WASHINGTON  – An invitation to Washington, D.C. came with little warning for San Diego State women’s basketball player Natalia Martinez. 

While attending a president’s dinner honoring teams that won regular-season championships, Martinez was pulled aside by SDSU head coach Stace Terry-Hutson and another athletics official. They had a question: Would she be willing to travel to Washington and represent the Pac-12 in conversations surrounding the Protect College Sports Act? 

“I was like, ‘Oh, wow,’” Martinez said. “They were like, ‘You’d leave next week.’”

Later that night, the texts started arriving. 

“Here’s the act, here’s the bill,” Martinez recalled. “Familiarize yourself with it. And yeah, you’re going to go to D.C.”

Within roughly a week, Martinez went from learning the details of the legislation to walking through congressional offices and discussing the future of college athletics.

The Protect College Sports Act of 2026, introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., seeks to establish a national framework governing college athletics as schools navigate athlete compensation; name, image and likeness (NIL) rights; transfers; and eligibility. (See the end of the article for ten of the biggest mandates, as identified by the Congressional Budget Office). 

The legislation would establish federal NIL rights; academic and medical protections for athletes; and protections for women’s and Olympic sports. It would also establish national eligibility and transfer rules and provide schools, conferences and athletic associations with limited antitrust protections for enforcing certain rules. 

The legislation has also drawn opposition from athletes, labor groups and lawmakers who argue that portions of the bill could restrict athletes’ compensation and bargaining power while giving the NCAA, conferences and schools greater legal protections. The Athletic’s Chris Vannini provided an overview of the legislation.

For Martinez, the trip meant navigating those questions not only as an SDSU basketball player, but as a representative of all athletes across the Pac-12. The junior guard’s selection makes sense. She is a political science major who plans to attend law school after graduation.

Martinez met with staff members for California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, Rep. Scott Peters and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden during four meetings in Washington. 

The conversations varied. Some offices were still learning about the legislation, Martinez said, while others asked directly about her experience as a college athlete and what she saw as potential positives and negatives of the proposal. 

For Martinez, one of the biggest priorities was making sure the conversation extended beyond the college sports that typically command national attention. 

“We’re women’s basketball. We’re one of the top sports,” Martinez said.

But many of her friends compete in sports ranging from football and men’s basketball to softball and water polo.

“[Softball and waterpolo] are the sports that you don’t hear their voices typically because they’re not such a noticeable sport,” Martinez said. “Those are the sports that really need their voice to be heard now.”

That responsibility became even broader when discussions turned toward international athletes. Martinez said she spoke with international teammates and researched the experiences of athletes at other schools before traveling to Washington so she could better represent perspectives she had not experienced herself.

Before being selected for the trip, Martinez was familiar with some of the larger issues surrounding the legislation, including athlete compensation and eligibility, but she had not studied the bill closely. 

That changed quickly. 

SDSU and Pac-12 officials helped prepare her with potential questions before the meetings, but Martinez said her goal was to provide her own perspective as an athlete. 

Among the provisions she found appealing was the legislation’s attempt to establish a five-year eligibility framework. 

The current bill would generally limit college athletes to five calendar years of eligibility, with exceptions for circumstances including pregnancy, religious missions and active-duty military service. 

Martinez said the ability to continue competing while pursuing an advanced degree could be particularly valuable for women athletes. 

“I thought that was really cool as an athlete to get to play and continue your sport while getting a master’s degree now,” Martinez said. “It’s super important, especially for women’s sports.”

She also saw value in establishing limits and structure around the money flowing through college athletics, though she stressed that her support came “to an extent.”

For Martinez, part of the concern is competitive balance.

“We all watch sports because you can’t predict who wins,” Martinez said. “Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to predict. The underdog story, the Cinderella runs, those are very rare to come upon.”

She believes establishing some type of framework could help address disparities between programs with vastly different financial resources.

“It’s not perfect,” Martinez said. “Nothing’s perfect, but having a framework to work on right now is important.”

Martinez’s trip did not leave her with an unequivocal position on every piece of the legislation.

Instead, she came away recognizing just how complicated reshaping college athletics could be.

“There’s things that I like about it,” Martinez said. “There are things that I’m not really fond of. There’s things I haven’t done full research on. And there’s just a lot of questions left unanswered.”

Among those questions, she said, are how changes could affect conferences and schools already dealing with extensive travel and conference realignment, along with questions surrounding the legislation’s medical provisions.

Those debates have continued in Washington since her visit.

Supporters of the Protect College Sports Act argue that a federal framework is necessary to provide stability across college athletics while establishing athlete protections. Opponents have challenged provisions involving athlete compensation and antitrust protections, arguing Congress should provide athletes greater economic and bargaining rights instead.

The bill has continued advancing through the Senate. Senators adopted an amended version of the legislation 77-23 on Sept. 24 before voting 74-25 to advance the legislation toward a final vote. The Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act on Monday, 77-22.

The Act now moves onto the House of Representatives, where it’s expected to face opposition from both parties with a small time frame to collect support. However, house representatives are not scheduled to vote on any bills until after the midterm elections in November. If a vote can’t take place before a new Congress takes charge in January, the process will have to start from the beginning again. 

Whatever ultimately happens to the legislation, Martinez’s role put an SDSU athlete inside a national conversation about what college sports should look like in the years ahead.

And for someone who had never been to Washington before, the experience also provided a firsthand look at how those decisions are made.

“It was just the behind the scenes of everything,” Martinez said. “This is what it’s like to get a bill passed. All these meetings, all the trying to persuade people to vote. It was super cool.”

Top photo: Courtesy of Natalia Martinez and SDSU Athletics