Guiding Principles for the Coalition for the Future of College Athletics
Principles
The Coalition for the Future of College Athletics (C4FCA) is built upon a foundation of values that prioritize the rights, welfare, and aspirations of college athletes. As we navigate the dynamic landscape of collegiate sports, these principles guide our actions, decisions, and vision.
Promote Academics: To preserve the central role of academics in the collegiate athletics experience, emphasizing academic progress and degree completion.
Enhance Student-Athlete Welfare: To ensure established baselines for academic support and degree completion funds both during and after athletics participation, guaranteed healthcare for sport-related conditions during and for a reasonable period of time following participation in college, provide life skills and financial literacy training, and ensure access to mental health and well-being resources.
Preclude Patchwork: To pre-empt divergent state-by-state laws that disadvantage certain students, academic institutions and states.
To enact a single national standard allowing targeted regulation with appropriate enforcement mechanisms to:
protect student-athletes: provide an appropriate, transparent framework to protect student-athletes from unscrupulous actors on the issue of NIL licensing;
prohibit pay-for-play: reaffirm that NIL transactions should not be a proxy for pay for play, whether from boosters, collectives or other third-parties;
prohibit improper inducement: protect the integrity of recruiting rules by prohibiting the use of NIL as an inducement to enroll or remain enrolled at a specific university or college.
maintain a national standard under which universities of varying sizes, budgets, and fan bases can compete against each other.
Preserve Student Status: To establish consistency across public and private institutions by clarifying that student-athletes are students, not employees.
Provide Opportunity: To maintain an enterprise that fully appreciates and recognizes the diversity of our student-athletes, breadth of sport offerings, and ensures protection under Title IX for female student-athletes.
Protect the Ability to Regulate: To provide governing bodies the ability to regulate in the specified areas of student athlete welfare, support and NIL. Such regulation would be overseen by an entity with the ability to enforce the regulations and without legal repercussions.