Advocating for athletes

Joel Lulla, a lecturer in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations at the Moody College of Communication, has long been known for helping students understand the complex relationship between sports and the media. Recently, that expertise moved from the classroom to the national stage when Lulla, who is also a lawyer, spearheaded a legal case that helped reshape NCAA rules governing student-athlete prize money.

“Back in the fall of 2023, I read an article about a tennis player at the University of North Carolina who had gone through all three rounds of qualifying for the US Open and ended up in the first round of the main draw,” Lulla said. “Even though she lost in the first round of the main draw, she still won $100,000. But the NCAA rule was that you can't keep prize money that exceeds your expenses to play in tournaments”

In the eyes of the NCAA, the prize money had made the player a professional and therefore ineligible to play her sport in college, even though she was still making significantly less money than some other student-athletes whom the NCAA still considered “amateurs”. 

“The more I learned about the situation, it just didn’t seem fair to me,” Lulla said.

Under previous rules, athletes were required to forfeit earnings above “actual and necessary expenses,” a standard critics argued was both vague and outdated. Lulla formed a legal team to help articulate the broader implications of the rule.

Lulla and colleagues framed the issue not simply as a violation of anti-trust laws but also as a question of fairness and modern economic reality. In an era when student-athletes can earn hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars not only from NIL deals and booster payments but also from direct revenue-sharing payments from their schools, the prohibition on prize earnings appeared increasingly inconsistent. Lulla’s analysis helped demonstrate how the rule constrained athletes’ opportunities and failed to reflect the current landscape of amateur and professional sports.

“So, after almost two years of litigation, the NCAA agreed to settle the case and to change the rule for pre-enrollment prize money, not just for tennis players, but for all individual sport athletes” Lulla said. The judge in North Carolina still must approve the settlement for financial damages to the tennis players who forfeited prize money in order to maintain their NCAA eligibility but the rule change for pre-enrollment prize money for all individual sports will remain effective regardless of whether the judge approves the overall settlement.”

With this revision that allows pre-enrollment student-athletes to keep prize money tied directly to their performance, the decision represents a shift in how the organization interprets amateurism and acknowledges the evolving role of athletes in the broader sports economy.

For Lulla, the case also reflects the kind of real world perspective he brings to his work at Moody College. By helping challenge a rule that affected athletes nationwide, Lulla’s work reinforces Moody College’s mission to prepare students not only to understand change in the sports media landscape, but to help shape it.