TCU’s Sedona Prince doesn’t just play women’s basketball, she’s taken on the NCAA — and won.
She was a lead plaintiff in House v. NCAA, one of the lawsuits that led to the nearly $2.8 billion NCAA settlement agreement announced in late May. That agreement has been called “historic” and “transformative” by sports commentators. If approved by a federal judge, the agreement will allow colleges to directly pay their student athletes.
But that’s not the only time Prince starred as a catalyst for change at the national level.
In a viral social media video in March 2021, she exposed the stark weight room disparities between the facilities available to men and women at basketball tournaments.
“I got something to show y’all. So, for the NCAA March Madness — the biggest tournament in college basketball for women — this is our weight room,” Prince says in the video.
She points her phone at a small, lonely tower of dumbbells in the women’s weight room.
“Lemme show y’all the men’s weight room,” she says, cutting to an expansive room with free weights, hand weights and weight machines.
The TikTok took off and led to changes in women’s basketball. To date, it has 3.5 million likes.
The NCAA commissioned an external review on gender equity that showed how the organization had normalized disparities between the conferences. In the year after the video, millions of dollars in new investments were made in the women’s tournament, and in 2022, the women’s tournament was officially branded with the title March Madness, a move the NCAA had previously resisted.
Quick Facts:
Sedona Prince
Hometown: Liberty Hill
Team: Horned Frogs, No. 13
Position: Center
Height: 6 foot, 7 inches
Past Teams
Texas Longhorns (University of Texas at Austin)
Oregon Ducks (University of Oregon)
2023-24 season averages at TCU
19.7 points, 9.7 rebounds, 1.9 assists
55.2% field goal percentage, 35.7% 3-point percentage
Prince joined TCU’s women’s basketball program in the summer of 2023 as a graduate student. In January 2024, she injured a finger and sat on the sidelines until late February, when she was back on the court. In April, she posted on X that she would play for TCU for the upcoming season, her final eligibility year.
“One last ride,” she said, “for a program that made me whole again.”
Her 2021 social media video — made when she was 20 — wasn’t her first effort to advocate for change at the NCAA. In June 2020, when she played for the Oregon Ducks, she and former Arizona State swimmer Grant House became the lead plaintiffs in House v. NCAA.
The lawsuit asks for back pay in the form of damages to student athletes who were unable to earn money on their name, image and likeness, or NIL. In other words, they could not market themselves and receive money to promote products or be in ads.
In June 2021, the NCAA lifted some of the NIL restrictions. The lawsuit also asks that student athletes have a share in the broadcast revenues for collegiate games.
House v. NCAA is one of the lead cases that prompted the settlement agreement. That agreement still awaits final approval from the judge. While the settlement terms don’t go as far as sharing broadcast revenues with student athletes, they do open the door for colleges to directly pay their student athletes.
Prince has not given public interviews on the NCAA settlement agreement. But in 2021, after she posted the video on weight room disparities, she was on a press junket. Her words in an interview with “Good Morning America” forecast the kind of change she would help create.
“When we start talking about these things and when student athletes speak about it, that’s how change happens,” Prince said. “(If) we all help each other and become like a unified system and unit of student athletes, I think it’s the most important thing that we can do.”
Points from the lawsuit: Sedona Prince
Attorneys in the House v. NCAA lawsuit outlined in the court filing how NCAA rules limited Sedona Prince from making money as a student athlete and affected her as a result. Below are arguments from the lawsuit, which have been paraphrased and edited for clarity:
- Prince began her college athletic career in 2018 at the University of Texas at Austin as a Longhorn.
- Attorneys for Prince say that she faced undue stress and hardship in the summer of 2018, when she got a serious leg injury while playing for Team USA in Mexico City.
- Prince did not know if she would play again after the injury. She paid tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and because of NCAA rules at the time of the lawsuit, she was not able to earn money by promoting herself to help cover her medical expenses.
- In summer 2019, she transferred to the University of Oregon, where she sat out for one season because of NCAA transfer rules.
- Fans made “Free Sedona” T-shirts and suggested that she sell them. Prince declined, because she thought if she sold T-shirts with her name and likeness, it would go against NCAA rules. “That really hit home with her as a demonstration of how absurd and unfair the NCAA’s NIL rules truly are,” the lawsuit stated.
- When the lawsuit was filed, Prince had 56,500 followers on TikTok, 11,000 followers on Instagram and 3,370 followers on Twitter. Her audience has grown significantly since, yet at that time she was not able to derive any profit from her social media activity. (The NCAA in 2021 lifted rules that had barred student athletes from profiting off their name, image and likeness.)
- One multimedia campaign promoting the University of Oregon’s women’s basketball team had some of the best viewership in all of women’s basketball. But she wasn’t able to profit from the use of her name, image and likeness in the campaign, according to her attorneys.
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.
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