- A University of North Carolina athlete has narrowed her prize-money lawsuit against the NCAA to focus only on Division I tennis players.
- Reese Brantmeier filed an amended version of her suit Friday after a federal judge rejected an injunction that could have applied to college athletes in multiple sports.
- Brantmeier's lawyers argue that "plaintiffs seek to lift the veil of hypocrisy" involving NCAA rules for payment of student-athletes.
University of North Carolina athlete Reese Brantmeier is narrowing her prize-money lawsuit against the NCAA to focus only on college tennis players. Brantmeier amended her suit after a federal judge rejected an injunction that would have covered athletes in multiple college sports.
The latest version of Brantmeier’s suit filed Friday challenges NCAA rules that block tennis players from accepting prize money from pro tournaments. Brantmeier hopes to secure class-action status for all men and women seeking to compete in Division I tennis.
“Plaintiffs and the Classes challenge the NCAA’s arbitrary prize money restrictions, seeking damages and declaratory and injunctive relief to strike such restrictions that prevent Plaintiffs and the Classes from retaining the full amount of monetary prizes earned through their athletic performance in non-NCAA competitions without jeopardizing their collegiate eligibility,” according to the amended complaint.
“The NCAA has long instituted a money first, student-athletes second approach in its operations, rules, and regulations. For over a century, from its inception until July 1, 2021, the NCAA prohibited the gifted student-athletes at its member institutions3 from receiving any compensation for their athletic performance and services beyond an athletic scholarship and certain other educational-related benefits,” the complaint continued.
At the same time, the NCAA “has generated billions of dollars in income,” according to the suit. Brantmeier’s lawyers highlight recent changes that have allowed athletes to benefit from payments linked to the use of their names, images, and likenesses.
“Plaintiffs seek to lift the veil of hypocrisy on the NCAA’s practice of allowing primarily Division I football and men’s basketball student-athletes, who play profit-generating sports in the Power Conferences, to receive virtually all of the pay-for-play money distributed by Collectives while prohibiting student-athletes who compete in Tennis from accepting Prize Money earned in non-NCAA competitions, including but not limited to the US Open Tennis Championships, the Australian Open, Roland Garros a/k/a the French Open, and the Championships, Wimbledon,” the amended complaint argued.
In a separate document filed Friday, NCAA lawyers objected to Brantmeier’s request to have her case cover all NCAA Division I tennis players after she dropped an earlier class-action request.
Brantmeier “seeks data for all tennis student-athletes — from more than 260 Division I programs — for a five-year period,” NCAA lawyers wrote. “Defendant has estimated that this RFP, as presently drafted, could implicate records for approximately 20,000 men and women tennis student-athletes. Depending on the scope of the request ultimately authorized by the Court, this RFP could include academic records, medical records, financial data, correspondence, and personal identifying information — breathtaking in scope, sensitivity, and complexity. Plaintiff’s sweeping requests will take significant time to collect, review, and redact as appropriate before production.”
Brantmeier and the NCAA also propose different timelines for the case, though both parties suggest deadlines extending into 2026.
US Chief District Judge Catherine Eagles issued an Oct. 7 order denying Brantmeier’s request for an injunction blocking the NCAA from enforcing rules against student-athletes accepting prize money from pro sports competition.
The injunction would have applied to any NCAA athlete competing in individual sports, defined by the NCAA as women’s bowling, cross country, women’s equestrian, fencing, golf, gymnastics, rifle, skiing, swimming and diving, tennis, indoor and outdoor track and field, women’s triathlon, and wrestling.
“A mandatory preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy, and the Court is not persuaded that Ms. Brantmeier has shown a likelihood of success on the merits for all of the Individual Sports,” Eagles wrote.
“Ms. Brantmeier has shown that the NCAA controls the markets for the services of Individual Sports athletes who want to compete in NCAA Division I sports and receive a college education in exchange for their athletic services. The NCAA has no identified competition in these markets,” Eagles wrote.
“But the evidence of harm to competition from the prize money rules is remarkably thin. The harm must be ‘likely and significant,’ which requires courts to conduct an ‘examination of market circumstances.’ Yet here, Ms. Brantmeier has produced little to no evidence specific to each market.”
“Ms. Brantmeier contends that the prize money rules harm competition by reducing the number of athletes participating in non-NCAA prize money tournaments,” Eagles added. “But that is not harm to competition in the relevant market, which Ms. Brantmeier has defined as the college athletics labor market.”
“She also contends that the prize money rules harm competition by encouraging some of the best athletes to skip NCAA competition, thereby decreasing the quality of NCAA athletics,” Eagles wrote. “Assuming without deciding this is the kind of ‘decreased quality’ the case law contemplates, she has not shown that the number of players who make this decision is meaningful enough to have an actual effect on quality, at least not in every single Individual Sport.”
“Ms. Brantmeier says that the prize money rules harm competition in the same way that group boycotts and price-fixing agreements do: by requiring member schools to exclude athletes who accept prize money from scholarships and NCAA competition and by reducing student-athletes’ compensation because they cannot earn prize money from third parties,” Eagles wrote. “But both of these arguments depend on the implicit assumption that there is meaningful prize money available from professional athletic competitions in each sport sufficient to affect competition in the market.”
“Ms. Brantmeier has affirmatively shown that significant sums of prize money are available for a few elite athletes in a few Individual Sports: tennis, bowling, and perhaps swimming,” Eagles wrote. “One might assume the same for gymnastics and golf.”
“But even in those sports there has been no showing that the prize money rules, which affect only elite athletes who qualify for professional competitions and win prize money, result in anticompetitive effect on the market generally,” the judge explained. “And for other sports, there is no evidence at all about the availability of prize money and little to support the inference of harm to competition in those relevant markets. This is insufficient to show a likelihood of success on the merits.”
Eagles wrote she is not “persuaded at this point that harm to a few elite ‘consumers’ is by itself sufficient to show harm to competition.”
Brantmeier’s individual case was based on $49,000 she won during the 2021 US Open.