Could this college athletes’ union finally stick?

Previous attempts to unionize college players for some reason or another failed without getting any meaningful traction.

Over 100 women’s college basketball players last month signed union cards with the new United College Athletes Association (UCAA).  The Oregon State players at the same time filed a formal petition with the state for collective bargaining.

In 2024, the Dartmouth men’s basketball players voted to join SEIU Local 560 but later withdrew their union petition.  In 2026, the Stanford football players formed the first chapter of the College Football Players Association.

Could this latest attempt at unionizing turn the trick? Retired Ithaca College professor and pay equity expert Ellen Staurowsky believed so. 

“I think there’s a contrast between what the United College Athletic Association did with the women’s basketball players and the Stanford football team that announced that they had created some kind of an organization,” explained the professor. “The College Football Players Association, according to their 990, is a social organization and not a labor organization.”

A true labor union built for athletes

The UCAA’s mission states that they want to represent NCAA athletes across all sports and eventually set up divisions for each sport to bargain separately for what their needs demand. 

Former track athlete Andrew Cooper and former basketball player Mikayla Pivec co-founded UCAA as a non-profit organization in 2021. Its board of directors includes WNBPA President Nneka Ogwumike, who last week announced her intention to retire after this season, and current WNBA player Cameron Brink, among others.

“We are professional athletes,” Maryland senior Oluchi Okananwa, a member of the UCAA’s interim executive committee, told ESPN. She simply said out loud the longtime elephant in the room, what many of us have long believed: big-time college players are in essence pseudo-pros in their particular sport, making money for everyone but themselves.

The UCAA wants to be seen as a union for college athletes, a prerequisite in order to represent workers in a collective bargaining agreement. Their core goals are not unlike most unions: negotiate a share of revenues and compensation, establish health and safety protocols for members, limit mandatory practice time, improve mental health support and protect academic freedoms and scholarships.

According to a July 31 ESPN article, the women had been “quietly building a base of women’s basketball players” for six months or more.

The NCAA’s millions-dollar pushback

As expected, the biggest boogeyman standing in the way of unionizing is the big, bad NCAA, and their wingmen include lawmakers and media. These two factions won’t stop pushing back against the players’ wanting to be seen as employees at their schools.

The NCAA and college sports bigwigs constantly contend that the players are not employees but students, and paying them would be a bridge too far. That college sports, in essence, are an extracurricular activity for the student-athlete while they are in school. 

“The conferences and the NCAA are spending money, millions and millions and millions of dollars in lobbying Congress,” continued Staurowsky. “This is money that their athletes generated that they are using against their own athletes.”

She surmised that if ultimately successful, the UCAA will be known as trailblazers.

“They understand that there’s this expression that’s floated around a lot about non-employees collective bargaining,” concluded Staurowsky on the new college players union. “You don’t have leverage if you don’t have standing as an employee.”

 “The women understand this distinction,” she pointed out.  

Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesma-recorder.com.

Copyright © Charles Hallman