AUSTIN, Texas — Coach Gordie Ernst’s Georgetown University tennis teams didn’t win any Big East championships. At Wake Forest, Bill Ferguson’s volleyball teams struggled near the bottom of their conference.

At Stanford, John Vandemoer’s sailing teams were nationally ranked but competed in a sport that isn’t governed by the NCAA.

All three were coaching lower-tier sports, not the glamorous, big-money ones, basketball and football. And yet, win or lose, these coaches did have something incredibly valuable: the keys that can get students into some of the most exclusive colleges in America.

And now they face criminal charges they leveraged that authority to enrich themselves or their sports programs.

Federal indictments unsealed this week outlined a sweeping college admissions scandal in which coaches allegedly took bribes from wealthy parents to help falsify their children’s sports credentials and designate them as recruited athletes.

Whether it’s football, basketball or “non-revenue” sports like tennis or water polo, private and public colleges with even the most rigorous academic standards for admission lower the bar for student athletes. They do it because they want to win championships at all levels.

“If you are going to pay for it and compete, why would you not want to win?” said Nellie Drew, a sports law expert at the University at Buffalo School of Law. “Stanford has more Olympic athletes than many countries. They are proud of that.”

Coaches of the smaller, so-called Olympic sports get paid far less than their football and basketball counterparts. Salaries for such coaches in the Ivy League and similar private schools can range from $75,000 to over $200,000.

At Texas, 18-year men’s tennis coach Michael Center was paid $232,000 compared with nearly $5.5 million for football coach Tom Herman.

Those salary figures could make a coach of a lower-tier sport more likely to at least think about taking a bribe, Drew said.