Judge dismisses NCAA wage lawsuit involving Penn track athletes

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the NCAA and more than 100 Division I schools alleging that the NCAA’s limits on what athletes can receive for playing sports violate the wage-and-hour provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The suit – in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, where the NCAA is headquartered – initially was filed in October 2014 on behalf of former University of Houston women’s soccer player Samantha Sackos and named the NCAA and every Division I school as defendants.

The plaintiffs later dismissed public schools from the case, and replaced Sackos as the named plaintiff with three track and field athletes from the University of Pennsylvania.

The plaintiffs attempted to claim that because the NCAA’s rules apply to all schools, the association and all the remaining school defendants were liable to the athletes under the FLSA. However, Judge William T. Lawrence ruled Tuesday the athletes could bring an action only against Penn.

That left Lawrence with the question of whether the athletes even had a case against Penn – and he ruled they did not.

“The question,” Lawrence wrote, “is not whether the plaintiffs, as student athletes, are ‘deserving’ of employee status, but rather whether Congress intended for the FLSA to apply to them.”

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Based on that, other federal court cases and the U.S. Labor Department’s approach to the issue, Lawrence ruled against the athletes.

Lawrence noted that “generations of Penn students have vied for the opportunity” to play for the school’s teams “with no thought of compensation” – not wages and not even the prospect of an athletic scholarship because, as an Ivy League school, Penn does not award athletic scholarships.

“This demonstrates unequivocally,” Lawrence wrote, “that the students at Penn who choose to participate in sports – whether NCAA sports, club sports, or intramural sports – as part of their educational experience do so because they view it as beneficial to them.”

Lawrence added that another reason for “finding that student athletes are not employees for FLSA purposes is the fact that the existence of thousands of unpaid college athletes on college campuses each year is not a secret, and the Department of Labor has not taken any action to apply the FLSA to them.”