New Report Illustrates Complications with College Athlete Unionization

A newly released Sportico report titled “Duke Union Risk Memo Warned of Kara Lawson, Lacrosse Players” underscores the tangled legal landscape facing any push toward college athlete unionization. Published on March 2, 2026, the article details how Duke University retained outside counsel to examine what would happen if its players attempted to organize, and the findings reveal a thicket of logistical and regulatory hurdles.

Central to the memo is the prospect that union drives would not produce one overarching NCAA-wide bargaining unit but rather a patchwork of individual campus unions—potentially more than one per school, depending on how athletes are classified. The Dartmouth men’s basketball team has already tested the waters, filing a petition that could set a precedent for school-specific organizing efforts rather than a single, national union.

The Sportico piece notes that such a decentralized model would force universities to navigate overlapping federal labor statutes, varied state laws, and the NCAA’s own evolving rules on athlete status. With Name, Image, and Likeness debates intensifying, many stakeholders have suggested collective bargaining as a cure-all for revenue-sharing grievances; Duke’s internal risk assessment signals that the remedy may invite a new set of complications, from determining which athletes qualify as employees to managing multiple bargaining agreements under one institutional umbrella.

The report, copyrighted by Jones Walker LLP, offers no quick fixes, only a sobering reminder that the path to unionization in college sports is strewn with legal landmines—each campus, and perhaps each team, left to chart its own course.