Women's basketball players formed an advocacy group. They can't get a meeting.

Washington Post

18-02-2025

For more than six months, dozens of active Division I women's basketball players have been quietly forming a players association, hoping to gain a say in a massive era of change for college sports. To do so, they have joined the United College Athletes Association, a nonprofit focused on athlete advocacy — and notably not a union, seeing that efforts to unionize college athletes have been unsuccessful to this point. Then in late January, the players sent separate letters to the commissioners of the Big Ten and SEC requesting a meeting to discuss a potential partnership for rulemaking and related matters.
In all, 120 players signed the letters. The association, which mostly includes players from the two power conferences, has at least one rep from every Big Ten team and a majority of SEC programs. Both conferences declined to meet.
In a response to Andrew Cooper, a UCAA co-founder and former D-I runner, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey noted that his conference is in regular communication with the SEC Women's Basketball Student-Athlete Leadership Council, which participates in meetings with athletic directors and other administrators.
Tony Petitti, the Big Ten's commissioner, wrote in his response: 'Given the personal relationships on campus, we encourage athletes to communicate directly with their coaches and athletic staff, who then coordinate on issues of concern with the Conference.'
The women's basketball players were not satisfied with this result.
'My issue with that is my coach does not have the power to negotiate on revenue sharing, for example, with the whole institution of the NCAA,' said Dominique Darius, a redshirt junior guard for USC. '… So telling us to talk to our coaches is just a misdirect of like, 'Okay, just go ahead and go over there while we make all this money and you sit over there and try to get ran in circles by your coach,' thinking that's productive when it's really not. And I think that's scary because they are trying to say that we're not valued.'
A Big Ten spokeswoman declined to comment beyond Petitti's letter. In a statement to The Washington Post, Sankey reiterated the points he made in his response to Cooper and the UCAA.
The athletes' initial letters to the conferences highlighted several top-line issues, including no baselines for future compensation and the fact that women's basketball players do not have a prominent voice in the overhaul of college sports. More specifically, the letters repeatedly pointed to the potential settlement this spring of House v. NCAA, which would allow schools to directly pay athletes through name, image and likeness (NIL) deals for the first time.
The SEC and Big Ten are two of the six defendants in the House case, not to mention the two most powerful and richest conferences in the country. To that end, they've been instrumental in shaping the settlement that will reshape the industry forever, should it be approved by a judge in April. SEC and Big Ten leaders are also scheduled to meet Wednesday in New Orleans, where they're expected to keep plotting an expansion of the College Football Playoff, including the potential for more than one automatic bid for each conference, according to Yahoo Sports. This is the key context in which the women's basketball players requested their meetings.
But because the UCAA is not organized as a union, the conferences have no legal obligation to recognize the group or invite it to the decision-making table. In their letters, though, the UCAA recycled a Petitti quote from Big Ten football media days last summer. Then, Petitti said: 'To address some of the issues … we need to do that collectively, right? These are really big issues and challenges that are going to take collaboration to address.'
'Obviously there are a lot of issues we could address: safety, academics, compensation, all those things,' Oklahoma center Raegan Beers said. 'But in the end it comes down to that we just want to have a voice. We don't have that right now. That's the first step, and those things can be addressed when that happens.'
Within the UCAA, the women's basketball players are organized by a president for each conference, vice presidents, an executive council and a player rep for each represented team. Darius is both president of the Big Ten side and USC's player rep. Beers is the group's president on the SEC side.
To start getting players on board, Cooper connected with Darius, then Darius started reaching out to current and past teammates, some of whom she played with on AAU squads in high school. Once they started talking, they realized a lot of issues were common across teams and conferences. Players opened up about being pushed to play through injury. One athlete, as noted in the letters to the SEC and Big Ten, can hardly afford her rent because her stipend from her school amounts to less than $10 per hour (she calculated a 50-hour workweek on average). There were a ton of stories about athletes having to repeat classes because credits didn't transfer — or not being able to choose a specific major because of their travel and practice schedules.
A Big Ten player said that, because of the cross-country travel demands brought by conference realignment, she recently went a month without attending one of her classes in person. And then there's disparity in NIL earnings between male and female athletes, which could widen if the House settlement is approved. Last week, the White House rescinded a Title IX memo issued by the Department of Education in the last days of Joe Biden's presidency. The memo had said Title IX law applies to any NIL payments from schools to athletes, calling for a proportionate distribution of money to male and female athletes once revenue sharing begins.
'We've kind of taken that route and tried to be very collaborative and really ask for them to see us and hear what we have to say,' said UCLA guard Charlisse Leger-Walker, a graduate student and one of the leaders of this effort. 'But the longer it goes on that they continue to ignore us, and we've tried that way … we want to use that voice and we want to make it more public.'
It is a precarious time for college athlete organizing, at least when it comes to the latest attempts to unionize. In anticipation of President Donald Trump reshaping the National Labor Relations Board, multiple groups — including the Dartmouth men's basketball team — backed off their efforts to be recognized as employees by the NLRB.
Still, the ongoing Johnson v. NCAA case is seeking to have some athletes classified as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The larger employment effort, opposed by the NCAA, most conference officials and all of their well-paid lobbyists in Washington, is not necessarily over. It just looks a little different in the new political climate.
In the meantime, multiple groups keep organizing athletes into players associations (which, like the UCAA, do not have collective bargaining power because they are not unions). Athletes.Org is believed to have the most current athletes aboard, including members across sports. There is the College Football Players Association, which, true to its name, is focused on representing football players. Then there's the National College Players Association, which has long been instrumental in various organizing efforts.
But this UCAA group is believed to be the largest players association for a specific women's sport. And now that the SEC and Big Ten declined its requests to meet, it doesn't plan to just fade away. Its leaders feel that, even with player leadership groups run by the NCAA and their conferences, an independent association is the surest path to gender equity.
'We deserve a voice. We deserve a say in the percentages [of money] that women's basketball gets compared to some other sports,' Darius said. '… Women have always been low-blowed and undervalued. We all know that. But now is a time where it's clear that this is a business and it's profitable, so let us speak on our behalf.'