It was fitting that Grant House was wearing a swimsuit when he took the phone call that upended his life.
This was the spring of 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. House was a junior at Arizona State and a member of the swim and dive team. After a workout, the swimmers were lying beside the pool when House overheard a fellow swimmer talking to her mother.
“I have the perfect guy for you,” she said. Then she handed House her phone.
House became intrigued as his teammate’s mother, an attorney, explained that her law firm planned to file a class action lawsuit against the NCAA and was searching for potential plaintiffs. And he was indeed a perfect fit. House was a straight-A student who was the president of ASU’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. He had also won two silver medals for the U.S. at the 2019 Pan Am Games, and a gold in the 2019 World University Games in Naples, Italy. House was thoughtful, articulate and poised, a natural-born leader.
That conversation led to a few more with other lawyers, one of whom asked if House would be willing to serve as one of the named plaintiffs. “I saw it as a no brainer,” House told Hoops HQ. “I figured I can help more athletes.”
Four months later, House was driving and noticed his mother had tried to call him several times. He rang her back. She answered in a panic, having learned that “House sues NCAA” headlines were rocketing around the internet. According to House, the lawyers told him that he had another week before they were going to file. He planned on having more extensive conversations with his family and people at ASU to prepare them.
Now, however, he had to pivot into damage control. That included conversations with several ASU administrators who were livid at having been blindided by the news that one of their most prominent athletes was in effect suing them. “I thought I had a lot more time to tell people," House recalled. "At that point, I didn’t understand the magnitude of what it was.”
That would not be the last time House was unpleasantly surprised during what has been an unpredictable, unsettling and immensely consequential journey since he took that fateful phone call more than five years ago. The case is technically called Grant House and Sedona Prince v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, et al. (Prince is a basketball player at TCU), but it is commonly referred to as House v. NCAA, or more succinctly “the House case.” (And more recently, “the House settlement.”) The case and the two attendant class actions have combined with previous rulings to shatter the NCAA’s longstanding amateurism model, ushering in a new era in which college athletes are finally getting paid for their efforts. Judge Claudia Wilken, who has presided over all these cases, is potentially days away from certifying the settlement that was negotiated between the parties. That agreement includes $2.75 billion in payments from the NCAA to former athletes, and establishes a system of revenue sharing and governance over Name, Image and Likeness contracts moving forward. For an industry that for so long refused any whiff of change, the transformation has been rapid and seismic.
It would be inaccurate to say all of this is happening because of a single swimmer at Arizona State. But for better or worse, it is House’s name that has been blasted in headlines and dragged through the mud. “Every time I see the headlines, I wonder...."
