The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s dismissal of a Division I college football player’s claim that he was an employee of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the PAC-12 Conference within the meaning of the Fair Labor Standards Act and California labor law and thus entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay.
The research team, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin, tracked 1,332 high school football players from 36 schools during the 2012 season. Participating players completed a preseason questionnaire about their injury history and demographic information. Then, as the season progressed, athletic trainers from the schools kept tabs on the incidence and severity of any concussions that occurred.
At the start of the study, 171 of the players — or 13% — told the researchers that they had experienced a sports-related concussion in the previous 12 months. During the 2012 football season, an additional 116 concussions were sustained by 115 players — 8.6% of the student athletes in the study.
When the researchers compared...
