Major changes could be coming to American college sports after President Donald Trump issued an executive order allowing college athletes only a five-year-window to compete and limiting the number of times athletes can transfer schools.
The order, entitled “Urgent National Action To Save College Sports,” also calls for changes in the way payments from athletes’ name, image and likeness are made, according to a White House fact sheet.
The order aims to alter the way the National Collegiate Athletics Association functions by giving them explicit direction in order to “protect the future of all college sports, including women’s and Olympic sports.”
Headlining the changes is that student-athletes will now only have a five-year window to be a student-athlete, with limited exceptions for military service. Additionally, an athlete would only be allowed one transfer while an undergraduate student and one more as a graduate student.
The White House also directs the NCAA to crackdown on improper financial activities like fraudulent name, image and likeness payments from collectives and suggests that violations could result in schools losing federal funding as a punishment. NCAA president Charlie Baker praised the order as a step in the right direction.
“Stabilizing college athletics for student-athletes still requires a permanent, bipartisan federal legislative solution, so we look forward to continuing to work alongside the Administration and Congress to enact targeted legislation with the support of student-athlete leaders from all three divisions,” Baker wrote in a statement on X.
The order was promised at the president’s “Saving College Sports” roundtable in early March with members of Congress, and many of the NCAA power’s players, including association president Charlie Baker and former Alabama head football coach Nick Saban. Notably absent from the roundtable were any current college athletes, something advocates for player’s rights objected to.
“You cannot plan for our future without our input,” Angelina Vasquez, a UNLV track athlete said on the voluntary membership organization Athletes.org’s website back then. “If a decision affects our bodies, our scholarships, our eligibility, or our livelihoods, athletes should have a voice in the room from the start, not after the fact.”
Trump’s order also comes after a failed attempt to achieve many of the same things in Congress through the SCORE Act, a bill that failed to reach a vote due to a lack of unanimous support from Republicans. The act’s full name is the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements act and was originally co-sponsored by Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) and Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.)
Like many of Trump’s recent executive orders, the measure may face challenges in federal court, something he predicted would happen at the March roundtable.
“We will get sued, that’s the only thing I know for sure in life,” Trump said at the meeting. “We will see how we do in the court system.”