Rise of the Roster Resistance: House v. NCAA’s Unwelcome Underdogs
Even in a legal saga defined by unpredictability, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken’s decision last week to withhold final approval for the House v. NCAA settlement caught many close observers off guard.
The settlement’s immediate imposition of team roster limits, the final sticking point of the five-year-old case, was barely on the judge’s radar when she granted the deal preliminary approval on Oct. 7. Now it’s the only topic of conversation.
By Wednesday, the parties are required by Wilken to confer on new language to the already-twice amended settlement, this time aimed at safeguarding the collegiate sports careers of current Division I athletes—and possibly even some recruits—from an abrupt end. This overtime legal showdown follows the NCAA and power conferences’ decision to effectively ignore Wilken’s earlier, more tempered warning during the April 7 fairness hearing.
“Implementing roster limits would vastly increase the scholarship opportunities for thousands of student-athletes,” an NCAA spokesperson said, “and the NCAA is working through the judge’s order with defendant conferences and plaintiffs to usher in the most significant changes in college sports in decades.”
While the college sports industry and its governing body have long celebrated a good underdog story, the roster limit resistance movement is one narrative that’s unlikely to make it onto NCAA.org.
A (largely) grassroots coalition of college athletes, their parents and advocates has halted a $2.8 billion settlement—temporarily, at least—that had all the momentum behind it. The resistance has brought forward new and compelling voices, including 18-year-old Gracelyn Laudermilch, a standout high school cross country and track athlete from the tiny town of Rome, Penn. (population: 385), who arguably stole the show at the settlement’s final approval hearing on April 7.
Unlike revenue-sharing rights, which will mostly benefit athletes in a select few sports, the roster resistance movement has gained meaningful traction across the entire landscape of college athletics—from football to crew. Its members argue that they embody the very ideal of the “student-athlete” the NCAA had long claimed to be protecting from the corrupting influence of earned income.
Time and again, over the last decade, the association invoked the voices and stories of walk-ons and nonrevenue sport participants to bolster its case that the “collegiate model” could only endure if it prevented college athletes from earning money from their skill. But now, with the NCAA having mostly abandoned those ramparts of the debate, these same athletes became an inconvenience to resolving three antitrust cases that have threatened the future of its commercial enterprise.
At the same time, the resistance has put the House plaintiffs’ lawyers on the defensive, with critics accusing them of sacrificing a substantial portion of the class to push through a settlement that could net their firms hundreds of millions of dollars. The backlash has fueled mounting tensions between legal teams—particularly that of Steven Molo, of MoloLamken, which represents many of the objectors, and the class counsel led by lawyers Jeffrey Kessler and Steve Berman.
Reflecting on early conversations with class counsel last fall, Molo told Sportico: “We had people reaching out to us about roster limits, saying, ‘You ought to do something.’ And [class counsel] said, ‘Yeah, we got it.’ And, you know, they didn’t get it.”
Berman, bristling at Molo’s criticism, maintains that his team repeatedly urged the NCAA to exclude current athletes from the roster restrictions but made little progress until Wilken’s recent order compelled the change.
“I think this was raised either as a side point for most people or wasn’t really the focus for most people, until the judge started picking up on it,” said Berman. “I’m not saying that it’s not a good, valid concern, but I don’t think it was what the objectors were really focusing on, until they began to see the judge was going to overrule all the other objections.”
Rowing upstream
Molo, a former federal prosecutor and now one of the most sought-after trial lawyers in the country, represented several former NFL players who objected to the league’s concussion settlement a decade ago. Otherwise, he does not typically handle athlete-related cases.
In entering the House case, MoloLamken originally centered its objection on what it viewed as the proposed settlement’s fundamental unfairness to female athletes, who were set to receive significantly less in back pay and future revenue-sharing than their male counterparts.
The firm’s first client was Grace Menke, a Yale rower from Sarasota, Fla., who had befriended the son of MoloLamken partner Tom Wiegand while the Wiegand family was in Florida during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Menke drafted two of her Yale teammates—Maddie Moore and Mia Levy—into the case. They were soon joined by three other collegiate rowers: Sierra Bishop, an All-American at Oregon State and member of the 2021 U.S. Under-23 National Team; Etta Carpenter, a two-time NCAA champion with the University of Texas in 2022 and 2024; and Flannery Dunn, who rowed for George Washington University.
On Aug. 9, 2024, MoloLamken formally objected to the settlement with its first motion in the case, filed on behalf of its six crew clients. All six were eligible members of both the “Additional Sports Class”—which includes non-football and non-men’s basketball athletes who competed between June 15, 2016, and Sep. 15, 2024—and the “Injunctive Relief Class.”
The 30-page motion offered a sweeping critique of the settlement, including a pointed attack on the attorneys who negotiated it.
Three weeks later, Molo messaged Berman and Kessler.
“I want to reiterate that we are not here as a nuisance objector looking for a payout,” Molo wrote, in an email that would later be attached to court pleadings. “We know you have put a lot of work into getting things to this point and recognize that significant progress has been made. We raise our objections in good faith and with the hope of achieving the best possible outcome for student athletes.”
Molo again made his case that athletes adversely impacted by the roster limits for the 2025-26 school year should have separate representation in the settlement.
“We have been aware of this issue and have raised it with the NCAA,” Kessler responded. “Those discussions are continuing. It is an issue of some individual schools possibly re-negging on their commitments to athletes. It does not present any need for separate class counsel.”
After the parties addressed Wilken’s initial concerns—most of which centered on how the settlement handled third-party NIL payments—she granted preliminary approval on Oct. 7. With that green light, the machinery of college sports began shifting into gear, operating under the assumption that this version of the settlement would prevail. In response, schools began preparing to make difficult cuts to their athletic programs, sharpening both scalpel and saw.
Taking stock of the unfolding situation, Noah Henderson—a former collegiate golfer who now teaches sports management at Loyola University—published a column in NIL Daily on Oct. 30 lamenting the “death of the walk-on athlete.”
Henderson had originally committed to West Point during his junior year of high school but ultimately walked on to the golf team at St. Joseph’s just a week before classes began. On the course, he struggled. “I battled some mental stuff, was in and out of the lineup, and never played the way I wanted to,” he said. Still, he eventually earned a scholarship.
“I appreciate the flexibility of the roster because it allowed me to have a career,” Henderson told Sportico this week. At the same time, he became acutely aware of the financial dynamics behind college sports. “I knew my rounds of golf at beautiful country clubs were being subsidized by the men’s basketball team,” he said.
Henderson’s column caught the attention of Michigan walk-on football player John Weidenbach, whose grandfather, Jack Weidenbach, had served as UM’s athletic director in the early 1990s. Weidenbach, in turn, became the first current college athlete to formally write a letter to Wilken on Dec. 9.
“I am aware that many student-athletes will benefit financially from the proposed settlement in this case, but I wish to express that there are thousands of others, like me, who don’t expect anything from it,” Weidenbach told the judge. “Those student-athletes, mostly walk-ons, earned a spot on their team, show up to practice every day, and embody every aspect of what it means to be a student-athlete without any care as to compensation. Yet, thousands of them will be cut—unnecessarily—the moment the settlement is approved due to the roster limits that are set to go into effect.”
(Through a family member, Weidenbach declined an interview request.)
Halfway across the country, Camden Dempsey—a walk-on long snapper at Colorado affectionately known as the “Governor” of CU football—took notice of Weidenbach’s words.
Dempsey, who co-chairs the Big 12 Conference’s chapter of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), initially enrolled at CU on a full-ride academic scholarship in 2021.
Six weeks into his freshman season, Dempsey tore his ACL during practice—a setback that sidelined him and compelled him to find new ways to contribute off the field. In the wake of the injury, he helped launch CU’s first unofficial NIL initiative in early 2022, organizing his fellow offensive linemen for an autograph signing event at a local Boulder bar and restaurant. The group earned $3,000, which they split evenly 10 ways.
While many CU players left the team following Deion Sanders’ arrival as head coach in 2023, Dempsey stayed on, bridging the coaching transition and quickly forging a close bond with the new staff. With both parents working as lawyers, Dempsey had been closely tracking the House case, though he hadn’t considered speaking out until he read Weidenbach’s letter.
“Everything he wrote was perfect,” said Dempsey, “but it wasn’t the quality of the argument that was going to sway the court—it was going to have to be numbers.”
Dempsey recalled sitting in a marketing class when he began drafting his own letter to Wilken. He circulated the letter through a Google link, sending it first to a few friends on the team, then eventually to his Big 12 SAAC cohorts.
Within a week and a half, he had secured 92 co-signatures—not quite the triple-figures he was hoping for, but nothing to sneeze at.
“I will tell you from experience that getting an athlete to sign on to anything is hard,” Dempsey said, “even if it’s what food we should get for the next banquet.”
Although CU didn’t publicly endorse Dempsey’s objection, he said his coaches, including Sanders, and the university’s athletic administration made it clear they supported him behind the scenes.
On New Year’s Day, Dempsey sent his letter to Wilken, bearing the signatures of 43 other Big 12 walk-ons and 49 scholarship athletes.
“We stand united in requesting a grandfathering provision to allow current walk-ons and non-scholarship athletes to complete their athletic careers,” he wrote.
After consulting with his parents, Dempsey decided not to retain counsel as an objector and instead represent himself pro se, figuring his words might carry more weight that way.
Weidenbach, meanwhile, soon joined on with MoloLamken’s other college sports clients, which subsequently came to be known as the Menke-Weidenbach objectors.
Parental dissent
Amid growing uncertainty about their children’s future in college athletics, the mother of a Notre Dame golfer took initiative. On Jan. 12, she organized a Zoom call with a few dozen other parents whose children were at risk of losing their roster spots.
“It made me sick to think that my son—who had worked relentlessly to achieve his dream of competing at Notre Dame—was now faced with an impossible choice: leave his dream school or give up the sport he loved,” said the mother, an executive producer in the advertising industry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Since the previous fall, the Notre Dame golfer’s mom had been active in the “Parents of College Athletes” Facebook group, building connections and gathering support. That Jan. 12 conversation included two attorneys from MoloLamken, as well as Philip Sheng, an intellectual property lawyer at Venable LLP, and Sam Ehrlich, a law professor at Boise State.
Ehrlich has closely tracked college sports antitrust cases, often being the first to share updates from new filings on his X account.
Sheng, for his part, is a former collegiate tennis player at Stanford. Beginning earlier this year, he began curating objectors’ letters on his X account and, as a result, began receiving outreach from athletes and parents. Though he had done small-scale pro bono work advising local Bay Area college athletes on NIL deals, Sheng did not specialize in sports or antitrust law.
“I was pretty much a nobody,” Sheng said in an interview.
One week after the initial meeting, a second Zoom call was held—this time drawing more than 200 participants.
“A large percentage of attendees had never even received the class action notice and had no idea what was unfolding,” the Notre Dame golfer’s mom said.
Following that momentum, she and a handful of other parents launched a series of “Roster Limit Objection” social media accounts—first on TikTok, then Instagram and X—where they shared news articles, objectors’ letters, and eventually video clips from court proceedings. Their aim was to raise awareness, both publicly and within the case, about the wider group affected by the settlement.
That online coordination culminated in a Jan. 31 motion filed by MoloLamken on behalf of 165 objectors—159 of whom challenged the roster limits specifically.
“The thoughtless implementation of roster limits creates pervasive intraclass conflicts,” the motion stated. “Each of the named representatives is a nationally recognized elite athlete who would have never been cut under any roster limit.”
A week before that filing, the Ivy League announced it would opt out of the House settlement entirely—removing Menke and the other Yale crew objectors from the class. Menke, according to multiple sources, is currently back in Florida, taking a post-baccalaureate year before applying to medical school. (She declined to comment for this story.)
Sheng, who has been publicly critical of the class counsel in recent weeks, notes that the plaintiffs’ lawyers originally raised the antitrust problem with roster limits in their second amended complaint filed last July.
But since reaching the settlement, they have joined the NCAA in downplaying the impact of roster limits. “In fact, only nine objectors—out of the thousands of current-athlete class members—even claimed that they had already been cut from their teams due to NCAA roster limits,” class co-counsel wrote in a March 3 motion supporting final approval of the settlement.
To counter that narrative and “expose the real numbers,” the Notre Dame golfer’s mom created a Google survey to track athletes who had been affected. By mid-March, she had counted at least 563 Division I athletes competing in the 2024–25 season who fit the criteria.
In the middle
Gracelyn Laudermilch, a high school senior, was well on her way to realizing her dream of running collegiate track. She had been in conversations with five Division I programs and one NAIA school—her parents’ alma mater—before verbally committing to one of the D-I schools. (She agreed to an interview on the condition that the school not be identified.)
Though non-binding, her verbal commitment basically ended her recruitment; she informed the other schools of her decision and closed off those opportunities.
But on Oct. 31, she received an unexpected call from the coach at her chosen school: the spot was no longer available.
Left scrambling, Laudermilch made two more visits to the NAIA school—her backup plan—while still holding out hope that her original opportunity might somehow be revived.
A few months later, during a practice run, she was listening to a podcast about the House v. NCAA case. Moved by what she heard, she decided to write a letter—though she wasn’t quite sure who the right audience was. She sent it to her local congressman and state representative. Eventually, she was connected to the mother of a Notre Dame golfer involved in the case, who encouraged her to send it directly to the judge.
On Jan. 31, Laudermilch wrote to Wilken, describing the impact of the House case on “thousands of senior student-athletes unable to make a decision on their college sports career due to roster limits and the constant evolution of the NCAA vs. House settlement.” She offered to speak at the upcoming fairness hearing, though she assumed that was a long shot.
“I am literally from the middle of nowhere,” said Laudermilch, who had only recently joined Instagram and X to follow updates about the case.
To her surprise, on March 31—just 11 days after she turned 18—she learned she had been chosen as one of three unrepresented objectors to speak at the April 7 fairness hearing. She dove into preparation.
“We read so many court briefs,” she said. “I’d never read a court brief before this. Almost every night, I was on the phone with someone, going over courtroom etiquette.”
Her family traveled with her to Oakland for the fairness hearing, toting along the laptop she had recently gotten for college.
After hours of discussion, primarily from lawyers, Wilken called Laudermilch to speak.
“I stand here alone today without an attorney, because I had no one representing me or my interests in this settlement,” Laudermilch said, launching into a six-minute speech that was widely viewed as one of the more eloquent and impactful of the hearing.
Two and a half weeks later, Wilken issued an order temporarily denying approval of the settlement, granting the parties an additional 14 days to confer and revise the agreement to reduce the harm that would result from the immediate implementation of roster limits.
“Any disruption that may occur is a problem of Defendants’ and NCAA members schools’ own making,” Wilken wrote, adopting a line, nearly verbatim, that had appeared in a MoloLamken filing.
In addition, Wilken ordered that Molo and two other objectors’ attorneys would be able to confer with the court-appointed mediator in the case.
Laudermilch was sitting at her family’s kitchen table in Pennsylvania last week when a text arrived with news of Wilken’s order. She bolted out of the house screaming, to the alarm of her parents, overwhelmed by the moment. Despite the sudden attention, she still has just one active Division I suitor: her original top choice. To avoid jeopardizing the opportunity, she’s chosen not to name the school publicly.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Camden Dempsey was about to take the stage for the final round of CU Boulder’s New Venture Challenge—the university’s flagship entrepreneurship competition—when a text from his mom brought him the same news. Not long after, Dempsey and his two pitch partners won the event, earning $144,000 toward launching their AI-powered digital title insurance startup.
Dempsey, for the record, said he wasn’t surprised by Wilken’s order.
“The last group I would go after are walk-ons,” Dempsey said. “These are the people not getting money.”
When all is said and done, this may prove to be just a two-week speed bump on the road to the settlement’s approval and a small footnote in the history of House.
Assuming the sides can sufficiently address Wilken’s near-term concerns—the judge has said she has no problem, in general, with rosters being capped—it is hard to know whether this specific movement has any legs beyond next week. But even if that’s the end of it, the underdog story of the roster resistance stands as a timely reminder of that widely repeated piece of deductive reasoning—echoed by countless college coaches in countless team huddles—on the misperception of finality.
“We got to get some of these attorneys on the field sometime,” said Dempsey, “so they learn you don’t have it in the bag until the clock says zero.”
(This story has been updated in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect Wilken’s order. This story has also been corrected in the 15th-to-last paragraph to clarify when Laudermilch turned 18.)
