New Leadership for a New Moment
Taking the Next Steps in Institution Building
This is a free online newsletter for Jason Stahl, Executive Director of the College Football Players Association (CFBPA). If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter, you can do so by clicking the subscribe button above. If you’d like to financially support our efforts at the CFBPA you can do that here.
We’re at the seven-month mark for the College Football Players Association (CFBPA) and we’re ready to take the next step forward in building our player-led institution and tackling the problems within college football. This seven months of work has taught us a lot and clarified the leadership structure that we would need to build a successful long-term institution. Today we’re ready to put that new leadership structure into place.
Up until this point, we’ve been operating with an informal all-volunteer leadership team that we classified as an “Advisory Board.” We’ve had this in place since our founding and have added to it when we found new individuals who were interested in volunteering their name and time to the CFBPA. However, we always knew that we would need to move away from the Advisory Board and to something more formal and legally-binding. Additionally, we would need a new part of our leadership structure—in many ways the most important part—that would be for members only. This part would be only for college football players of the past, present and future to use the CFBPA as their collective voice to make the changes they desire within the sport.
We’re happy to say that both of these new components of our leadership structure are coming together. First, I’m happy to announce that we now have our Board of Directors completed. As you’ll see on our website, the Board of Directors will determine all of our institutional policy and guide major decision making. They will also make sure we are in full compliance with all rules and regulations governing 501(c)(4) nonprofits. I will sit on the board as a member but will not have voting rights in order to ensure that the Board always has discretion to vote independently on decision making and leadership.
Roxanne (Roxy) McCray will move from an advising role to become President of the Board. We’re very excited to have her in this role as she has shown in her work with NFL Wives for Change just how much you can accomplish when you work to get players and former players organized to create meaningful change. We are just as excited to have Maddie Salamone as our new Vice President. Maddie is an attorney and a former college athlete herself. Having worked valiantly as an NCAA reformer on the inside, we’re happy to have her on board working on change from the outside.
To oversee our institutional finances, we’ve brought Seton Parsons on board as Treasurer. Seton is an attorney with past experience as a Treasurer and political fundraiser. He is currently a law clerk within the Small Business Administration. Seton’s experience working within other 501(c)(4) nonprofits will be invaluable as we work institutionally to ensure we are always in full compliance with the law. Finally, Jaime Miettinen will be our new Secretary. In her work as an attorney, Jaime has worked tirelessly for athlete’s rights and will be instrumental in helping us write our institutional bylaws. I’m very excited with the team we’ve been able to put together as I think they are fully committed to our institutional mission and vision.
With our Board of Directors now formed, we are re-titling our Advisory Board as simply “Advisors” to avoid any confusion. Advisors are there to bring their unique knowledge to bear when we need assistance in their area(s) of expertise. However, they do not speak for the CFBPA and are not responsible for our organizational decisions or policies.
Michael Hsu has been our most active advisor to date and we would not be where we are as an institution without Michael’s help. However, at this time, Michael and I agreed that he would take leave of his advisory role for the CFBPA. Michael has co-founded the College Basketball Players Association and is most well known publicly for using that institution to make a filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declaring that college athletes should be classified as employees. Given that these projects are separate and independent from the CFBPA, Michael and I thought it best that he should take leave as an advisor in order to bring clarity to which institution was responsible for which efforts. We wish Michael all the best with the College Basketball Players Association.
I should note at this point that this does not mean that I, or the CFBPA, is against Michael’s NLRB filing. We have taken no public position on the matter. Back in November, when Michael filed the charge, I decided that the CFBPA would not publicly state an institutional position on the matter as I did not want to make such a monumental decision without it being decided on by our membership. At that point our membership was not robust enough to poll on the question. So, we have now taken the position that we need to be prepared for the eventuality that Michael’s effort will be successful. We need to have systems in place and college football players organized so such a momentous change ends up working for college athletes and not against them. Thankfully, our new Vice President Maddie Salamone helpfully outlined this view with Michael and others in a recent Aspen Institute debate. I urge you to give it a listen.
This debate, and the importance of organizing players in advance of college athletes being deemed employees by the NLRB or the courts, highlights the urgent need to get players organized now in order to prepare for this possible future. To this end, I am very excited to report that we are currently developing our members-only Leadership Committee (LC). The LC is open to any CFBPA member in any of our four membership categories: Alumni Player, Current College Player, High School Player or Lifetime Member. For anyone who wants to become a member and participate in the LC, there is still time to sign up and let us know if you’re interested in getting involved.
Once formed, the LC will spend the college football off-season leading a vigorous membership drive to grow our membership to levels where we will be able to create a platform and start advocating for the changes in the game that our membership wishes to see. College football players of the past, present and future, I urge you to get involved in this effort now. Our most recent LC addition, who just won a Super Bowl with the Los Angeles Rams, when asked why he became a member said, “I want to be a part of the change in college football that gives the players of past, present and future a real voice in the real issues of the game.” If you want to be a part of this change as well, I urge you to become a member today.