The State Employee’s Association of North Carolina’s Board of Governors unanimously voted to allow UNC-System athletes who are playing on scholarship to join the association earlier this month.

The ruling will allow SEANC to treat athletes playing for scholarship at a North Carolina state school as state employees, but the potential effects the decision will have on N.C. State Athletics remains unclear.

The rights of college athletes has been a long-time controversial topic of discussion, but recently gained more media attention when the National Labor Relations Board granted the Northwestern University football team the right to unionize in March.

Topics such as compensating athletes beyond their scholarships, giving athletes the rights to their own names sold on memorabilia and profitable TV rights contracts are among those currently being debated in the national spotlight.

SEANC made the decision to allow scholarship athletes to join after the NLRB decision regarding Northwestern University scholarship football players, according to SEANC Communications Director Toni Davis.

“If student scholarship athletes wanted to be represented by a union or an association, we wanted them to know that SEANC was ready to invite them into our association with open arms,” Davis said. 

N.C. State Director of Athletics Debbie Yow declined to comment on the effect the decision may have on athletes at the University. 

“We currently do not understand any of the potential advantages to our student athletes joining the Union,” Yow said in an email. “For that reason, I have nothing definitive to say at this point other than we will continue to do all we can to support our student athletes and that will never change.”

SEANC is an association of state employees with about 55,000 members in every agency around the state. 

“After folks begin to join, the way our association works, we are a membership-driven association so what we lobby for comes from the priorities that our members describe,” Davis said.

Though no UNC-System Athletes have joined at this point, Davis said joining the association could offer scholarship athletes the potential to have the association advocate on their behalf, as well as other membership benefits. 

For a $9 monthly membership fee, N.C. State scholarship athletes would have access to a discount database of more than 3,000 statewide member discounts as well as the option to pursue one of more than 15 insurance programs, according to Davis. 

Davis said, for athletes without full-ride scholarships to the University, the association also offers both merit- and need-based scholarships to members.

SEANC, unlike some associations and unions, doesn’t restrict membership to non-managerial employees, Davis said.

“Our members can be absolutely anyone,” Davis said. “You can be a janitor, you can be the governor. It doesn’t matter. We are here to advocate on your behalf.”

Although there are potential benefits for athletes who join, everything beyond the initial ruling allowing their membership is in the planning and development stage, Davis said.

“We are a membership-driven association, and so if the Board of Governors did not want to move in this direction, we didn’t want to put the cart before the horse and have all sorts of recruiting work ready to go,” Davis said.

From this point forward, SEANC will be working toward making decisions about how it will go about recruiting members, what the governance structure will be like and how the athletes will fit in, according to Davis.  

“Now that work really begins,” Davis said.