The University of Oregon filed three motions seeking to dismiss or limit aspects of the federal Title IX lawsuit brought against it by current and former members of the school’s varsity beach volleyball and club rowing teams.

UO’s outside counsel from Perkins Coie LLP filed a motion for summary judgment related to a statute of limitations, a motion for judgment on one of the claims and takes exception to “novel legal theory” pertaining to name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation to athletes, and a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction last week.

A settlement conference between the parties is scheduled for July 18 in Portland and several other deadlines from November to June 2025 are set in the case, Schroeder et al. v. University of Oregon, in which the women’s athletes are seeking class status and claim the university is “depriving its female student-athletes of equal treatment, equal athletic financial aid, and equal opportunities to participate in varsity athletics in violation of Title IX,” the 1972 federal law that requires women and men be provided equitable opportunities to participate in sports.

The university argues the statute of limitations for the claims brought by the players — all of which it denied in its March response — should be limited to either one or “at most two years” and thus requires some claims be dismissed.

“Plaintiffs were on notice of the alleged discriminatory behavior when they accepted offers to attend the University, or at the latest when they arrived on campus and began participating in their respective sports,” the university’s motion states. “The limitations period began to run at that time.”

UO is requesting the claims of 21 players be dismissed since they are beyond a two-year statute of limitations the university is arguing should apply, if not one year. Separately, it states the female athletes “do not allege that they have been treated less favorably than similarly situated male student-athletes” at UO and takes greatest exception to comparisons in resources between the beach volleyball and football programs.

The case is also the first known Title IX lawsuit seeking damages related to alleged disparate NIL opportunities and compensation and though the players have not sued Division Street, UO’s official athletic collective, or Opendorse, which administers its NIL marketplace, the relationships between those entities and the school is cited in the complaint.

“The NIL system is administered through independent collectives — not by the University,” one of UO’s motions states. “And Plaintiffs have not alleged that the University directly or even indirectly controls the allocation of NIL proceeds by these third-party collectives. Further, under the current NCAA Bylaws, universities cannot assist student-athletes in marketing their athletics ability or reputation. ... The outside entities offering those NIL opportunities are private companies that are not subject to Title IX. No law or facts support grafting an outside entities’ activities onto the University, and then making the University responsible for those entities’ actions.”

However, the NCAA recently approved changes to its NIL policies to permit schools to be actively engaged in brokering and such opportunities for its athletes. Also, Oregon House Bill 4119 was signed into law earlier this spring, amending the state’s NIL law to permit state universities and their employees to participate in “identifying, facilitating, enabling or supporting opportunities for a current student athlete to exercise the student athlete’s” NIL rights without fear of penalty from the NCAA or other athletic governing body.

“We believe all these motions are meritless,” said Arthur Bryant of Bailey & Glasser, LLP, who is representing the current and former beach volleyball players and club rowing team members. “They are based on inaccurate perceptions or misrepresentations of the facts or the law.

“The complaint very clearly that female student-athletes as a whole at Oregon are treated way worse than male student-athletes at Oregon and it cites specific facts in support of that. The notion that we’re just comparing beach volleyball players and football is just false.”

As to UO’s relationship with Division Street and Opendorse, Bryant said, “they are not truly independent third-parties.”

The lawsuit, which seeks millions of dollars in damages, was filed in December following an investigative report by The Oregonian/OregonLive in July 2023 detailing disparate treatment of players on Oregon’s beach volleyball team, which has never received athletic scholarship funding and practices and plays rare home matches at Amazon Park, a public park in Eugene.

UO notes it selected an on-campus location for a new beach volleyball facility, which was approved by the school’s campus planning committee in October and originally anticipated to be completed as early as fall 2025 but was pushed back to fall 2026 due to an unrelated construction matter at the school. The school also states it has “allocated the NCAA maximum six scholarships to beach volleyball for use in recruitment in the upcoming years.” In April, UO beach volleyball coach Jason Dillard told The Oregonian/OregonLive that two equivalency scholarships were budgeted for use in 2024-25 — a first for the program.

In its motion to dismiss, UO states, “there is no contract law basis for awarding legally unprecedented monetary damages to the beach volleyball plaintiffs based on an average harm or lost opportunity theory, particularly when no Plaintiff can assert a particular lost scholarship to which she had a legal right in the first place. Alternatively, if the Court finds that Plaintiffs can seek compensatory damages, then the Court should limit the amount of damages available for Plaintiffs to recover to the six scholarships allowed by the NCAA for the sport.”