The Influence of Sedona Prince

At twenty-four years old, Sedona Prince is starting her seventh year of college basketball, but she has only played in seventy games. Last year, her first at Texas Christian University, she averaged roughly twenty points, ten rebounds, and three blocks, but she missed a long portion of the season with a broken finger that required surgery. Before that, a torn ligament in her elbow ended her time at the University of Oregon. And, prior to that, she was forced to sit out her first season at Oregon after transferring from the University of Texas following a horrific leg injury. That broken leg had kept her off the court during her freshman year, at Texas, after she had been one of the top recruits in the country—at six-foot-seven, a dominant presence inside. The injury left her with tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. In retrospect, Texas might wish it had just paid them.

In 2018, Prince had broken her leg while playing for the U.S. U-18 national team, in a game in Mexico the summer before her freshman year. After leaping to block a shot, she came down on her opponent’s shoe, and her fibula and tibia snapped. She flew back to Austin, had an operation to place a rod and two screws in her leg, and, according to ESPN, began rehabilitation with a University of Texas athletic trainer the next day. She immediately began an aggressive rehab program. At the time, her coach told the media that there was a chance that she might be back before the end of the season, calling her recovery “very encouraging.” But, in fact, her fracture, under the stress of so much rehab, wasn’t healing properly.

Her bone had expanded and part of it had died. The antibiotic treatment for an infection sent her to the emergency room. Then the bills arrived. Her personal insurance covered only part of the costs, and an exception in the University of Texas’s secondary coverage absolved its responsibility for the rest; she had suffered the injury while competing for U.S.A. Basketball, not Texas, and the school contended that U.S.A. Basketball was also responsible for paying the follow-up costs. The bills mounted. Prince considered her options. Her dream had been to go to Texas, less than an hour drive from where she’d grown up. She’d committed in the eighth grade. But she was nineteen years old, and fielding calls from debt collectors while feeling “scared, alone,” she told me last month. “I felt like nobody was listening to me.”

In the end, Prince’s father reportedly paid ten thousand dollars out of pocket, while an emergency fund at U.S.A. Basketball covered the rest. Meanwhile, she transferred to Oregon, and asked that the mandatory one-season waiting period be waived in light of her injury and medical treatments. But the N.C.A.A. denied her waiver. She worked with ESPN to share her experience in a long investigative article by Dan Murphy, published in 2021. She was worried about how the story might be received, but the response was tremendous. The ordeal taught Prince a few things. One was that no one in the business of college sports was looking out for her. The second was that she could speak up for herself, and that doing so might help future players as well. “I was, like, Oh, you know, I won,” Prince said.

At one point, her family considered suing Texas to pay her medical expenses, until several attorneys advised them that tort reform made it hard to successfully bring an action against a public university. But some lawyers noted that Prince had around seventeen thousand followers on TikTok. (She’d joined it, she later explained, because she’d been bored while she’d been away from the court.) They told her about the N.C.A.A.’s “name, image, and likeness” (N.I.L.) restrictions. Their firm believed that those restrictions were illegal under antitrust laws. She didn’t get a cut if anyone bought her jersey. She couldn’t utilize her social-media brand to get sponsorships. She couldn’t even set up a GoFundMe to pay off her medical bills.

She was ready to hear it. The experience of being saddled with debt while playing college sports “woke me up very quick at eighteen, nineteen years old to how the N.C.A.A. really treats their athletes, how universities do, and how it just goes,” she told me. So, in June, 2020, Prince and another athlete, the swimmer Grant House, sued the N.C.A.A., and moved to have the suit recognized as a class action, demanding damages for lost television revenue and potential social-media earnings. (A football player, Tymir Oliver, later joined.) It was one of several similar lawsuits at the time pressuring the N.C.A.A. to grant more economic rights to athletes, but it would become perhaps the most consequential of all of them.

The case was scheduled to go to trial in January of 2025, after her expected graduation date. But the N.C.A.A. granted athletes an extra year of eligibility owing to the shortened 2020 season. She continued playing and building her online following. Speaking out was becoming more and more natural. She had practice posting videos and was comfortable in front of the camera. And she had reasons to speak out all around her. It galled her to see how many people wore the jersey of her Oregon teammate, Sabrina Ionescu—perhaps one of the most popular basketball players of either gender—while Ionescu didn’t get a cent. And she could easily see how programs discriminate against female players. Everyone could see: the men had better advertising, better food, better facilities, better swag. None of this was news, and Prince knew that there were athletes and coaches within women’s basketball who had, for years, loudly and tirelessly pointed it out. But, on social media, Prince had a platform that many others did not. And she was “fearless” about using it, she said. What did she have to lose? She was already suing the N.C.A.A.

During March Madness, in 2021, she posted a video comparing the women’s tiny weight room with the men’s vast facility. It went viral, and became national news. Suddenly, Prince was on CNN, and “Good Morning America,” and the Twitter feed of Stephen Curry. It prompted the N.C.A.A. to commission a gender-equity review, which called Prince’s video the “contemporary equivalent of ‘the shot heard round the world.’ ” The report found what many people already knew, that the N.C.A.A. had been grossly undervaluing and underinvesting in women’s basketball.

But the extent of it was just becoming apparent. A month before it was released, the N.C.A.A., under pressure from the lawsuit led by House and Prince, among other legal challenges, changed its rules to allow student athletes to maintain their N.I.L. rights. Athletes could now profit from their own brands, and the women were no longer merely at the mercy of the N.C.A.A.’s neglect. The N.C.A.A., meanwhile, scrambled to scale up its treatment of the women’s basketball tournament to that of the men, helping to set the stage for the explosion of interest in women’s college basketball and the cultural ascendance of Caitlin Clark. Within a year, Prince was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in endorsements. She had 3.1 million followers on TikTok, roughly more than a million more than Nike had at the time.

It is not simple, the business of being a brand. In 2022, Prince told the Wall Street Journal that she spent an hour or two a day recording and editing videos for social media. Prince has cooked food on TikTok, danced on TikTok, brushed her teeth on TikTok, cuddled a hamster on TikTok. In videos, Prince is charming, goofy, a crusader for her causes. In interviews, she’s the same (with less dancing). She has “grown her following by simply being herself—a formerly closeted, shy high school student who found acceptance and now shares that joy with others. She’s a sports star for whom sports are just one thing she does,” the Journal said. The article noted that her “most-viewed clip, seen 32.4 million times” at that point, was a video of Prince trading clothes with her then girlfriend, the TikTok influencer Rylee LeGlue, who was much shorter than her. The clip has since been deleted. It can be a risky thing, leveraging one’s life.

LeGlue and Prince broke up, and TikTok controversy followed. Rumors flew. Had Prince cheated? Had she told LeGlue she’d sue if LeGlue went public? Where were the boundaries around a relationship that played out in public, anyway? None of this, of course, had anything to do with what Prince was doing as a basketball player—but that was just part of the story, and what was happening on the court was that Prince was in pain. She announced that she needed elbow surgery, and left Oregon to move to Los Angeles to heal and begin training for the W.N.B.A. draft. But she felt “lost,” she said.

That spring, she heard that an Oregon assistant coach was heading to Texas to take over the T.C.U. Horned Frogs, who were 1–17 at the time, and told him she wanted to join him. By then, the N.C.A.A. had abandoned the rule requiring transfers to sit out; she was able to play right away. Through the transfer portal, the organization’s database used for players to signal their availability, T.C.U. built a competitive team with Prince at its center, almost overnight. It was a strange season. T.C.U. jumped out to a 13–1 start, largely behind Prince’s inspired, strong play. But then, in early January, she broke her finger. A rash of injuries to many of the team’s other players followed—so many that T.C.U. was forced to hold open tryouts for walk-ons, who somehow kept the team competitive until the stars returned. It seemed like a fairy tale, until the team crashed out in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament in March.

But that was only, as ever, part of Prince’s story. At the end of 2023, a federal judge granted class certification to House v. N.C.A.A., meaning that Prince represented current and former Division I women’s basketball players who, she and the other plaintiffs alleged, had been unlawfully prohibited from maximizing the amount of money they could make from selling the rights to their name, image, and likeness. And in May this year, the lawyers and the N.C.A.A. announced that they had reached a settlement, one that promised to remake the entire business model of college sports. As part of the settlement, the N.C.A.A. agreed to pay $2.75 billion in damages to current athletes and a group of former ones, and it set up a system allowing schools to pay athletes directly via N.I.L. deals up to an allotment of twenty-two per cent (expected to be more than twenty million dollars per school and rising on an annual basis). The judge gave the deal preliminary approval last month.

When she started the suit, Prince hadn’t dreamed that damages would reach near $2.75 billion. The settlement was a tremendous success. But the position of named plaintiff was a strange place to be in. Those were her documents that were turned over; those were her lawyers; and she was the one testifying before Congress. But she also had little control in the entire matter, and she’s troubled by how much the settlement leaves out. There is nothing in it requiring schools to distribute those millions of dollars equitably, or at all. It’s unclear what the settlement means for women’s sports, or Olympic sports, or small schools with not much revenue. There’s nothing in the settlement that says the money can’t all be spent on football recruits. “I think, going forward, it’s a big push to get all student athletes together,” Prince said. The schools don’t have a track record of holding themselves accountable. A lot of student athletes, Prince says, “have no idea what’s about to happen,” and the challenge is making them realize what a big deal this is. She also wants them to optimize their N.I.L. in college to make “as much money as possible,” and to “empower them” by teaching them to “tell their stories,” she told me.