Athletes accuse NCAA of academic discrimination against Black students

CHICAGO (CN) — Several student-athletes maintained to a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Monday that the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s academic policies discriminate against Black college athletes and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Troyce Manassa, a former basketball player at historically Black college Savannah State University, filed a class action against the NCAA in 2020 after his team was banned from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference due to the association’s Academic Performance Program.

The NCAA’s Academic Performance Program was enacted in 2004 for Division I schools, and it subjects teams to penalties for academic underperformance as opposed to individual student-athletes.

The APP is based on two metrics — the graduation rate and the academic progress rate. The academic progress rate is a team-based measurement of eligibility, retention and graduation, and is used to determine eligibility for postseason games, according to the appellee’s brief.

J’Ta Freeman, a Black student-athlete for Howard University’s women’s lacrosse team, joined Manassa as a plaintiff in the class action, although her team did not face a ban from postseason competition while she was an active member.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana sided with the NCAA and dismissed the class action for failure to state a claim in 2021 and the statute of limitations, which Manassa and Freeman appealed in 2024.

The students’ attorney, Elizabeth Fegan, argued before the panel that the NCAA knew the academic performance benchmarks would discriminate against HBCU student-athletes but enforced the program anyway with the express intention of changing the mission of historically Black colleges and universities.

“The NCAA set that arbitrary benchmark knowing that historically black colleges and universities have a mission,” Fegan, an attorney with Yorkville firm FeganScott, said. “That mission is to educate and provide opportunities for Black student-athletes and Black students, who might otherwise have been left behind by our educational system and our society.”

She said the NCAA’s policy disproportionally burdened Black student-athletes, as it often required them to exceed their own schools’ academic standards.

Brian Casey, an attorney for the NCAA, said the athletes’ argument had very little to do with the academic policy and far more to do with traditional notions of Article III of the Constitution, which established the judicial branch.

U.S. Circuit Judge John Lee, a Joe Biden appointee, asked Fegan how she determined that Freeman would’ve been impacted by the academic policy next season, when Howard’s lacrosse team hadn’t faced an academic ban since 2013.

Fegan noted that a ban is one of seven penalties the NCAA can impose on teams through the Academic Performance Program.

Lee asked if Freeman faced any of those other penalties, which Fegan said she did not, but ultimately, it’s not about whether Freeman was penalized.

“The Supreme Court has said that it’s not the ultimate inability to achieve success, it’s not that there has to be an actual penalty. It’s the imposition that there’s any barrier or discriminatory program in it of itself,” Fegan said. “So, we don’t need to show, for example, that a ban was actually ultimately imposed. We have to just show that this program is discriminatory.”

Casey disputed Fegan’s characterization of the barrier and maintained that the district court acted properly when it dismissed the initial complaint.

“In order to have standing for injunctive relief, the injury needs to be concrete and particularized,” Casey said. “This isn’t a concrete or particularized injury… there isn’t any concrete thing that happened to (Freeman) that gave her standing.”

Casey added that the NCAA requiring a uniform benchmark for academic success isn’t a barrier because it applies to all Division 1 schools and the success of one team isn’t contingent on another’s.

“The fact that some schools have less resources, that’s not the NCAA’s doing,” he said. “Those are socioeconomic factors that — if they want to blame the Louisiana legislature for underfunding Southern University of Grambling — okay, but that’s not the NCAA.”

Joining Lee on the panel were U.S. Circuit Judges Michael Brennan and Amy St. Eve, both Donald Trump appointees. The panel did not indicate when it might rule.

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