Meet Ramogi Huma, whose decades-long crusade for fairness in college athletics is finally coming to fruition

If you don't know his name, you certainly know what he has wrought

By Dennis Dodd May 15, 2024 at 8:45 pm ET• 9 min read

It was a team meeting you'd never want to be a part of. Ramogi Huma was a wide-eyed prospect from Covina, California, in the mid-1990s absorbing the ground rules for playing at UCLA.

"They called them voluntary workouts, but they clearly weren't voluntary," said Huma, a linebacker who went on to grab all of two career interceptions. "When we were told that the NCAA had a rule that, should we be injured during summer workouts, UCLA was prohibited from paying for our medical expenses, that was a big deal for me."

So big that something clicked. Something bigger than himself and, ultimately, bigger than the NCAA and college athletics.

A players' rights movement was born. A quarter of a century later, Huma is college athletics' chief activist. The title, well, we just gave him that because the folks he antagonizes certainly won't.