Dartmouth team votes to unionize

College could file objection or take the matter to court.

HANOVER, N.H. — The Dart- mouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize Tuesday in an unprecedented step toward forming the first labor union for college athletes.

In an election supervised by the National Labor Rela- tions Board, the players voted 13-2 to join Service Employees International Union Local 560. Every player on the roster partic- ipated. The school has five business days to file an objec- tion to the NLRB and could also take the matter to fed- eral court. That could delay negotiations over a collec- tive bargaining agreement until long after the current members of the basketball team have graduated.

Although the NCAA has long maintained that its play- ers are “student-athletes” in school primarily to study, col- lege sports has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry that richly rewards coaches and schools while the players remained unpaid amateurs.

Recent court decisions have chipped away at that framework, wi h players now allowed to profit off name, image and likeness and earn a still-limited stipend for living expenses beyond the cost of attendance. Last month’s decision that the Big Green players are employees of the school, with the right to form a union, threatens to completely upend the amateur model.

A college athletes union would be unprecedented in American sports. A previous attempt to unionize the Northwestern football team failed because the teams Wildcats play are in the Big Ten, which includes public schools that aren’t under the jurisdiction of the NLRB.

That’s why one of the NCAA’s biggest threats isn’t coming in one of the bigmoney football programs like Alabama or Michigan. Instead, it is the academically oriented Ivy League, where players don’t receive athletic scholarships. The two juniors at the heart of the union effort, Romeo Myrthil and Cade Haskins, said they would like to form an Ivy League Players Association that would include athletes from other sports and other schools in the conference. They said they understood that change could come too late to benefit them and their current teammates. Dartmouth has indicated it will ask the full NLRB to review the regional director’s decision. If that fails, the school could take the case to court.