Ten of the thirteen players on Oregon State's women's basketball roster have signed union authorization cards [2]. That is the small number. The large one is more than 100 women's basketball players across several Division I conferences who have signed with the United College Athletes Association, the largest group of college athletes ever to formally seek collective bargaining [1][2].
The part that matters legally is where they went with it. On Friday, July 31, the Oregon State players moved for recognition through Oregon's Employment Relations Board, the agency that administers the state's public employee labor law, rather than through the National Labor Relations Board [1][3].
Oregon State is a public university. Under the division of authority that has governed American labor law since 1935, employees of a state institution are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act; they are covered by whatever their state legislature wrote. Sportico put the consequence plainly, noting that because Oregon State is public, the relevant laws and adjudicating bodies are state rather than federal [3]. Every previous college athlete union attempt of consequence involved a private school and therefore the federal board.
That history is short and it is not encouraging. Northwestern's football players organized in the mid-2010s and the NLRB declined to exercise jurisdiction. Dartmouth's basketball players were certified in 2024 and the effort was subsequently withdrawn. Penn's track athletes lost a wage claim in 2016 [3]. Two of those three ran into the same structural wall: the federal labor board is a presidentially appointed body whose majority flips with the White House, and a case that takes three years to litigate can outlive the board that welcomed it. A union certified under one board can find itself before a different one when the employer refuses to bargain.
A state agency does not work that way. Oregon's Employment Relations Board is a creature of Oregon law, appointed under Oregon's process, and no federal election reconstitutes it. Filing there does not make the legal question easier, since the players still have to establish that a scholarship athlete is an employee under state law, a proposition no Oregon tribunal has ruled on. It makes the answer durable. That is a different kind of advantage, and for a campaign whose predecessors all died of delay rather than of losing on the merits, it may be the more valuable one.
The players are describing the stakes in employment terms rather than fairness terms, which is itself a strategic choice. Oluchi Okananwa, a Maryland senior, was direct: "We are professional athletes. Although the NCAA begs to differ, we are employees" [2]. Malia Samuels, who transferred to Indiana from USC, framed it as a record rather than a grievance: "I don't think anything we've been through in the past two years puts the student before the athlete" [2]. Jada Williams of LSU said that "Nobody should be making decisions without us," and added, "We're ready to shake the room" [2]. Jenna Villa, Oregon State's senior leading scorer, gave the campaign its plainest line: "We want one voice" [2].
The United College Athletes Association was founded in 2021 by Andrew Cooper, a former NCAA track athlete, with co-founder Mikayla Pivec, and later registered as a labor organization [1][2]. Organizing women's basketball specifically has been the group's focus rather than a target of opportunity.
One procedural detail is unsettled in the record and should not be smoothed over. OnLabor and Sportico both report that the Oregon State players filed a petition with the Employment Relations Board on Friday [1][3]. ESPN reports the Friday filing as well, while also stating that the players will first ask the university to recognize them voluntarily and would petition the board if the university declines [2]. Those are two different postures. Whether the board petition is already pending or is being held as the fallback changes the timeline substantially, and the reporting does not resolve it.
What a state route cannot do is worth stating too. The Oregon board's authority stops at the Oregon state line. Okananwa plays at Maryland, Williams at LSU, and Samuels at Indiana, all public universities in states with their own labor statutes and their own boards, some of which bar public employee bargaining outright. The 100-plus cards are a national organizing achievement that will have to be cashed one state at a time. Athletes at private schools remain in the federal system that has yet to produce a single collective bargaining agreement in college sports.
The question Oregon's board now faces is the one the NCAA has spent a decade keeping away from any tribunal that would answer it: whether a person who trains, travels and performs on a schedule set by an institution, in exchange for compensation from that institution, is working. The board can only answer for Oregon. An answer for Oregon is still the first one anybody has gotten to keep.
