Meet Ramogi Huma, whose decades
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 • 9 min readIt 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.