Two women from the Kansas City area are at the center of a growing push to unionize women’s college basketball.
On Friday, the United College Athletes Association said more than 100 women’s college hoops players had joined its campaign to organize the sport. The group says that number is believed to be the largest of college athletes seeking a collective-bargaining agreement, or CBA, with their schools.
The announcement also included another major step: 10 of 13 Oregon State women’s basketball players submitted a petition to the Oregon Employment Relations Board seeking recognition as a union, according to the UCAA. The development followed several days after Stanford football players formed a campus chapter of the College Football Players Association with the aim of collectively bargaining with the ACC.
For the women leading this effort, the work has been building for years.
Two years ago, more than 100 women’s college basketball players signed a letter to the Big Ten and SEC asking for a formal way to work together on issues affecting college athletes. The conferences turned them down, and the players started organizing on their own, eventually creating the United College Athletes Association.
At the center of that movement is an interim executive committee made up of nine current women’s basketball players, including Kansas City native Jada Williams of LSU and Grain Valley product Grace Slaughter of Missouri. The committee also includes Maryland’s Oluchi Okananwa and UCLA’s Charlisse Leger-Walker.
Williams is a senior who was an all-conference point guard at Arizona and Iowa State before transferring to LSU this spring. She grew up in Kansas City and spent her freshman year at Blue Springs High School before moving to La Jolla Country Day School in California.
Slaughter, also a senior, is an all-SEC guard for Missouri and one of the best players to come through the Tigers’ program in years.
In an ESPN report, Williams said a CBA is the right route for college athletes.
“Nobody should be making decisions without us,” Williams said in an ESPN report. “A lot of people treat us like kids, but we live adult lives.
We should negotiate transfers, money, eligibility, everything. We should have a voice in all of it. ...
We’re ready to shake the room.”
The UCAA’s advisory board brings in some serious experience, too. Among its members are NWSLPA executive director and WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike, former National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, and former NFLPA president and ESPN commentator Domonique Foxworth.
The push is unfolding in a college sports landscape still tangled up in NIL, the transfer portal and constant eligibility questions. A CBA would make college athletes employees, something universities have long resisted in the amateur model that generates millions for their athletic departments.
The current wave of organizing looks very different from earlier efforts. Northwestern football tried to unionize in 2015, but the NLRB unanimously declined to hear the case. The Dartmouth men’s basketball team abandoned its attempt in late 2024 after the Trump administration took over the NLRB.
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