When Sports Law and Public Relations Coincide
Here is a public relations disaster in waiting. According to this report, the NCAA may soon be testing for sickle cell:
As part of a settlement the NCAA agreed to recommend that all universities and colleges offer athletes screening for the sickle cell trait. And Rice University will propose a bylaw at the association’s annual meeting to make that mandatory. Currently, 64 percent of colleges screen for the sickle cell trait.
This sounds like a ripe sports law action the first time an athlete is excluded from competition because of this testing, at least based on rudimentary data regarding the prevalence of the trait in African Americans over those of other races. While I will not pretend to be an expert on genetics, it seems that this potential regulation may be taking things a little too far. If anything, I think it would lead to an increase in certain types of waivers of liability. In other words, schools would probably not be able to ban athletes from competing, but if the student-athlete is identified as possessing the trait, he would have to acknowledge its existence, and hold the institution harmless.
There is also an argument about the “slippery slope” which says that once institutions start testing for one trait, what is to stop them from testing for dozens of other specific characteristics and “discriminating” on that basis? I do not envision that the sickle cell testing would lead to this slippery slope, but this is a sports law trend that is worth keeping an eye on.
