Swimmer Chris Jennings Among the Plaintiffs in Division III Eligibility Suit
Former NCAA swimmer Chris Jennings is among three plaintiffs in an antitrust suit against the NCAA prohibition on Division III scholarships.
The suits was filed last week in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California. It is seeking class-action status in seeking to both secure an injunction to stop the practice and recover damages for athletes.
Jennings is one of three plaintiffs. He’s a former swimmer and lacrosse player at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia from 2019-23. Also putting their names to the suit are Jackson Hale, a current senior defensive back at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington, and Connor Printz, who played basketball and Claremont McKenna College in California from 2020-24.
A hallmark of Division III athletics is its Bylaw 15.01.3, which says that member institutions, “shall not award financial aid to any student on the basis of athletics leadership, ability, participation or performance.” Students who attend those universities to play sports do not do so on athletic scholarships, though they may receive financial aid via other methods or criteria, including merit-based aid.
The lawsuit argues that this amounts to “an ongoing conspiracy to fix the price of Division III athletic labor at zero” for more than 400 schools and an estimated population of up to 200,000 athletes annually. Damages, which the case dates to Oct. 21, 2022, could run into the billions.
Division III is at the base of the NCAA pyramid and its largest share of institutions. The lack of scholarships is a selling point for many. It allows them to field more programs on a level playing field with other institutions and with the intensity turned down from the Division I and II levels, where scholarship places are scarce and hotly contested.
If the plaintiffs are successful, Division III schools would be allowed but not required to offer athletic scholarships, likely sparking an arms race among institutions. (The NCAA will file a formal response in the coming months but did not comment on the initial filing; any litigation is expected to take years to move forward.)
D3 athletics is even more of an outlier since the House settlement, a suit brought by a number of athletes against the NCAA (and with a swimmer as the lead named plaintiff). That forced Division I institutions to compensate athletes by sharing the revenue generated by the sports in which they compete in a pooled fashion – capped at $20.5 million per school in 2025-26. A byproduct has been a move away from scholarship limits to strictly regulated roster quotas, all of which is separate from the fundraising engine of name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities.
Division I athletes can be paid directly by the school in addition to scholarships and NIL. Division II athletes get scholarships but not direct pay via the House settlement. Division III athletes, as Printz himself did, are eligible to earn money from NIL sources but not in the form of athletic scholarships or direct pay.
The current suit builds Rock v. NCAA, which challenged NCAA restrictions on athlete financial aid. It was dismissed in 2013, but it was argued by Steve Berman, who later worked on the House case. The suit also shares a framework with NCAA v. Alston, which opened the door to NIL money.