In October 2020, the NCAA stripped away all titles, including the Atlantic-10 Conference title, from all three seasons that Brittany Collens played at UMass, practically erasing her and her fellow teammates' college careers. UMass had discovered an accounting error that gave Collens and her teammate an extra $252 of scholarship money towards a landline phone jack. When the school self-reported the error, the NCAA decided the money towards the phone jack gave the tennis program a competitive advantage and decided to delete the team's records.
Collens, a 2017 UMass Journalism graduate, recently met with a group of students in the Journalism Hub to talk about her efforts to help reform how the NCAA treats college athletes.
While the NCAA likes to glorify the image of college athletics, Collens quickly learned how different this image actually is. After learning she wasn't allowed to sit in on any hearings the NCAA holds, Collens asked why this rule exists, and the answer given back was simply that athletes can't participate because the punishments are aimed at the universities, not the student-athletes.
"They don't want athletes' voices to be heard," said Collens.
Not only can athletes not attend hearings, but Collens also explained how she was not allowed to teach tennis over her off-seasons. She also had limits as to what major she could choose to pursue.
"It's kind of a system where if you're in a bad situation, you're trapped," said Collens. Freshman year, she transferred from New Mexico State University to UMass because they wouldn't allow her to pick sports journalism as her major.
Since graduating from UMass Amherst with a journalism degree in 2017, Collens has certainly put her major to good use, interviewing as many sources as she can regarding the NCAA and athletes' experiences while also writing articles herself about her own experience and how society can help change, such as her piece in the Players Tribune.
She described her life in the past six months as a full-time job, putting in eight-hour days talking to senators, fellow journalists, former athletes, and current athletes while also playing professionally. All while playing professional tennis.