Dartmouth Basketball’s Union Took Shape in the Campus Dining Hall

Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team congregated at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a dreary, drizzly Tuesday and walked over to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. Then they went up to a second-floor conference room and took a vote that had been six months — or rather, many years — in the making.

When the yellow sheets of paper were tallied and certified about an hour later, the basketball players had accomplished something no other college athletes had done.

By a 13-2 vote, they had formed a union.

“It’s definitely becoming more real,” Cade Haskins, a junior on the basketball team and a leader of the effort, said to about a dozen reporters after the vote. “We know this could potentially be making history. That wasn’t the reason we were doing it, but to do that can be scary and daunting.”

Haskins expressed hope that his peers across the Ivy League and the rest of the country would soon be recognized as employees under federal labor law — a classification that has been a red line for college sports leaders who would be forced to share revenue directly with athletes.

But at a time when college sports’ amateur model is buckling under the strain of antitrust lawsuits, unfair labor challenges and waning support in Congress, it is unclear whether Tuesday’s election will be remembered as a signature moment or a footnote.

There is no visible movement to organize by other Dartmouth teams. And a reminder that the case is far from final arrived just before the vote: Dartmouth filed an appeal of a regional director’s decision last month to classify the players as employees to the full National Labor Relations Board, which has jurisdiction only over private employers.