A bill that would require college coaches recruiting athletes in California to disclose details of medical expenses, scholarship renewals, and transfer policies passed the state’s Assembly this week. The measure, dubbed the Student-Athletes’ Right to Know Bill, now heads to the Senate.
The bill is the legislative darling of the National College Players Association, an advocacy group of 14,000 current and former Division I athletes that has pushed for more transparency in the conversations between coaches and recruits over athletics scholarships.
“There are some serious problems in how the schools and the NCAA treat their athletes, and it’s not public,” the group’s president, Ramogi Huma, a former linebacker at UCLA, told The Chronicle in April. “Our message to parents and recruits is, Buyer beware. Be careful in the school you choose.”
It’s worth noting that Mr. Huma isn’t the only UCLA alum pushing for changes in big-time college sports. Ed O’Bannon, a former basketball standout for the Bruins, filed a federal lawsuit last year against the NCAA, demanding that it pay former athletes for its use of their likenesses in commercial ventures. We’ll have more on the potential impact of that lawsuit, which legal experts say could be enormous, in coming days.
3 Responses to Small Victory for Athletes’-Rights Measure
11272784 - June 4, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Athletes are treated like chattels by institutions and the NCAA – they work for the institution without pay (other than room and board), can’t take campus or off-campus jobs, and can lose their scholarships by simple acts that all other students do every day. This is a step in the right direction.
jfborland - June 5, 2010 at 11:40 am
Not to mention tuition and free books. Yeah, what a crappy deal for them. A majority of the student-athletes are treated well and have all the resources they need. It is the student-athletes in revenue-generating sports at big schools that are under a lot of pressure. No question about it. But I think the majority of student-athletes have a pretty good deal. By contrast, a kid that is not any good at sports but is good in chemistry probably has to pay for their education.
goxewu - June 6, 2010 at 11:02 am
A D-1 football player spends more time (about 44 hours per week) in football practice/meetings than he does in class and studying. Those players tend, because of this and because they aren’t chosen for academic acumen to begin with, to gravitate toward the easiest and most bogus majors, e.g., “Leisure Studies,” and take the easiest classes. Scholarships can be lost for other than academic or conduct reasons. Medical treatment for the residual effects of injuries isn’t automatically furnished by the college. The purpose of the football program is, to make money for the school, either in profit, free advertising, or alumni donations. Football (and men’s basketall) are not like any other extracurricular activity or any “non-revnue” sport; the educational value of football for the players is near-nil, the “character-building” of it largely a myth. The coach’s salary is in the millions, the player’s in a sham “free education.”The obvious solution is to make players employees of the school–much like buildings & grounds employees–and give them, as a perq, the right to take classes for enough years (including post-playing years) to get a degree if they so choose.There’s an argument that such an arrangement–turning college football into a professional under-24 league–would loosen or remove the sentimental bond that fans feel when the players are, in theory at least, “student-athletes.” Nonsense. Fans and alums know full well what a corrupt cesspool bigtime college football is and they don’t care, as long as the games are spectacles, the play exciting, and–over the longer haul–the team wins. Knowing that the players are pros in an under-24 league won’t change that at all. Knowing that the best players in men’s D-1 basketball are de facto pros–”one and done,” just in waiting for the NBA or Euro leagues, with almost no pretense at all of being students–hasn’t lessened interest in bigtime men’s college basketball one bit).