"Former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers admitted that the NCAA created the term 'student-athlete' to deny college athletes rights in the 1950s, an era where denying select Americans their rights was commonplace. The recent NLRB ruling confirming that college athletes have rights under federal labor laws is a major step toward correcting this injustice and modernizing today’s professional college football and basketball industries. NCAA sports has chosen to cement its position on the wrong side of history by working to strip college athletes of their newly asserted rights.
It is CAPA’s hope that the United States House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on college athlete unionization will dismiss baseless NCAA claims of unintended consequences and focus on the NCAA's intended consequences of denying players a seat at the table. It should examine policies that leave current and former players stuck with sports-related medical bills, subject athletes to unnecessary brain trauma risks, allow schools to dump permanently injured players, and maintain chronically poor federal graduation rates among football and men’s basketball players.
However, CAPA is concerned that this hearing has been called in an attempt to legitimize the NCAA’s illegitimate effort to eliminate college athletes' rights. At the end of the day, we should not be a country that sacrifices select citizens' rights to appease the preference of others.”
Learn more at collegeathletespa.org.
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