This story is the second part of a series looking into the House settlement and its impact on the University of Iowa.

While the House settlement threatens to uproot smaller sports across the NCAA, Iowa women’s wrestling isn’t going anywhere — but that doesn’t mean it won’t be impacted.

The House settlement, named after plaintiff and former Arizona State swimmer Grant House, has become the collective name for a handful of attorneys settling their lawsuits against the NCAA regarding compensating players for their play.

The settlement, pending final approval on April 7, will have three big impacts. First, it will force the NCAA to pay former Division I athletes in backpay. Schools will then have the option to opt into directly paying their current players through shares of revenue the university’s sports bring in, and the NCAA can directly limit schools’ name, image, and likeness funds to recruit athletes.

It will also eliminate scholarship limits, so universities can offer a scholarship for each roster spot, but rosters are now limited as a result. Some athletes will be cut from their current teams, and even fewer will be recruited to join moving forward.

While much of the concern has centered around cash cows in football and basketball as well as Title IX implication, small sports will be dealt a great blow, too. Their coaches and the managers and athletic directors above them will be suddenly forced to navigate a testing landscape of decisions and funding.

And with the addition of women’s wrestling to the University of Iowa athletics program just two years ago, question marks suddenly surround head coach Clarissa Chun’s team.

UI Director of Athletics Beth Goetz discussed revenue sharing with the Presidential Committee on Athletics earlier this month but did not divulge what sports receive what percentage of said revenue.

“You’re going to see here at Iowa and across the country that people will be more thoughtful about projects that aren’t necessities in the moment and that don’t help you drive revenue,” Goetz said. “To be candid, we wish this wasn’t the moment in time that we needed to focus on [upgrades to Carver-Hawkeye Arena] as well. But this building is a revenue-generator.”

While not quite a project Goetz was referring to, women’s wrestling doesn’t generate a lot of money relative to football, basketball, or even men’s wrestling at Iowa. Iowa women’s wrestling is projected to make $80,000 in fiscal 2025, whereas Iowa men’s wrestling is projected to make over $1 million.

But with the spearheading effort of a Power Four school establishing such a program, it’d be worse to chop it right at the smell of blood. So, as costly as it is to establish another sport alone at the university, the House settlement now makes it difficult to maintain.

RELATED: The future is here: How the House settlement will dramatically change college athletics

That’s amid pressure for the athletics program to properly fund its money-making sports like football and basketball first. It will need to keep as much of its own revenue as possible to recoup the costs of recent expenses such as the brand-new Goschke Family Wrestling Training Center. And it will the need the money to afford a facelift to Carver-Hawkeye Arena — where the Hawkeyes wrestle their home meets — to which Goetz has already committed and began.

With the wealth of success the Hawkeyes have seen in the collegiate wrestling sphere — a historic program earning Iowa City the nickname “Wrestletown, USA” — a women’s wrestling program made sense. But that was announced four years ago. No major Division I program has followed suit, and it’s hard to imagine one will now with resources even tighter to establish one.

So, the newest sport to join the UI stoked fears in Chun that it would be the first to leave. But the university assured her that wouldn’t happen.

“I think the University of Iowa is really great and supportive of women in athletics, and they have no plans of dismissing our program, which I’m really happy for,” Chun told The Daily Iowan. “And they’ve only been supportive since day one in providing us all the opportunities that any other programs have here … I am looking forward to just the forward movement and hopefully momentum with the growth of women’s wrestling.”

Chun’s hope comes as the NCAA announced on Jan. 17 it’s adding women’s wrestling as its latest championship sport. Formerly competing in the National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships, female athletes from Division I, II, and III will compete for NCAA championships — the first coming in 2026.

“The great thing is women’s wrestling is still being added across the country,” Chun said. “The announcement of the NCAA making it a championship sport only helps support the direction women’s wrestling is heading.”

Over the last year, a handful of smaller colleges and universities have announced the additions of women’s wrestling programs in the near future, including Ithaca College in South Hill, New York, and Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont.

Indeed, per USA TODAY, the National Federation of State High School Associations found the number of high school girls in wrestling quintupled since 2013.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Chun said. “It’s growing. It’s been growing for a long period of time over the decades of girl’s wrestling at grassroots through high school levels.”

Still, it’s hard to imagine the women’s wrestling program will receive enough money to be entirely flexible with Chun’s free discretion, as the bulk of revenue sharing might go to football, basketball, and men’s wrestling first. And should any college program struggle to pay its athletes the right amount, they look for one that can.

The House settlement thus has implications for roster sizes and recruitment, too, with so many athletes now demanding money to attend certain schools. It’s great to wrestle with the Tigerhawk across the chest — but how great?

Chun said the women’s wrestling roster cap is now set at 30, before which Chun had no limit for the number of wrestlers she could add across her first two seasons.

“When I got here, it was to my discretion as far as the roster size with intentions of not overdoing it, too,” Chun said. “Our recruiting has looked a little bit different from our first year and second year and even compared to last year.”

Goetz did not respond to multiple interview inquiries from the DI.