the transfer portal. The Board of Governors voted unanimously on February 17 to kill the program, effective at the end of the season, and replace it with women’s STUNT, a sport derived from cheerleading that carries lower costs and a bigger roster. The team was in Greensboro, North Carolina, preparing for their conference championship when the vote happened.
But Bowen did not just grieve. She went to Charleston. She and several teammates showed up at the Capitol, walked the halls, talked to legislators, and testified before the House Education Committee in support of Senate Bill 502, the Women’s Collegiate Sports Protection Act. Standing in front of lawmakers today, Bowen urged them to think about “the little girls you pass kicking a soccer ball” on the way home from work.
It worked. The House Education Committee advanced SB 502 on a fast track this morning, voting 21-1 to suspend its own rules, taking up the bill the same day as the public hearing, and requesting that House leadership waive the Finance Committee reference entirely to get the bill to the floor before the session ends on March 14.
And just hours later, the story took another dramatic turn: fifteen members of Marshall’s swim and dive team filed a class action Title IX lawsuit against the university and its Board of Governors in federal court. The suit, Dodd v. Marshall University, was filed by Bailey Glasser and alleges that Marshall has been shortchanging women athletes by as many as 250 participation opportunities per year. The swimmers are asking for a temporary restraining order to prevent Marshall from killing the team while the case proceeds.
SB 502, in other words, is not a hypothetical. It is a bill born out of a real crisis, moving at real speed, with real young women fighting on multiple fronts to save their sport.
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What SB 502 Actually Does
The Women’s Collegiate Sports Protection Act creates a framework for West Virginia’s public Division I universities, primarily WVU and Marshall, to establish dedicated women’s athletic endowments for Olympic sports. Those are the non-revenue programs like swimming, track, soccer, tennis, and gymnastics that do not generate their own television contracts or ticket revenue but form the backbone of collegiate women’s athletics.
The bill authorizes the Higher Education Policy Commission to set up a statewide endowment trust. The structure is straightforward: the principal stays intact. Only investment earnings can be spent. Those earnings are restricted to direct program costs like scholarships, coaching salaries, training staff, equipment, facilities, and travel.
Funding comes from two sources. First, private donations. Second, institutions can match those donations out of verified internal cost savings, with a critical guardrail: those savings cannot come from cuts to academic programs or faculty.
Earlier versions of the bill included a 50-percent state tax credit for donors to these endowments. That provision was removed by the Senate Finance Committee before the bill left the upper chamber, making SB 502 revenue-neutral to the state. The bill now creates the mechanism for endowments without costing taxpayers a dime. As lead sponsor Senator Jay Taylor, R-Taylor, put it, removing the tax credit “helps make it a lot easier” to get votes.
The math is sobering. In the House Education hearing, committee staff and witnesses walked through the numbers: to sustainably fund a program that costs roughly $819,000 per year (what Marshall spent annually on swim and dive), you would need an endowment of approximately $16 million at a five-percent payout rate. That is a serious philanthropic commitment. Nobody is pretending otherwise.
But the bill’s supporters are not asking the state to write a check. They are asking the state to open a door.
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Why This Bill, Why Now
SB 502 sits at the intersection of three tectonic forces in college athletics, and to understand the bill, you need to understand all three.
The revenue-sharing tsunami. The House v. NCAA settlement, approved by a federal judge in June 2025, blew the lid off the old model of college sports economics. Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, Division I institutions can now share up to 22 percent of average Power Five athletic revenue directly with student-athletes, a cap set at roughly $20.5 million per school this year. That money is not evenly distributed. Most schools are expected to funnel roughly 75 percent to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, and five percent to women’s basketball, leaving just five percent for every other sport combined. Olympic sports, the ones that produce Olympians and fill out women’s rosters, are getting squeezed.
Senator Taylor framed this explicitly in his floor remarks and in an interview with MetroNews: if student-athletes become employees, if collective bargaining arrives, Title IX may no longer apply in the way it does today. An endowment, he argued, would still be there. “This bill would help protect in case some of that stuff happens,” Taylor said. “If we can get these endowments set up for both universities, then that would help protect the women’s sports so that they’ve got a source of revenue.”
The Marshall flashpoint. Marshall’s decision to cut women’s swimming and diving became the most visceral example of what revenue-sharing pressure looks like at the mid-major level. The program cost $819,000 annually. The Fitch Natatorium needs capital upgrades the university says it cannot fund. Marshall President Brad Smith cited three factors: finances, infrastructure, and Title IX alignment. The replacement sport, STUNT, carries a projected cost of $330,000 and can roster up to 65 athletes, compared to the swim team’s 28. Marshall projected savings of $2 million over three years.
The optics, though, have been brutal. Marshall announced the cut days before the team’s conference championship. Harrison delivered the news on the first day of the university’s own women-in-sports celebration week. An independent audit from October 2025, cited in the Title IX lawsuit filed today, found that Marshall shortchanged women by 210, 250, and 160 participation opportunities in the three most recent academic years. The swimmers’ lawyers at Bailey Glasser say cutting a women’s team when you already have a Title IX participation gap that large is “not an especially close case.”
The Supreme Court backdrop. West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act, the 2021 law restricting girls’ and women’s sports teams to biological females, was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on January 13, 2026, in West Virginia v. B.P.J., alongside a companion case from Idaho. The Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of the challengers’ claims during oral argument, and a decision is expected by this summer. The state’s Attorney General, JB McCuskey, has made the defense of the Sports Act a signature issue.
SB 502 represents a notable rhetorical pivot from the earlier, more exclusively restriction-focused Save Women’s Sports Act. Where the 2021 law was about who can play, SB 502 is about making sure women can play at all. The Legislature’s own blog described it not as a culture-war bill but as a “permanent-funding and incentives package” tied to Title IX compliance. That framing is deliberate. Lawmakers are building a second pillar under the “save women’s sports” banner, one focused on funding and opportunity rather than eligibility restrictions. Both pillars, supporters would argue, are necessary.
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How It Got Here
SB 502 was introduced early in the 2026 session and referred to Senate Education, with a second reference to Senate Finance because of the tax-credit provisions. Senate Education advanced it on February 5 with a “do pass” recommendation. Senate Finance produced a committee substitute that stripped the tax credit and tightened the bill’s fiscal footprint. The bill passed the Senate on March 3 by a vote of 33 to 0. Not a single no vote.
In the House, it was referred to Education with a second reference to Finance. Today, March 10, the House Education Committee held a public hearing, took testimony, suspended Rule 83 on a 21-1 vote to allow same-day markup, and reported the bill to the floor with a “do pass” recommendation. The committee simultaneously requested that leadership waive the Finance reference to skip the second committee stop entirely.
That kind of procedural fast-tracking is unusual and tells you everything about where leadership sees this bill on the priority list. With four days left in the regular session, there is no time for another committee stop. If the Finance waiver is granted, SB 502 could see a House floor vote within days.
The Legislature’s blog confirmed the action this morning in plain terms: the bill “was taken up for immediate consideration and was advanced to the floor.”
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Inside the Hearing Room
The House Education hearing this morning blended budget realism with raw emotion. Travis Mollohan, representing WVU, called the bill “another tool in the toolbox” for universities trying to protect women’s programs in a rapidly changing financial landscape. WVU issued a formal statement of support, calling the endowment “an important next step in helping to ensure women’s collegiate Olympic sports programs are available to our student-athletes in the rapidly changing NIL landscape.”
Delegates pressed witnesses on whether the endowment could or should cover NIL or revenue-sharing expenses. The answer was no. The endowment is designed to fund the “meat and bones” of programs: scholarships, coaching, equipment, travel. The operational core. Not the competitive-arms-race layer of NIL payments and revenue shares.
Several members asked about Title IX risk. Could a women-only endowment create legal exposure? Witnesses pointed to the national reality: roughly 90 percent of universities are not at “pure proportionality” under Title IX. A women-only endowment helps narrow that gap. At Marshall, where the student body is approximately 57 percent female and 43 percent male, the proportionality math is particularly stark.
And then there was Bowen. The freshman swimmer who lost her team and chose to fight rather than transfer. She told legislators to think about the next generation of girls growing up in West Virginia and what it means when their state’s universities are cutting women’s sports rather than funding them. Several committee members were visibly moved.
A group of Marshall alumni also sent a letter to the House committee urging passage, noting that meaningful private fundraising support for the swim program “is possible” and that with the endowment mechanism created by SB 502, “reinstatement becomes financially realistic rather than theoretical.” The alumni asked lawmakers to consider whether institutions that eliminate women’s programs should receive funding without demonstrating reinstatement pathways.
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The Other Shoe: Dodd v. Marshall University
As if the legislative drama were not enough, the Marshall swim team opened a second front today.
Fifteen team members, led by junior Allison Dodd, filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia alleging that Marshall has violated Title IX by systematically denying women equal opportunities to participate in varsity sports. The suit was filed by Bailey Glasser, a national firm with deep Title IX litigation experience.
The complaint cites an independent audit showing that Marshall fell short of proportional participation by 160 to 250 women per year across the most recent three academic years. Against that backdrop, the lawsuit argues, cutting a women’s team makes the gap wider, not narrower.
“For years, Marshall has failed to offer women equal opportunities to participate in varsity sports,” attorney Joshua Hammack said in a statement. “And now the school seeks to cut a women’s team.” Dodd recalled the meeting where the news was delivered: “We literally had a two-minute meeting with the athletic director, and that was that.”
The lawsuit and SB 502 are legally separate proceedings, but they are narratively and politically inseparable. The swimmers are fighting on both fronts simultaneously. As Bowen put it: “We would love if this bill passes and we could eventually use it to support the team financially long term. But we also know it’s up to Marshall to do the right thing, even if it costs them money.”
Marshall issued a statement acknowledging the lawsuit and reaffirming that the decision to cut the program is “in the best interest of the institution as a whole.” The university said it will not comment further on pending litigation.
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The Bottom Line
Here is what this comes down to.
College athletics is undergoing the most fundamental financial restructuring in its history. The House settlement opened the floodgates of revenue sharing. NIL has turned recruiting into an open marketplace. And the downstream effect of both is entirely predictable: money flows to football and men’s basketball, and everyone else scrambles for what is left.
Women’s Olympic sports are the most vulnerable. They do not generate revenue. They depend on institutional support. And when budgets tighten, they are the first programs on the chopping block. Marshall’s swim team is not an outlier. It is a preview of what is coming everywhere, especially at mid-major schools without massive television contracts or deep-pocketed donor bases.
SB 502 does not solve all of that. It does not mandate that any school keep any program. It does not cost the state a cent. What it does is create a dedicated, permanent financial structure that gives donors, alumni, and institutions a way to protect women’s sports with private money. A way to build something that the next athletic director cannot raid for football travel expenses.
The bill passed the Senate 33-0. The House Education Committee fast-tracked it this morning. WVU supports it. Marshall’s own alumni are rallying behind it. The Marshall swimmers, in the middle of losing their team and filing a federal lawsuit, took time to come to Charleston and testify for it.
Is an endowment a silver bullet? No. Building a $16 million fund for a single sport is hard work. But it is the kind of hard work that alumni networks and donor communities can rally around when they have the right legal and institutional framework to do it. SB 502 builds that framework.
West Virginia has spent years at the center of the national fight over who gets to play women’s sports. B.P.J. v. West Virginia is sitting at the Supreme Court right now. The Save Women’s Sports Act made this state a leader on the eligibility question.
SB 502 is the other half of the equation. It is not enough to say who should play. Somebody has to fund the playing field. This bill is how you start.
The House has four days. Pass the bill.
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