College athletes advocates to meet with NFLPA

Steve Berkowitz | USA TODAY Sports

WASHINGTON -- Advocates of expanded rights and benefits for college athletes will be meeting this week in Washington with executives from the NFL Players Association and making a lobbying tour of Capitol Hill, organizer Ramogi Huma said Monday.

The events are meant to coincide with the NCAA convention, which begins Thursday just outside of Washington. The upcoming convention will be the first at which schools from the five wealthiest conferences – the Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Pacific-12 and Southeastern -- have a significant measure of autonomy in rules-making. Those schools are scheduled to vote on proposed rules changes that could create more benefits for athletes.

Huma is the executive director of the National College Players Association, an advocacy group. He also is a co-founder and president of the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), a labor organization that has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to allow Northwestern University football players to unionize.

Huma said his groups will be visiting Wednesday with NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, assistant executive director George Atallah and staff counsel Sean Sansiveri, who Huma described as being heavily involved in the NFLPA's policy on brain trauma.

NFLPA communications director Carl Francis confirmed that Huma's groups will be meeting with union officials.

"We literally want to strategize with them," Huma said. "We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. The NFLPA is a well-established union used to dealing with a multi-billion-dollar industry. There have been a lot of developments in the last year, and we really want to look at what's going on on a macro level."

Huma said that among the people joining him for the meetings will be former Northwestern football player Kain Colter, a leader of the unionization effort; former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon, the lead plaintiff in an ongoing antitrust suit against the NCAA and Tim Waters, political director for the United Steelworkers, which has been supporting CAPA.

Huma said his groups have a number of appointments set with Congressional offices for Thursday, but he declined to identify which ones.

As the schools begin considering rules changes that have been called for by a number of U.S. senators and congressmen, Huma said, "We want to make clear that any type of reform should not exclude college athletes' rights."