by Daniel Johnson
April 4, 2024
Jeff Landry criticized the LSU girls’s basketball workforce and voiced his displeasure that they weren’t current for the nationwide anthem and known as for his or her scholarships to be revoked for lacking it.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry criticized the LSU girls’s basketball workforce and voiced his displeasure that they weren’t current for the nationwide anthem and known as for his or her scholarships to be revoked for lacking it.
Nonetheless, in keeping with a spokesperson for LSU, the governor’s suggestion goes towards the observe of the Tigers and the Girl Tigers.
Cody Worsham, an LSU athletics spokesperson, informed the Louisiana Illuminator, “Our basketball applications haven’t been on the courtroom for the anthem for the final a number of seasons. Often, the anthem is performed 12 minutes earlier than the sport when the workforce is within the locker room doing ultimate preparations.”
LSU head girls’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey echoed Worsham’s assertion when she was made conscious of the protest from Landry post-game.
“Truthfully, I don’t even know when the anthem was performed,” Mulkey mentioned to reporters on the post-game press convention. “We form of have a routine the place we’re on the ground, then they arrive off on the 12-minute mark.”
The observe, in keeping with the Illuminator, has its roots within the 2016 anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick. On the time, the specter of LSU’s soccer gamers doubtlessly becoming a member of the protests spooked Louisiana legislators so badly that they threatened to tug funding for the college.
LSU’s president on the time, F. King Alexander, informed the lawmakers that the gamers remained within the locker room whereas the anthem was performed, thereby avoiding any potential protests.
In keeping with Sportico, imposing such a requirement on any school athlete would doubtless result in a authorized problem. The First Modification ensures the correct to free speech, which was additional codified within the context of the schooling system by a 1943 Supreme Court docket determination.
In West Virginia State Board of Schooling v. Barnette, the Court docket dominated that college students and academics at public colleges, which LSU is, are given the correct to not salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Landry’s feedback are notably ill-timed for the NCAA, which is in the midst of going through a reckoning over its century-long observe of chopping athletes out of compensation for his or her athletic labor.
Landry’s fellow Republicans are towards the thought of student-athletes forming a union, however Democrats have hinted that they might help a revenue-sharing mannequin. Throughout a listening to in March, California Democrat Rep. Mark DeSaulnier mentioned unionization is the start of fairness for faculty athletes.
“Unionization or the chance for unionization will not be the top however the starting for an equitable system and remedy for individuals who steadily get the quick finish of the stick particularly in a multi-billion business.”
Mark Gaston Pierce, the manager director of the Staff Rights Institute at Georgetown Legislation, informed Inside Greater Ed that the athletes need to obtain their fair proportion, in any other case, it’s simply slavery by one other identify.
“We’re speaking about sports activities being a job right here,” Pierce mentioned. “It’s a job due to the advantages it gives to those establishments in addition to the NCAA. The flexibility to have the ability to reap these advantages equally—or not less than considerably—by an athlete is important. In any other case, we’ve got slavery.”
