The head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks is stepping down from his role.

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2025 was a historic year for the club. The team set their franchise record for wins in a season, as they finished the season with a 97-65 record. 

The post ‘It should be a holiday’: Milwaukee Brewers fans celebrate start of the 2026 season  appeared first on WPR.

WASHINGTON — Mikayla Pivec said she worked more than 50 hours per week as a women’s college basketball player, but earned less than $8 an hour from a $1,600 monthly stipend.

The professional basketball player and former star at Oregon State University said she was testifying at Thursday’s U.S. Senate panel hearing on reshaping college athletics because “the NCAA has failed and continues to fail to protect and respect college athletes.” 

Pivec, who worked for a food delivery service and “collected cans” to make ends meet in college, played for Oregon State prior to the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines that allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL.

“NIL has helped some players, but most still earn less than $10 an hour and struggle to pay for basic necessities,” she told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. 

Pivec said “the lack of protections goes way beyond money,” noting that she had a foot injury that needed surgery and was denied an MRI “every single time” she requested one.

She is the co-founder and organizing director of the United College Athletes Association, a players’ association that aims to ensure college athletes are protected, educated and fairly compensated. 

Another ‘unfair system’

The college sports landscape continues to grapple with gender inequity in NIL deals, a patchwork of state NIL laws, booster collectives and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues. 

Just last year, a federal judge approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

At a White House roundtable this month, President Donald Trump vowed to imminently deliver an executive order aimed at reshaping college sports. 

“The current landscape is just replacing one unfair system for another,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate HELP Committee.

“Short-term financial gain with NIL deals is overshadowing the value of an education and the value of Olympic and women’s sports,” the Louisiana Republican said. 

Employees?

The fierce debate over whether college athletes should be considered employees took center stage Thursday, drawing mixed attitudes from senators, experts, leaders and athletes. 

“I think the political dynamic is that Republicans and Democrats aren’t that far off from what we agree on — it’s just this one small issue that gets in the way from us passing something related to unionization and how we treat students-athletes, whether we treat them as employees or not,” said Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican. 

A bipartisan bill on pause in the U.S. House looks to create a national framework for college athletes’ compensation and would prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees. 

The measure would also give broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences.

Sen. Chris Murphy, who has advocated for collective bargaining, said he does not want Congress “in the business of micromanaging college athletics and how compensation works.”

“That just doesn’t feel like our role,” the Connecticut Democrat said, while blasting the bipartisan bill as an “effort to put the big schools back in a position where they can collude and wage-suppress.” 

Trayvean Scott, vice president of Intercollegiate Athletics at Grambling State University in Louisiana, pointed to a “strain” that athletic departments, and under-resourced institutions in particular, would begin to face as a consequence of student-athletes becoming employees.

“When you look at that, my belief is that roster spots will start to be reduced, specifically to those non-revenue sports, specifically on the men’s side,” he said. “For an institution at Grambling State University, where we have 15 Division I sports, that means baseball is probably going to go first.”

On Sunday, the UW Badgers women's hockey team won 3-2 against number-one seeded Ohio State in the NCAA Frozen Four tournament.

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Chad McGehee started as the director of meditation training at Wisconsin Athletics in 2020 — the first ever person to hold that title in a major college sports program. McGehee tells athletes that meditation is “strength and conditioning for the mind.” 

The post Conditioning for the mind: UW-Madison athletes prepare with meditation appeared first on WPR.

Brice Christianson is using his experience as a Child of Deaf Adults to open up sports broadcasting to the Deaf community through live ASL play-by-plays.

The post This Wisconsin native is working to broadcast hockey games for people in the Deaf community appeared first on WPR.

Wisconsin lawmakers are advancing a bill through the Senate that would place policies in statute and provide funding to help the University of Wisconsin navigate changes in college sports allowing  student athletes to make money off their name, image and likeness (NIL). 

University of Wisconsin-Madison Athletic Director Chris McIntosh said at a public hearing on the bill last week that the measure is necessary to help UW maintain its athletics programs and competitiveness. 

A recent landmark antitrust settlement in a House v. NCAA lawsuit allows college athletics programs to directly provide NIL compensation to student athletes. 

According to written testimony, starting in fiscal year 2026 the settlement will add an expected $20.5 million annual expense to the UW-Madison athletics budget to cover the cost of the revenue-sharing requirements. The settlement allows schools to pay athletes up to an annual cap that starts at about $20.5 million per school in 2025-26 and increases every year potentially reaching over $32 million by 2035.

AB 1034 would provide $14.6 million annually in state funds to go towards debt service for the maintenance costs of UW-Madison’s athletic facilities. It also includes $200,000 annually in state funds for debt service for maintenance costs of the UW–Milwaukee Klotsche Center as well as $200,000 for the UW-Green Bay soccer complex. The purpose is to free up funds that the UW can use to provide students with opportunities for NIL agreements. 

“If this bill doesn’t pass and is pushed off into the future, it will continue to put tremendous financial strain on athletics and on the university. We will have our backs up against a wall financially by the time that this would come forward in 2027,” McIntosh said. UW-Madison has 23 sports teams and he said this would especially help support its Olympic and women’s programs.

Without the bill, McIntosh said UW-Madison will need to reevaluate “our expectations on the success of our sports” or “how they’re supported or how many of them exist.”

There are at least 32 states that have passed laws to regulate NIL agreements for student athletes. 

The bill seeks to codify the policies that UW-Madison and other campuses already have in state law. Some of those include prohibiting NIL contracts that conflict with school policies or  provide money in exchange for athletic performance, as well as those that require student athletes to endorse alcoholic beverages, gambling, banned athletic substances or illegal activities or substances. It also includes a requirement that student athletes disclose third-party NIL deals they enter. 

UW schools will also be able to contract with organizations that can help student athletes find NIL opportunities.

The bill is coauthored by Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and Reps. Alex Dallman (R-Markesan), Scott Krug (R-Rome) and Paul Tittl (R-Manitowoc). 

UW exempted from state open records law

Open records advocates have questioned the broad nature of an open records exemption included in the bill.

Beth Bennett, executive director of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, said in written testimony that the language in the bill related to open records “appears to extend far beyond” its intended purpose and could “create a sweeping exemption for any financial record connected to a public university’s athletic program.”

The language included in the bill states that “to protect competitive interests and student privacy,” records related to the “generation, deployment, or allocation of revenue generated by an intercollegiate athletic program that are the subject of reasonable efforts under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of the records, when competitive reasons require confidentiality” will not be subject to the open records law. 

Bennett said the bill “creates a subjective and potentially expansive loophole” that would “enable a public institution to shield broad categories of financial decision-making from scrutiny simply by asserting competitive harm” and undermine “Wisconsin’s long-standing commitment to open government.”

Bennett said the bill’s language should be narrowly tailored if it is seeking to protect sensitive NIL agreements involving student-athletes.

Nancy Lynch, vice chancellor for legal affairs for UW-Madison, told lawmakers at the Senate public hearing on the bill that it would put the university on a competitive footing with peer institutions in other states, and said the open records exemption is important for that purpose. 

“The need for the explicit exemption is focused on protecting competitive interests and student privacy,” Lynch said. “We seek only to codify our existing practice of denying access to student athlete NIL agreements and certain university records that are related to NIL strategy, allocation, revenue generation and use, the release of which would put us at a competitive disadvantage with our competitors. 

Lynch said the provision would just provide “certainty” for student athletes and “clarity” for records seekers, not give them “an unlimited exemption to withhold anything we wish.” She noted that UW-Madison has released NIL records that don’t implicate students or competitive interests including its temporary NIL policy and the full athletics budget.

“This legislation would not change that,” she said. 

However, she said the broad nature of the language would provide flexibility that allows the university to determine their response as requests come in.

“As the NIL landscape continues to evolve, the language as it’s been drafted helps us anticipate additional types of records that we don’t know yet may exist,” Lynch said.

A Legislative Council member told lawmakers during the hearing that the specific language in the bill “is not limited to the name, image or likeness under that specific phrasing,” but “does have to be limited to … generation, deployment or allocation of revenue related to the athletic program and it has to be when competitive reasons require the confidentiality.”

Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) asked whether the university would be open to an amendment that would ensure that the language applies to NIL.

Lynch said she didn’t necessarily have an objection to that but noted that the bill is not currently written that way and changes to the bill at this point could delay the legislation until the next legislative session. 

The Assembly passed the bill in a 95-1 vote with little floor debate last month. 

The state Senate will be in session in March, but the Assembly adjourned for its last regular floor session last month. Any changes to the NIL bill would need to be approved by both the Senate and the Assembly before the bill could go to Gov. Tony Evers.

The Joint Finance Committee voted 8-5 Tuesday to concur in the bill. There was no debate on the bill, though Sens. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond), Julian Bradley (R-New Berlin), LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) and Kelda Roys (D-Madison) all voted against it.

The Senate Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development committee also voted 3-2 via paper ballot Wednesday to approve the bill with Bradley and Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) in opposition.

With four Republicans opposing, the bill will likely need Democratic support to pass in the Senate.

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The Legislature's budget committee voted Wednesday to give more than $14 million a year to UW-Madison for athletic facilities costs as the sports powerhouse pays student athletes for “name, image, likeness” deals, known as NIL.

The post Legislative committee advances funds so UW-Madison can pay student athletes appeared first on WPR.

WASHINGTON — A U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday added to the fierce debate over compensation for student-athletes, with senators and experts agreeing the current system wasn’t working but with different ideas for a path forward.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, hosted a roundtable of experts, leaders and former college and professional athletes to discuss “fixing college sports.”

Cassidy said the “current system is actually hurting the student-athlete.”

“Our effort will be, what do we do to protect the student-athlete?” he continued, adding that approach would also protect universities.

Two of the five panelists Cassidy brought in hailed from Louisiana State University, including Collis Temple Jr., a member of the LSU Board of Supervisors and former basketball star at the university, along with Julie Cromer, executive deputy athletic director and chief operating officer for LSU Athletics. 

The event came on the heels of a White House roundtable last week, where President Donald Trump pledged to imminently deliver an executive order aimed at reshaping college sports. 

Debate over athletes as employees

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. 

A federal judge in June 2025 approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The rules for name, image and likeness deals vary from state to state.

The college sports landscape is also wrestling with gender inequity in NIL deals and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

A bipartisan bill on pause in the U.S. House aims to create a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. It would also prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees while providing broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, expressed optimism over the bill’s fate during the White House roundtable, saying “we’re right on the verge of passage in the House and we now think we have the votes to do that.” 

But the bill would face a dismal path in the Senate, where Senate Democrats have pushed back against it.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan proposal from GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state would provide “a new antitrust exemption allowing college football institutions to jointly sell media rights” and make it “optional for conferences and schools to pool their media rights together.”

Conversation between schools and athletes needed

Jim Carr, president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, said “the implications of student-athletes becoming employees, or a lot of these court decisions that are making it difficult to enforce our rules around what we call education-based athletics, is really — I don’t think it’s an overstatement or being too dramatic to say — critical to not only the NAIA but each of our institutions being able to stay in business on a long-term basis.” 

Carr, whose association includes roughly 250 institutions, said at an average NAIA school, 36% of the students are also athletes.

Sen. Chris Murphy called for collective bargaining, where athletes can “speak for themselves,” noting that Congress should not “micromanage” the relationship between colleges and college athletes. 

“We should just empower the colleges or the conferences and the athletes to have a conversation between themselves,” the Connecticut Democrat said. 

Bernard Dennis III, principal at Jackson Lewis P.C. and an employment and sports law expert, said that if students are classified as employees, “they then become subject to several statutory schemes, not the least of which would be the (Fair Labor Standards Act), which would allow them to be compensated for their work time, for overtime and then it becomes a challenge in what constitutes that.”

He added that “under the law, it would be anything that is required for their work, and so when you have eligibility rules about maintaining a certain GPA, things like that, it becomes not only your time on the field, but does going to class become compensable work time? How do you track that?”

UW-Oshkosh is one of at least 10 Wisconsin colleges that have added or announced plans to add women’s flag football, according to Collegiate Flag Football, an online publication tracking the sport's growth.

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