Athletes’ voices more often being heard
When news of the Dartmouth decision began to spread, my mind went back to a story I worked on in 2020, to a frustrated tennis player at UMass whose college sports experience was destroyed by NCAA incompetence, her team’s conference title stripped over an unwitting and minor rules violation.
I wasn’t alone. Brittany Collens heard from many friends in the wake of Tuesday’s landmark vote by the Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team to unionize, telling me Friday how so many of them wondered if there was any chance a retroactive shift to employee status could somehow restore her team’s championship.
That’s not going to happen, but as Collens said from the desk of her posttennis career in marketing and another new title as assistant tennis coach at Babson, that was never what her fight was about.
“Sure, that would be nice, and I understand the symbolic nature of how that would look, but it was always about underlining what was inherently wrong with the whole system,” Collens said. “The NCAA wouldn’t let us testify on our own behalf. They wouldn’t take our calls. We were so silenced in that. The whole situation stands out as such an image of what the NCAA does to silence athletes.”
And therein lies the most important aspect of what the Dartmouth vote represents — a pathway for athletes to be heard, and to be heard with a unified, powerful voice that can speak to their own best interests. That’s the part of the story that extends far beyond the borders of New Hampshire, not simply one more piece of evidence to paint the NCAA as the anachronistic dinosaur ill equipped to handle the ever-changing college sports landscape, but as the proverbial pebble in the pond creating ripple effects that promise to alter that landscape forever.
As players Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil said in their statement after a decisive 14-2 vote that took less than an hour, “Today is a big day for our team. We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past.
“It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.”
Simply open your ears to the conversation around college sports and you’ll know that that train already left the station. With NIL legislation freeing college athletes to profit from their own name, image, and likeness, with ongoing antitrust lawsuits challenging the NCAA’s authority, and with open transfer portals allowing athletes the freedom to change schools, the collection of tectonic plates are already shifting on their fault lines. How much they actually implode will determine the future of college sports as we know them.
With experts far more knowledgeable than I unable to predict what that future might look like, it does feel safe to say the landscape of collegiate athletics is as unstable as at any point in its long, storied history. So many disparate viewpoints are at odds. The amateur model is dead! NIL is killing the game! These scholarship kids are too greedy! The NCAA should be dismantled! Congress is the only hope!
And a conversation with Lisa Delpy Neirotti, the director of the MS in sport management program and an associate professor of sports management at George Washington University, offered even more insight into possible farreaching consequences of unionization. From the potential of employees being fireable to the issue of visas for international players, from state labor laws versus federal ones creating an unlevel playing field to the possibility outside investment firms could take over the running of college sports team creating a minor league-type system, Neirotti is right in wanting this conversion to touch on all the other questions it would open.
“There’s still a lot of questions, but a scenario which I think is going to happen is a private equity or some entity that has money will come in and say, ‘OK, we’re going to take over your basketball and football programs, and we’re going to make those professional athletes,’ ” she said. “‘We’re going to hire them, take care of them’ — I don’t know what that take care of means — and then they would just be treated like a minor league athlete.
“I don’t know if an investment or private equity company will pay more than minimum wage. It’s going down a route of like an NBA G League. And then universities, with the money they get from the licensing fees, could use that to pay for other sports like women’s rowing or men’s swimming, the ones that are not professionalized. You could end up with this two-tier system.
“I’m just not sure everyone is thinking this thing through clearly. It sounds great, athletes should have all these rights. I’m not sure the benefits are going to outweigh the cost . . . If you unionize you are considered an employee, and I think they’re trying to unionize so they can tell [the colleges] what they want, but telling you what they want, there are a lot of unions that don’t get their way. You have to pay union dues, whatever the union negotiates you have to follow.
“So I don’t know. There’s a lot of things to consider. Is there another way we can make these athletes happy?”
Her question is fair, and I don’t have the answers. But looking to the NCAA for a solution is also moot, as Collens or anyone on the wrong end of its bureaucracy can attest.
Decades upon decades of athlete frustration hasn’t been dealt with, worsening as lucrative television contracts and licensing deals pour money into the college game. The NCAA’s own statement in the wake of Dartmouth’s vote admitted as much: “The association believes change in college sports is long overdue and is pursuing significant reforms.
“However, there are some issues the NCAA cannot address alone, and the association looks forward to working with Congress to make needed changes in the best interest of all student-athletes.”
What a mess.