Profile Post

While there are a number of people who have published various white papers and studies about student athletes and our struggles, I haven’t found too many who blog about the subject. That said,

I did find a person who had been blogging from 2013–2015 about student athletes, the NCAA, and sports law. Her name is Saya Mengenai. She attended Harvard Law School, where it appears she focused primarily on sports law.

Her posts, written from a lawyer’s perspective, cover both collegiate and professional sports. In them she persuasively argues for the rights of athletes.

She blogs anywhere between 10–30+ times a month. In 2013 she blogged from February-December. In 2014 she blogged from January-December, and in 2015 she blogged from January-March.

Throughout her posts she uses hyperlinks to different sites to emphasize/add some “juice” to the topic she is blogging about. She uses them as references as well. It is clear from how she speaks on the different subjects she is looking at them through a lawyer’s perspective. However, in almost all of what I had read, she was very much on the side of the athletes.

For example in a blog post titled Testing the NBA Draft Waters in 2015, she goes into depth about how the NCAA and the NBA make it very difficult for student athletes to declare for the draft, and make a decision on whether to enter or remain in school. This is because both organizations are not on the same page, and the NCAA makes student-athletes make their decision too early before they are able to “test the waters” with the NBA league. She argues that the NCAA only looks out for the needs and desires of the coaches rather than the student-athletes.

Ironically because the NCAA’s main purpose is to help maintain the long lasting success of student-athletes, and its rules were put in place to make sure that student-athletes were protected, as well as have a voice in situations like this. Unfortunately, the NCAA is corrupt and only cares about what is going to make its members more money. Thus, the organization doesn’t really care about the athletes once they decide to become professionals. It only cares about them while they are in college. Even then the NCAA only sees these student-athletes as revenue generators rather than people. She also argues that, the attention an athlete receives from the NCAA, in regards to perks or help etc., all depends on the sport an athlete plays (aka football and men’s basketball > everyone else).

I believe Saya Mengenai is a foreigner and it can be seen in her word choices. I have no idea what some of them mean, or how to pronounce them. Frankly, I never seen them before. Also the months are in different languages for example the month of February is spelled Februari.

Overall she does a great job in her posts, and it was refreshing reading up on someone else who blogs on the topic of student athletes, especially from the perspective of a law student.