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The Dartmouth basketball team recently came to a big decision as they decided to form a union. This is something that isn't seen in sports, and Alabama senator and former Auburn football head coach Tommy Tuberville thinks that Dartmouth could start a bad trend.
Dartmouth basketball was having some issues with the way the school was operating, and that is why they decided to make this move in the first place. The university recently released a statement on the matter.
“For decades, Dartmouth has been proud to build productive relationships with the five unions that are currently part of our campus community. We always negotiate in good faith and have deep respect for our 1,500 union colleagues including the members of SEIU Local 560. In this isolated circumstance, however, the students on the men’s basketball team are not in any way employed by Dartmouth,” the school said. “For Ivy League students who are varsity athletes, academics are of primary importance, and athletic pursuit is part of the educational experience. Classifying these students as employees simply because they play basketball is as unprecedented as it is inaccurate. We, therefore, do not believe unionization is appropriate.”
Tommy Tuberville doesn't think that this move from the Dartmouth basketball team is a good one, and he is concerned for the future of college sports because of it.
“They’re going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg—all these athletes are—because it pays for everything,” Tuberville said, according to an article from On3. “Scholarships are paid — men and women — but there’s a lot of people that don’t bring in money to universities. But what’s going to happen here is you’re going to see groups of people that’s going to try to unionize and then it’s going to spread across the country. We’ve been fighting it here. Joe Manchin and I did a NIL bill that was bipartisan, but it kept unionization out, but the Democrats wanted it in. That’s the reason we haven’t gotten it to the floor. But this will absolutely kill college sports. You know, the last time I looked, they’re not employees. These students are student-athletes. And if you want the federal government involved and ruin something, you try to make the student-athletes employees. Soon the federal government will get involved, unions will get involved, and it will be a total disaster.”
We'll see if this decision by Dartmouth goes on have more of an impact on college sports. Tuberville certainly thinks it will.
