NCAA’s Relaxed Prize-Money Rule Further Erodes Amateurism

The class action represents approximately 12,000 student-athletes who have either competed in D-I tennis since March 19, 2020, or who were deemed ineligible to compete due to prize money rules. Court records indicate that around 60 athletes are described as being owed damages on account of voluntarily forfeiting prize money earned in a tennis tournament to comply with NCAA rules.

If approved by Judge Eagles, the settlement would involve the NCAA agreeing to pay a damages amount of $2.02 million along with additional money for attorneys’ fees, costs and other expenses.

The elimination of pre-college prize money restrictions applies to all student-athletes, not just tennis players. The NCAA, per the settlement, also pledges not to reinstate these rules later.

The settlement doesn’t change long-standing NCAA rules that restrict athletes from accepting prize money after collegiate enrollment. Those athletes, however, can earn NIL and revenue-share compensation while in college and remain in compliance with NCAA eligibility rules.

The eligibility of new college athletes who have earned money in their sport has expanded in recent years. This is true of those athletes who earned NIL money in high school, of basketball players who played professionally in the G League and abroad, and of hockey players who earned compensation through playing in the Canadian Hockey League and overseas. The NCAA has held the line on denying eligibility of basketball players who signed NBA contracts, but broadly speaking, there’s a noticeable shift away from college sports populated by true amateurs.

This shift is occurring as more young people in America can earn money in ways that weren’t available to older generations when they were children and teens. Esports and social media influencing, for example, create chances for young people to make money in the same vein as more traditional routes like acting and music.

Whether young people “making money” is a good thing is a question that policymakers and lawmakers will need to tackle. The addictiveness of social media with young people recently led a jury in Los Angeles to find Meta and YouTube negligent for designing their apps in ways that caused children to become addicted, leading to mental health harms. There are also privacy concerns, as Harvard Law School professor Leah Plunkett recently explained on podcast Culture Apothecary, with influencing in sports and entertainment and AI’s use of the accompanying content.

The NCAA’s elimination of pre-enrollment prize money caps will open the door for talented high school athletes to earn compensation without losing the chance for an athletic scholarship to college. In a world where young athletes can earn significant compensation through NIL and revenue share, the NCAA faced conceptual hurdles trying to defend prize money rules. But these shifts in athletics aren’t occurring in a vacuum, as more young people and their parents pursue earning money in contemporary sports and entertainment, the line between “amateur” and “pro” is getting blurrier.

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