The College Athlete-Employee: FLSA and the End of Amateurism

As the legal and economic premises of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) amateurism collapse, Division I college athletics has reached an inflection point: At least some scholarship athletes—especially in revenue sports—may be deemed employees. This article uses the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as the clearest vehicle for assessing what that shift would mean in practice. Antitrust litigation, name, image, and likeness reforms, and the House v. NCAA settlement have changed who can pay athletes and how; the unresolved question is whether and to what extent athletic participation will be treated as work under wage and hour laws— how to define compensable time (training, travel, “voluntary” activities), calculate overtime, and design lawful compensation structures.

Drawing on the Third Circuit’s decision in Johnson v. NCAA, the article develops a workable framework for (1) determining employee status under the FLSA, (2) identifying the relevant employer(s) in the fragmented governance structure of college sports under joint-employment principles, and (3) operationalizing compliance inside athletic departments that have never been built to run timekeeping and payroll for athletes. It then identifies a major downstream consequence: classifying athletes as employees helps clarify Title IX treatment of direct institutional payments by situating those payments within Title IX’s employment-compensation framework rather than the proportionality rules governing athletic financial aid.

The article concludes that athlete–employee status under the FLSA is not only doctrinally plausible but increasingly difficult to avoid given the commercial realities of modern college sports. While the compliance burdens are substantial, the employment frame offers a more legally defensible—and administrable—structure for athlete compensation at the moment the “student-athlete” construct can no longer do the doctrinal work the industry demands.