NCAA says it won’t retroactively apply age-based eligibility to Class of 2022, will push for reversal of injunction
By Sydney Hunte
Published:
While the NCAA will move forward with its new age-based eligibility model allowing student-athletes to complete five years of eligibility in five years, those rules won’t apply to players from the high school class of 2022 who had already used up four years of eligibility but had hoped to return in 2026.
“The Division I Cabinet, including its student-athlete members, carefully considered whether to make the age-based eligibility rule apply retroactively, and decided that doing so would not be in the best interest of all current and future college athletes,” NCAA chief legal officer Scott Bearby said in a statement released on Tuesday evening.
That comes as an injunction granted by a U.S. District Court judge in Colorado that ran counter to the NCAA’s ruling and would allow Class of 2022 student-athletes to return for a final year even if their eligibility had been exhausted. While the NCAA had hoped to obtain a stay pending appeal, Judge Charlotte Sweeney denied those efforts.
The NCAA will now work with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse Sweeney’s injunction, it said, with the appeals court agreeing to accelerate those efforts.
“We stand behind and will continue to fully defend the membership’s decision,” Bearby said. “The injunction should never have been granted, and we have asked the Tenth Circuit to permanently reverse it.”
Sydney is an Atlanta-based journalist who has covered everything from SEC and ACC football to MLS, the U.S. men's national soccer team and professional tennis. His work has appeared on such platforms as SB Nation, Cox Media Group and FanSided.
