Reese Brantmeier v. NCAA

When Wisconsin native Reese Brantmeier graduated from high school in 2022, she was the top tennis recruit in the country. Brantmeier was already attending classes and playing at the United States Tennis Association’s training hub in Orlando, Florida, along with other top junior players, several of whom decided to turn professional. 

But Brantmeier’s family “is a strong advocate of academics,” she said, and she accepted a scholarship to play for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a perennial tennis powerhouse. The double major in exercise and sports science and studio art still plans to turn pro, and many recent collegians have gone on to accomplished post-collegiate careers–most notably, University of Virginia’s Danielle Collins and Texas Christian University’s Cameron Norrie, who have reached the top 10 in the world singles rankings.

But there was a catch. Brantmeier had already played in professional tournaments. She’d beaten Great Britain’s Katie Boulter, who was ranked 27th in the world earlier this year, and had competed in the 2021 and 2022 U.S. Opens. Her initial appearance in the U.S. Open, where she lost in the first round of the mixed doubles tournament and the third round of the qualifying singles tournament (one win shy of making the main draw), paid out about $50,000. By making it to the second round of the U.S. Open doubles tournament in 2022, Brantmeier was entitled to almost $18,000.

The NCAA doesn’t prohibit students from playing professional events but says they can only accept enough prize money to cover their expenses. Accepting any more means they lose eligibility for intercollegiate competition. There is an exception for incoming collegiate players, who are allowed to keep up to $10,000 per year in professional winnings. 

Brantmeier and her family believe she followed the rules dutifully. “We consulted with the NCAA at each step but often got conflicting answers,” Brantmeier said. Before her arrival on campus in August 2022, the NCAA deemed several of her expenses unwarranted, including the purchase of a portable scanner to track receipts and her mother’s portion of lodging costs in New York during the 2021 U.S. Open. 

Because of the dispute over a few hundred dollars, Brantmeier was found ineligible to play in her freshman fall season and was directed to pay a $5,100 fine to charity. (She chose to donate to the Patrick Ryan Memorial Tennis Foundation, a southern Wisconsin non-profit that promotes accessible tennis.) In spring 2023, she returned to the courts and dominated–playing the No. 1 singles position as a freshman and helping lead UNC to its first NCAA women’s championship, taking down N.C. State University in the final.

Meanwhile, other college athletes were swimming in money thanks to the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Alston. The court ruled unanimously that the NCAA was violating antitrust laws by not allowing athletes to profit from their work.

“It is highly questionable whether the NCAA and its member colleges can justify not paying student athletes a fair share of the revenues on the circular theory that the defining characteristics of college sports is that the colleges do not pay student athletes,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a concurring opinion. 

Because of Alston, brands and boosters can now pay college athletes directly via name, image, and likeness (commonly referred to as NIL) deals and direct large sums of money to coveted athletes—typically football and basketball players, though several popular female athletes also have landed lucrative endorsements. To take just one prominent example, in 2021 a group of well-heeled University of Texas alumni formed a nonprofit to pay each Longhorns offensive lineman on scholarship $50,000 annually. 

Despite her dominance on the court, Brantmeier hasn’t received any NIL deals. After all, college tennis doesn’t reach large television audiences and isn’t profitable. Brantmeier doesn’t begrudge her fellow athletes who have landed deals. “It’s great if athletes can profit from their work,” she said. 

But if athletes like former UNC-CH basketball center Armando Bacot can command $1 million in endorsements, it seemed unfair to Brantmeier that she and collegiate athletes in other individual sports like golf, bowling, and track couldn’t keep the winnings they earned directly through competition. So, when lawyers reached out about mounting a legal challenge to the NCAA rules, she was receptive.

On March 18, Brantmeier became the named plaintiff in a class-action suit against the NCAA in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. The suit doesn’t seek damages but calls for an end to bylaws that prevent players like Brantmeier from “retaining full and just compensation for monetary prizes earned through their athletic performance.” 

A court date for a trial has not been set and probably would not occur before 2026, when Brantmeier will be a senior. But her lawyers have asked for an injunction that would allow the several collegiate players in this year’s U.S. Open, which began in late August, to keep their prize money. (Brantmeier tore her meniscus in February and since then hasn’t played any collegiate or professional matches.)

The lawsuit is just one of many the NCAA is facing in the wake of the Alston decision, but it represents the most head-on attack on the teetering edifice of so-called amateurism in college athletics. Brantmeier’s lawyers are confident they will prevail.

“I don’t see a credible argument the NCAA can make on this point of denying these athletes the money they earn,” said New York-based antitrust lawyer Peggy Wedgeworth, one the lawyers representing Brantmeier.

From Wisconsin to the U.S. Open

Cold Spring, Wisconsin, a town of about 700, lies approximately midway between Madison and Milwaukee. It’s not the type of place that typically produces one of the country’s best young tennis players. 

“There are a lot of farms around us and not a lot of tennis courts,” Brantmeier said. Neither her parents nor two older brothers played tennis, and Brantmeier tried other team sports as a child. She first picked up a racquet at age 8 and didn’t start playing regularly until she was 10, which in today’s climate of hypercompetitive youth sports is late on the path of athletic greatness. 

Brantmeier practiced in the closest “big town”–Whitewater, population 15,638–and played in local tournaments. After dominating her age group, she played older girls and continued to win, relying on the big serve-big forehand that defines modern American tennis as well as raw quickness around the court.

Brantmeier won her first junior national tournament at 14. By then, the United States Tennis Association, which runs the U.S. Open and helps develop American players, had taken notice. Offering generous financial support, the association invited Brantmeier to join its training center in Orlando.

While Brantmeier trained in the Florida heat, the NCAA’s vise-like grasp of college athletics was under attack. The organization was founded in 1906 to address the mounting deaths in college football. It consolidated its power under executive director Walter Byers, a former sports writer, who led the organization from 1951 to 1988. Byers negotiated lucrative television deals for college sports and championed the notion that student-athletes were amateurs. 

“Member institutions’ athletics programs are designed to be an integral part of the education program,” the NCAA bylaws stipulate. “The student-athlete is considered an integral part of the student body, thus maintaining a clear line of demarcation between college athletes and professional sports.”

Of course, illicit payments often flowed to athletes anyway, which the NCAA has policed to varying degrees. In 1987, it shut down Southern Methodist University’s football program after finding that the school had paid recruits for years. Myriad other penalties have been handed down for similar, if lesser, instances of illicit compensation. (In 2019, to take just one example, the NCAA forced the University of Mississippi’s football team to vacate 33 wins over six seasons after finding boosters made unauthorized payments to current players and recruits.)

But as college sports became increasingly lucrative for schools, the lack of remuneration for the athletes themselves prompted legal scrutiny. In 2014, former University of California-Los Angeles star basketball player Ed O’Bannon was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts, which had released a March Madness video game that depicted O’Bannon and other players from his 1995 national championship team among the historic squads. 

The game didn’t use the players’ names, but they were easily identifiable by their height, race, and jersey numbers. The NCAA, but not the players, profited from the deal with the gamemaker. Though the association offered to settle, O’Bannon insisted on a trial. A federal court ruled in his favor, ordering the NCAA to pay him and his fellow plaintiffs $42.2 million. 

Subsequently, student-athletes filed additional class action suits, which were combined, culminating in the 2021 Alston decision.

Alston spawned a flood of similar litigation, and in May the NCAA and the five power conferences—Pac-12, ACC, SEC, Big Ten, and Big 12—settled three bundled cases, agreeing to pay $2.8 billion to current and former college athletes. The payouts, meant to repay lost NIL revenue, date to 2016 and will continue for 10 years. The settlement also proposed a system for direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes, capping the amount at no more than $22 million a year per university. Meanwhile, Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team voted to unionize and received support from the National Labor Relations Board, though the school likely will resist the effort in federal court–a process that could take years.

Brantmeier v. NCAA challenges the NCAA’s position on amateurism head on, arguing tennis players and other individual-sport collegiate athletes —  golfers, bowlers, track stars—should be able to keep their professional earnings. In a 1929 report, the Carnegie Foundation’s Howard J. Savage posed many of the same questions: “A man with musical talent is permitted without comment to represent his college on a glee club and at the same time to sing for pay in a church; or another person may edit a college periodical and sell as many stories as he can to magazines. Why, then, should not an athlete represent his college and simultaneously be compensated for this or any other athletic success if his skill be sufficient?” 

Ultimately though, Savage defended the NCAA’s position, distinguishing between singing, acting, and writing—skills that “are primarily mental or emotional”—and sport, whose skills “are primarily physical.” As logically strained and anachronistic as Savage’s argument reads today, it remains the NCAA’s position. 

The NCAA and its attorneys declined to speak with The Assembly about the suit. A trial date hasn’t been set, but the District Court recently ruled that “all discovery must be completed by July 14, 2025.” The court is also expected to rule soon on class certification, which would allow other collegiate athletes to join Brantmeier’s lawsuit.

Should the suit go to trial, Matthew Mitten, executive director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University, said he expected the NCAA will argue that it’s well within its rights to distinguish between amateur and professional athletes. 

“You have to give governing bodies some discretion to spell out the rules,” Mitten said. “That’s as true of determining eligibility as it is of determining how many players are on a football field.”

But Jason Miller, Brantmeier’s Raleigh-based attorney, said the amateurism rule is outdated, arbitrary, and loaded with exceptions. He pointed out that collegiate Olympic medal winners are allowed to keep the cash awards bestowed by their sports’ national governing bodies—$37,500 for a gold medal in the U.S., $22,500 for silver, and $15,000 for bronze—and remain eligible for collegiate competition. 

“There are more exceptions than there are rules,” Miller said. “So, this notion of a standard of amateurism is nonsense.”

Leaving Money on the Court

Brantmeier’s meniscus tear required surgery and kept her sidelined for the 2024 spring season. The injury also meant that she couldn’t compete in the NCAA singles and doubles championships, whose winners (provided they’re U.S. citizens) get automatic entry into the main draw of the U.S. Open. 

This year, the automatic bids went to the University of Miami’s Alexa Noel, who won the women’s singles title, and Ohio State’s Robert Cash and J.J. Tracy, who won the men’s doubles title. (Noel lost in the first round, but since she had already decided to turn pro and forgo her final year of college eligibility she was able to accept the $100,000 payout. Because Cash and Tracy have graduated, they’ll split and keep the $40,000 they won for reaching the second round.)

Last year, Brantmeier’s UNC-CH teammate Fiona Crawley made it into the main draw after winning three qualifying matches. She earned $81,000 but turned it down—permissible modest expenses excepted—so she could play her senior season with the Tar Heels. 

“I would never take the money and never risk my eligibility, but I worked my butt off this week, and it seems unreal that there are football and basketball players making millions in NIL deals and I can’t take the money that I worked so hard for,” Crawley said at the time.

Hunter Reese, now a professional doubles player, recalled playing in the U.S. Open in 2014 after he won the NCAA doubles championship as a junior at the University of Tennessee. After losing in the first round to veteran French professionals, he went to the tournament bursar’s offices with receipts for his expenses in hand.

“Playing in the U.S. Open was the biggest thing that had happened to me in my tennis life, and the experience should have been 100 percent positive,” he said in an interview with The Assembly. “Instead, you had officials making sure I didn’t take the prize money [to retain his collegiate eligibility for his senior season], as though I was a criminal.”

It’s a lament many other collegiate players have echoed, especially given how expensive it is to compete professionally in tennis, which unlike team sports like football, soccer, and basketball doesn’t have guaranteed salaries. Once they leave college, tennis players have to foot the bill for travel, lodging, coaching, and other expenses themselves. Sponsors may help, but it’s the top players like Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, Iga Swiatek, and Coco Gauff—who least need the money—that land lucrative deals.

UNC-CH athletic director Bubba Cunningham and women’s tennis head coach Brian Kalbas declined to discuss Brantmeier’s case for this story. But N.C. State women’s tennis head coach Simon Earnshaw has said he supports it. “Quite frankly, I like Reese’s lawsuit,” he told The Daily Tar Heel. “The NCAA is so out of whack.”

Brantmeier spent the summer rehabilitating her knee back in Wisconsin and teaching at a kids’ tennis camp. She’s also raised funds for her nonprofit, the Reese Brantmeier Project, which is working to restore two community tennis courts in Whitewater. She’s expected to make a full recovery and return to college competition–she’s just not sure yet exactly when that will be. 

In some respects, Brantmeier was fortunate to suffer her injury in college rather than as a low-ranked professional. “If I had turned pro and had this injury when I was just starting out, I would be out of a job, without the support of the university, and not earning a degree,” she said.

Still, she thinks it’s unfair that players like her must constantly “put a price on our college experience,” Brantmeier said. “If you’re a talented college player with good pro results, you have to think about the money you’re giving up, since there’s no guaranteed salaries in tennis and our earning window is relatively short.”

Paul Wachter has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, ESPN, and The Atlantic. He lives in Chapel Hill.