Three weeks ago on July 31, Judge Charlotte Sweeney granted a class-wide injunction allowing Class of ’26 athletes a fifth year of eligibility, in line with the new 5-in-5 standard.
But today, that ruling was flipped by the Tenth Circuit of the Colorado Court of Appeals, and athletes previously granted a fifth year are no longer eligible.
As primarily a spring sport, the ruling will not have as much of an immediate impact on college tennis compared to say, men’s and women’s soccer whose seasons have already commenced. But individual competition in the fall tennis season will be impacted.
The ruling shuts out players who received eligibility based on the Colorado ruling, but not the plethora of athletes who gained a fifth year of eligibility through other courts, such as in Kentucky, North Carolina and others.
The NCAA has made it clear it will fight to prevent class of 2026 athletes from gaining another year of eligibility outside of the waiver process, and the Colorado ruling is just one example. But in order to correct what it sees as injustice, it will have to fight those other injunctions as well.
If the NCAA fails its appeal process in the other cases (i.e. Kentucky, North Carolina), there will be an eligibility crisis. The law will not be adjudicated equally and universally, and the NCAA will have failed to fairly govern its leagues.
We will likely see a mass of athletes take to the courts and try to gain an injunction through a different avenue, and being on the doorstep of fall competition, we could see a rocky start to the 2026-2027 season.
Some athletes already left their day jobs to return to college athletics for their fifth year after the Colorado ruling. But three weeks later, they may have to transition back into the outside world for the second time, and who knows if this will be the last?
