The NCAA has long maintained a stranglehold over college athletes, oftentimes preventing them from participating in athletics while they were trying to deal with challenging life situations.
We’ve witnessed it through situations involving student-athletes such as Jeremy Bloom, who was forced to choose between playing football for Colorado or representing the U.S. at the Winter Olympics. We’ve seen it with players who were penalized for, or prevented from trying to transfer without delay while coaches could leave with no harm or limitation.
On Friday, DeJuan Clayton became one of the lucky ones to challenge and defeat the NCAA.
Clayton began his college career in 2016 at Coppin State University in Baltimore. Unfortunately, injuries hampered his time there and he missed numerous games. His fifth season began during the Pandemic, which ultimately didn’t count toward athlete eligibility limits. He then graduated, moved to Connecticut and enrolled at the University of Hartford, where he pursued his next degree and suffered a shoulder injury that limited him to only two games.
He then headed west to the University of California-Berkeley, where things got even uglier.
In a story written by the Riverdale Press, Clayton’s attorney, Diana Florence, noted in a lawsuit that Clayton suffered hamstring injuries and was “forced to endure harsh and egregious treatment of the Cal coaching staff, while simultaneously enduring other well-documented physical and mental health issues.”
Among other things, Florence claimed that the school made him pay for his plane ticket to the West Coast, didn’t provide him with housing or financial assistance and “pressured” him into returning to play before finishing rehab.
“He didn’t have any stipends,” Florence said to the Press. “He was forced to work, and also do a Division I practice schedule.”
That season, in 2022, Clayton played in nine games for Cal, the last being in February 2023. That’s one less game than the 10-game maximum where athletes can earn a medical waiver from the NCAA to remain eligible.
Yet the NCAA denied him the waiver.
Clayton was in NCAA purgatory, waiting for any chance that would allow him to pursue his next opportunity. That movement arrived in December 2023 when U.S. District Judge John Preston Bailey in West Virginia ruled against the NCAA’s two-time transfer rule that required athletes to sit out a year.
So he transferred to Manhattan College in the hopes of playing out his eighth year of eligibility, the chances of which looked very dim.
But this past Friday at 7:48 pm, Clayton received in lifeline from New York Supreme Court Justice Kim Adir Wilson in the Bronx who granted an injunction in his case against the NCAA.
That ruling enabled him to suit up and play in the Jaspers’ game that night against Marist. It also made him eligible for the team’s four remaining games as well as for NIL deals.
So after eight years of disappointment, injuries, stress and legal wrangling, DeJuan Clayton finally earned the right to finish his basketball career on the collegiate hardwood.
And while he finished with 9 points in 10 minutes in a loss to the Red Foxes, what matters is that in the end, DeJuan beat the NCAA and won.
