Meghann Burke has been busy. The executive director of the NWSL Players’ Association has been the face of the union’s recent public clashes with the NWSL over player compensation. But that didn’t stop her from appearing in front of a Congressional summit on Thursday to testify against The SCORE Act, a bill related to college athletics that, she told The IX Soccer, would “would strip women of the right to organize.”
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The bill comes at a turbulent time for college sports. Rules that govern NCAA athletes have changed rapidly and dramatically over the past few years, at both the state and federal level. College athletes have, at times, won big — the introduction of NIL (name, image and likeness) laws have helped athletes earn hundreds of millions of dollars, and a recent House of Representatives settlement allocated $2.8 billion in back pay to Division I athletes who were ineligible for NIL benefits during their college careers. But there have been considerable setbacks, too, and particularly for female athletes (who are only earning 10% of that House settlement).
With NIL and its related developments changing the college athletics landscape so rapidly, legislators are scrambling to regulate the field and establish some consistent processes to govern college sports. The most recent attempt is the SCORE Act, which, among many things, aims to standardize rules and guidelines for college athletes across the country. Some of the rules that would be subject to standardization include when and how athletes can earn money, what schools and boosters can and cannot do, and disclosure and reporting requirements for NIL deals.
Proponents of the SCORE Act — the White House and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee among them — are pointing to the consistency, stability and clarity this legislation would attempt to bring to college athletics. They see the law as a promising way to clear up confusion about the rules that athletes, universities and conferences are expected to follow, which get especially muddled when students enter the transfer portal, which is now happening at an accelerating rate. But at the summit on Thursday, which was chaired by Rep. Lori Trahan (D, MA-3) at the Library of Congress, nearly every one of the 15 speakers at the 3.5-hour hearing voiced their opposition to the SCORE Act, largely because of the negative effects they believe the bill would have on women’s sports.
The SCORE Act, which was introduced in July 2025 by Rep. Gus M. Bilirakis (R, FL-12), does attempt to standardize the tumultuous world of college athletics, but to many, including Thursday’s panelists, that stabilization comes at the expense of protecting student athletes. The bill puts student athletes into a legal category where they are explicitly not employees of their college or university, thus limiting their legal pathways to advocate for themselves if they were ever to need to do that.
And female athletes, as well as Title IX proponents, know that they will likely need to do that. The 50-year old Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, has facilitated massive growth in the world of female college athletics, but women athletes still face serious inequity issues. Legally limiting their ability to advocate for themselves could make their problems worse.
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Burke sees an obvious connection between her work with female professional athletes and the issues surrounding female college athletes. “The NWSLPA is concerned about what’s happening at the college level because we fight the same issues every day — underinvestment, lack of resources, lack of belief that women’s sports are valuable,” she said during her panel testimony.
Burke, who was instrumental in negotiating the NWSL and NWSLPA’s collective bargaining agreement, said the best way to confront these issues in women’s sports has been through unionizing. “Stripping women of the right to organize and join a union strips them of the right to enjoy equal pay and protections in the workplace,” she testified. “Women’s rights and union organizing go hand and hand.
The AFL-CIO Sports Council, a group of eight American players’ unions including the NWSLPA and the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association, opposes the SCORE Act; the council sent a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in July 2025, stating that the bill is “a bad deal for athletes.”
Today, most NCAA athletes are not in a union and are not protected by any collective bargaining agreement. Aside from a few exceptions — such as the Dartmouth men’s basketball team, which unionized in 2024 — there is no union or CBA that can protect student athletes. And the passage of the SCORE Act, Burke and other panelists believe, would move student athletes further away from that protection.
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Panelist Mikayla Pivec, a former D-1 basketball player at Oregon State, echoed Burke’s sentiments when she addressed how important it is for female athletes to have legal mechanisms to protect themselves, especially when they relate to issues of well-being. “There are a ton of health and safety issues at the college level,” Pivec said. “Athletes are pushed to play through injuries. A union is the best way to facilitate protection.”
The SCORE Act is far from becoming legislation; it hasn’t even passed a vote in the House of Representatives. That gives opponents of the bill hope that a better piece of legislation can eclipse it, one that could allow for collective bargaining or a union or — the most aspirational of them all — laws that would term a student athlete an employee. Additionally, Rep. Trahan, who was a D-1 volleyball player herself, has introduced the College Athletics Reform Act, legislation that also aims to stabilize college sports but with more oversight and protection for athletes.
For Burke, Pivec, Trahan and other advocates for women’s college sports, the goal above anything else is to make sure athletes have a voice. Whether or not that means they must be explicitly considered employees is a hard question to answer, Burke admitted. But she believes the only reason anyone is afraid to call a student athlete a worker is because “they’re afraid of it,” and that fear is not a force that should motivate policy-making.
“I don’t believe in the designation around revenue or non-revenue generating for sports, but if we want to work with that mindset for a moment — janitors don’t generate revenue, cafeteria workers don’t generate revenue. And yet they are workers, and they have the right to organize because they provide labor and a service that is valued,” Burke said. “The same is true for athletes. I don’t see why we can’t apply that same logic.”
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