by Matthew Parker
Ohio State Sports Journalism Student 

The NCAA was founded 114 years ago, and ever since student-athletes have earned little more than academic scholarships and some living expenses.

The Professional Collegiate League hopes to change all that.

The league, which is hoping to launch this summer, will provide a competitive option for high school basketball players trying to take the next step in their career, while also allowing athletes to earn a salary and a scholarship, countering the NCAA’s amateurism rules.

“The NCAA is an economic cartel,” Ricky Volante, the CEO and co-founder of the PCL said. “You have a group of competitors coming together to collusively cap the market, to increase the profit share that they're getting, and the amount of profits that they're getting.”

Volante, a lawyer focusing on issues surrounding professional and amateur sports, said the idea of the PCL took hold when Volante met Andy Schwarz, who serves as the chief innovation officer of the league. Schwarz is also a lawyer who had become frustrated with the slow pace of progress he was making against the NCAA in the court system.

Volante, who played college baseball, said he saw the NCAA system through the eyes of an athlete and from a league’s perspective while working at the Mid-American Conference.

This drove him to create a league that competes with the NCAA.

“I had experienced, in a couple of different ways, the wrongs of the system personally,” Volante said. “He (Schwarz) brought the more conceptualized side of things, and working on it from a very different point of view.”

Volante said there are four ways to combat an economic cartel: litigation, legislation, unionization and competition. The first three ways had been tried and failed, leaving Volante and company with only one option: competition.

The PCL has been in the works for around a decade, and Volante says it hopes to start hosting events this year, although the COVID-19 pandemic makes it more challenging.

“We’ve been working towards a launch in ’21 for the last couple of years now,” Volante said. “Realistically, there’s a chance that our first events don’t happen until ’22, but if we feel confident and comfortable with our ability to launch safely for our athletes and our staff then we would still attempt to do so this year.”

Recruiting in the PCL will be done by a centralized basketball operations team, where players will be recruited to the league as opposed to a specific team. This will be done under the supervision of former NBA star David West, who serves as the chief operating officer, as well as the director of basketball operations. 

From there, the league will work with players to identify cities and schools that fit their goals before moving into the contract specifics.

“We would work with them to identify educational institutions physically within that city that they will attend, or alternatively they could go to an online program,” Volante said. “Then we would work through with them what our contract proposal would be, and it won't be identical.”
In other words, if one team already has a couple of star players, the contract to that team would be for less money than a team located in a different city that may still be searching for the lead guy.

Wendell Haskins, who serves as the chief marketing officer of the PCL, was introduced to Volante about a year ago at the NBA All-Star Game in Chicago and said the league’s concept enticed him to partner with Volante.

“I really feel strongly that these young players should have the opportunity to earn money based on their talent,” Haskins, who has a basketball background and had done quite a bit of work with the NBA said.

Volante said he understands the PCL may not be well known yet but says the league will begin increasing its marketing toward fans once rosters become more set in stone.

“Once we have the sponsors and our distribution deal, and our athletes in place, then we can start doing a more aggressive campaign geared towards fans,” Volante said.

Haskins said trying to expand the PCL’s notoriety is difficult when there are many uncertainties about the logistics of the league.

“When we're fully ready and have a schedule and the players and rosters, things of that nature, we'll be able to do more with the actual league,” Haskins said. “We still don't have full team rosters and all of our personnel in place right now.

Volante said he knows that starting a league from scratch isn’t easy, but he expects the PCL to succeed due to the higher talent level he hopes to recruit.

“The XFL are guys that aren’t good enough to play in the NFL,” Volante said. “Whereas we are gearing ourselves towards the up-and-coming stars.”

Volante said he believes the public will be intrigued by the high-level basketball his league will have to offer.

“We’re going to surprise people the caliber of talent we’re able to sign early on,” Volante said. “There’s still a ton of talent that we’ll be able to compete with, and go and get.”