What California's 'Fair Pay to Play' Law Could Mean for Women's Sports

Camille Mahlknecht knew she wanted to play professional basketball since she was 8 years old. In 2011, the 6-foot-2 center won a full scholarship to California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where her team won two Big West Conference championships and advanced to the first round of the NCAA championship tournament — twice.

It was by all accounts a successful career. Yet the opportunities to play for a professional team after college, when compared to her male peers, were slim. “It’s honestly not even comparable,” she said. There are 10 WNBA teams in the U.S., while the NBA fields 30 teams.

Now a new law, SB 206, could change the landscape for female student-athletes like Mahlknecht by expanding opportunities at the college level.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the “Fair Pay to Play Act” on Monday, he made California the first state in the country to allow collegiate athletes to earn money from endorsements.

This opens up opportunities for athletes to make money from social media ads, sponsorship deals and the use of their image in video games. States like South Carolina and New York are drafting similar legislation.

The law, however directly conflicts with the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) position that strictly bans student-athletes from receiving any kind of endorsement money.

Cecelia Townes, founder of GladiatHers, an organization dedicated to empowering women in sports, said opening up endorsements to amateur athletes will be a game changer, “not just for the growth of collegiate athletics, but also the growth of professional athletics for women.”

While federal laws like Title IX seek to even the playing field for female athletes, women are still underrepresented in college sports, which later impacts their professional opportunities, said Townes. “For a lot of collegiate women, there isn’t an NBA or an NFL that they can go to and just make gobs of money,” she said.

Townes points to the example of swimmer Missy Franklin, the five-time Olympic gold medalist who made her Olympic debut at age 17. Franklin had to forgo money from sponsors in order to preserve her ability to swim in college. What she was giving up could well have been a lot of money: A single sponsorship bonus netted gold medalist Michael Phelps $1 million from Speedo after the Beijing Olympics.

Endorsement contracts can also help shine a brighter spotlight on women’s sports, which Townes said is critical to building a professional presence. “If you don’t have eyes on women in college, you aren’t building a foundation for a professional women’s sport,” she said.

SB 206’s author, state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, acknowledged the benefits that the bill could give female athletes. “Female student-athletes will have the chance to market themselves — giving them a shot at breaking through the male-dominated sports industry and raising the profile of women’s sports overall,” Skinner said in a statement.

The NCAA has expressed opposition to the new law. In a statement, it agreed “changes are needed to continue to support student-athletes, but improvement needs to happen on a national level through the NCAA’s rules-making process. Unfortunately, this new law already is creating confusion for current and future student-athletes, coaches, administrators and campuses, and not just in California.”

Similarly, the collegiate athletic conference Pac-12, which includes UC Berkeley and Stanford, released a statement saying that it was “disappointed” in the passage of SB 206. It added the law “will likely reduce resources and opportunities for student-athletes in Olympic sports and have a negative disparate impact on female student-athletes.” A representative for the organization did not provide additional examples of negative impact before the time this article was published.

Mahlknecht knows firsthand how student-athletes would benefit from having extra income. As a student-athlete at CSUN, she spent roughly 40 hours a week playing basketball. On top of that, she worked as an on-campus tutor for 15 hours a week, and said a lot of her teammates needed to have jobs on the side. She said that having the opportunity to make money through endorsements would have taken away the “stressor of running from practice to your tutoring job … [it] would have been wonderful.”

“I think it’s a win-win,” Townes said. “That’s why it’s almost the perfect opportunity, because it doesn’t require the schools to pay anything. It just says, you know, ‘Hey, athlete X, if they have 200,000 followers on their Instagram because they’re great athletes, they can now benefit from that.’ ”

SB 206 won’t take effect until 2023, which leaves time for further legal battles and negotiations. In the meantime, California has set a high bar for the treatment of its student-athletes, both men and women.