EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsMore than 100 women's college basketball players have joined a unionization campaign with the United College Athletes Association, the organization announced Friday, making them the largest group of college athletes to formally push to collectively bargain with their schools.The group is aiming to represent NCAA athletes across all sports and eventually form divisions for each sport to bargain separately. After more than six months of quietly building a base of women's basketball players, they launched a campaign Friday to expand membership.The 100-plus players have signed union authorization cards to allow UCAA to represent them in collective bargaining discussions. They plan to start by attempting to bargain with individual schools as membership grows.The UCAA announced that Oregon State's basketball team, where 10 of the 13 players have signed union cards, filed a petition Friday to be recognized as union members and to negotiate with the university."We want one voice," said Oregon State senior Jenna Villa, the team's leading scorer last season and a member of the UCAA's 10-person interim executive committee.Maryland senior Oluchi Okananwa, also a member of the UCAA's interim executive committee, said the organization would like to negotiate for better pay, safety mandates and academic protections but is focused for now on securing a "seat at the table" to advocate for the best interest of athletes rather than having the terms of playing a sport in college dictated to them."We are professional athletes," Okananwa told ESPN. "Although the NCAA begs to differ, we are employees."The NCAA and many of its members have adamantly opposed several efforts for college athletes to be viewed as employees, a necessary step to collective bargaining. However, a growing number of athletic directors and coaches have said in the past year that they believe collective bargaining with players is the best way to create some stability in a college sports industry overwhelmed by legal challenges. Support for a collective bargaining model has increased as hope that Congress will deliver stability with a new federal law continues to dwindle.Organizing college athletes to negotiate with their schools comes with its own set of legal and logistical challenges. Public and private employee unions are regulated by different agencies and use different rules, making it difficult to create a union that could represent athletes from both public and private schools.An attempt to organize the Northwestern football team in 2015 was derailed by the public-private obstacle. More recent attempts to create unions for college athletes in Southern California and on the Dartmouth men's basketball team fizzled in late 2024 after the Trump administration installed a more conservative National Labor Relations Board, the agency that regulates private employee unions.At Oregon State, the players will start their efforts by asking the university to voluntarily recognize them as employees. If the university declines, they will have to petition the Oregon Employment Relations Board, which regulates the state's public employee unions.Union labor laws vary by state. Some states do not allow their public employees to unionize. Villa said part of the reason UCAA decided to begin in Oregon is because the state has labor-friendly laws.UCAA executive director Andrew Cooper said the group hopes to eventually shift to conference-wide bargaining units, where players negotiate as employees of their leagues, when they have built a broad enough membership base. Eventually, Cooper said he would like to create a master agreement that applies to all college athletes and then have each sport negotiate supplement bargaining agreements that pertain to their specific circumstances."That's new to sports, but a common structure in labor," Cooper said. "There should be a floor, and we want to raise the floor for all athletes."Cooper, a former NCAA track athlete, started UCAA in 2021 as a nonprofit advocacy group. The group was formerly composed of Big Ten and SEC women's basketball players who pushed for more rights in meetings with members of Congress. Cooper and co-founder Mikayla Pivec, a former Oregon State basketball player, have since registered as a labor organization, a designation needed to represent workers in a collective bargaining agreement.The UCAA's board of advisers includes the presidents of the WNBA and NWSL unions, current WNBA player Cameron Brink and former NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo.Okananwa said the UCAA built its membership largely through word-of-mouth. The executive committee now includes players from several Division I conferences as well as some former players who recently finished their college careers. She and other members of the interim executive committee said the growing professional nature of college sports as well as concerns among some members about the medical care they received convinced them that the time was right to push for union status.In courtrooms and in Congressional hearings, NCAA leaders have said they oppose the idea of athletes being deemed employees because they view college sports as an extracurricular activity that is part of the athlete's education. They say many schools wouldn't be able to afford the added costs that come with employment and that many athletes are not interested in becoming employees.Malia Samuels, who transferred to Indiana this offseason after three years at USC, said she started to view herself as an employee after all of the increased time demands that came with the Trojans' move to the Big Ten."I don't think anything we've been through in the past two years puts the student before the athlete," Samuels said.The UCAA is one of several groups working to organize athletes with an aim to unionize. Earlier this week, Stanford football players announced they were forming a campus chapter of a college football players' association.Pivec said everyone in college sports -- athletes and administrators -- is desperate for more stability than the current system provides. Jada Williams, who transferred to LSU this spring, said the only fair path to reaching that stability would come through a collective bargaining agreement."Nobody should be making decisions without us," Williams said. "A lot of people treat us like kids, but we live adult lives. We should negotiate transfers, money, eligibility, everything. We should have a voice in all of it. ... We're ready to shake the room."
