The NCAA faces an antitrust lawsuit from three current and former Division III athletes seeking class-action status and challenging the division’s ban on athletic scholarships.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to stop the NCAA from enforcing its ban on athletic scholarships for Division III schools and to award damages to athletes who lost financial aid because of it.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, challenges NCAA Division III Bylaw 15.01.3, which says members can’t “give financial aid to any student on the basis of athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance,” according to Sportico.
Plaintiffs include current Division III college football player Jackson Hale at Pacific Lutheran University, former basketball player Connor Pritz at Claremount Mckenna, and former swimmer and lacrosse player Chris Jennings at the University of Lynchburg.
Sportico reported the plaintiffs allege in their complaint the NCAA “has engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to fix the price of Division III athletic labor at zero by prohibiting every member of Division III, the NCAA’s largest division at more than 400 schools, from offering a single penny of athletic scholarship.”
The plaintiffs note that Bylaw 15.01.3 does not allow Division III schools to offer “one of the most common discounts on an American college education—the athletic scholarship,” according to Sportico.
Pritz said in the lawsuit he was forced to quit college basketball in the 2023-2024 season to prioritize his social media business, adding that he took out almost $80,000 to cover his education costs, the outlet reported.
In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston that the NCAA’s restrictions on education-related benefits for college athletes violated federal antitrust law.
The lawsuit says, “The Division III prohibition on athletic aid is undeniably a multi-conference agreement in Alston’s own taxonomy.”
“Division III schools remain free to differentiate themselves along every dimension that does not fix the price of the labor that sustains the marquee recruiting tools that are their athletic programs,” it adds, according to Sportico.
The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at [email protected].
