One college football player has decided against backing down from the overbearing and overreaching monolith that is the NCAA.
Central Florida kicker Donald De La Haye has a rather entertaining YouTube channel that’s so popular it’s working its way towards 70,000 subscribers. As a result of that popularity, De La Haye has generated some revenue from the site, revenue that the native of Costa Rica said he would be sending back to his financially-struggling family.
This past week, word leaked that UCF’s compliance department had informed De La Haye that, if he continues to accept money from the YouTube channel, he’d risk being declared ineligible by the NCAA. This past weekend, the player essentially decided to leave it up to the NCAA to determine whether or not he’ll be allowed to have a future in collegiate sports.
And he did so via, yep, a very passionate video posted to his YouTube channel.
“It’s been extremely tough these past few days. It’s been very hard,” De La Haye said at one point. “I feel like I’m at trial right now. I didn’t do anything bad. ...
“I’ve decided I’m going to continue making my videos. ... Gonna upload regularly to this channel. I’m not demonitizing. I refuse to. So it’s out of my hands now. The decision is in the NCAA’s hands, whether they wanna suspend me or whether they wanna let me do me.”
God bless you, Donald. You have more supporters than you’ll ever know, supporters that hope your fight will, ultimately, lead to some semblance of equity and fairness for student-athletes.
