The Big Ten Unity Proposal pitched Wednesday by a number of Big Ten players calls for protection and a real plan from conference leadership in combating the coronavirus pandemic which has ravaged the U.S. Although the idea was spurned from a player at the University of Michigan, he hails from the Garden State, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Over the past few months, as college football has crept closer to a return, Hunter Reynolds could feel something was amiss. A junior defensive back on the Michigan football team, Reynolds was baffled by the lack of communication between student-athletes and the NCAA and Big Ten during the coronavirus pandemic. He wondered why the NCAA, the governing body of college athletics, allowed individual conferences and programs to craft their own safety and testing protocols as players gradually returned to campuses over the summer.
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A former walk-on, Reynolds connected with former Michigan teammate Benjamin St-Juste, now a cornerback at the University of Minnesota. Unlike many student-athletes who are itching to play, Reynolds and St-Juste weren’t as eager to return to the field -- not without the proper protocols in place to protect players from COVID-19.
Their first venture was College Athlete Unity -- a club to empower student-athletes in their fight for justice at their respective colleges. Networking through those channels led to the Big Ten Unity Proposal, which, ultimately, gives the players more power than their coaches, schools and even the Big Ten.
Think of it as a player’s union with more leverage as players don’t have millions of dollars dangling over their heads to play. So there’s less incentive to just shut up and dribble (or run with the ball, in this case).
No team wants to pull a player’s scholarship because he refuses to compete through the climate of COVID-19, increasing the players’ leverage even more.
“Once we started talking to different leaders across different schools in the Big Ten, we came to the consensus that pretty much all of the players we were speaking to had similar concerns,” Reynolds told the Free Press on Monday night. “No one had really asked us what our concerns were or how we felt how those concerns should be addressed.
“We just let (other players) know that we had these concerns over here at Michigan and these concerns over here at Minnesota. We started a dialogue between everyone about how we feel the situation should be handled. There wasn’t really a whole lot of communication between the NCAA and the players, or even the Big Ten and the players.”
In part inspired by the Pac-12 Unity Group that released a series of demands Aug. 2 while threatening to boycott the upcoming season, the Big Ten group posted a proposal of requested measures on The Players’ Tribune on Wednesday after the conference announced its revised schedule and COVID-19 testing protocols. Unlike the Pac-12 players movement, the Big Ten players are not threatening a season boycott or asking for a revenue-sharing agreement with the league.
The full proposal can be read here, but among the notable requests are testing three times a week for all athletes, coaches and others around them, complimentary access to BTN streaming for athlete families, adjustments to cost-of-living stipends and automatic medical redshirts for players who miss any time due to the virus.
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A South Orange native, Reynolds ended his high school career at Choate Rosemary Hall private boarding and day school in Wallingford, Conn., where he was coached by Lawrence Spinnato, and graduated as a member of the Dean’s List and Honor Roll. In addition to playing football, he competed in track and field, where he was a 2017 Class A New England Prep School 4x100-meter relay champion.
He began his high school career at N.J. football pillar Don Bosco Prep (Ramsey), where he lettered for three years before transferring out of state. His father, Tom, played football at Penn from 1987-90. Since walking-on at Michigan in 2017, he’s become a two-time letter-winner, the co-recipient of the 2018 Team’s Scout Team Player of the Year Award (defense), and has appeared in 14 career games.
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(NJ Advance Media’s James Kratch contributed to this report.)
Todderick Hunt may be reached at thunt@njadvancemedia.com.