By Sam Safferstein, Tulane Sports Law
On September 30, 2025, Frank Heindel, a freedom-of-information advocate, sued the University of South Carolina (“USC”) in the Fifth Judicial Circuit Court in Richland County, SC to obtain records pertaining to the school’s payments of more than $20,000,000 to student athletes. The lawsuit claims that the school violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and asks the judge to “either order USC to turn over the records in their entirety or hold a confidential hearing to determine which parts might be exempt from disclosure.”
Following landmark shifts in Name Image and Likeness and collegiate revenue sharing (a result of the House v. NCAA settlement), USC, along with most universities in the United States, have begun to explore the uncharted waters surrounding the disbursement of funds to student-athletes. Schools that opted into the settlement are permitted to utilize $20.5 million to pay their athletes and are subject to FOIA requests for information and records. However, USC has failed to produce responsive documents to FOIA requests for invoices from USC’s NIL Collective, The Garnet Trust. USC has claimed that the information being requested is not in their possession but rather in the possession of private actors and companies like the NIL Collective and Learfield – entities not beholden to the same FOIA laws as the school. On September 4, 2025, USC was sent a FOIA request from Frank Heindel, who is an open records advocate and has sued USC in the past for failing to respond to a previous FOIA request in 2019. Through his request, Heindel is seeking to obtain any “executed revenue-sharing contracts or agreements between the university and its football players.” The university subsequently denied the request, claiming that the information is shielded by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”). Heindel claims USC’s position is “legally untenable” and that when a public university spends tax dollars, their usage of funds should be disclosed. The plaintiff is seeking a court order directing USC to either produce the records or hold a hearing to determine which records are exempt from disclosure.
“I’m not asking for names or grade point averages. I’m asking how a public university spends public money,” said Heindel. The university’s legal representative, attorney Andrew Lindemann of Lindemann Law Firm, P.A. in Columbia, South Carolina, responded, saying the university “had lawfully and accurately responded to Heindel’s records request.” A hearing was set for October 10, 2025. Following the hearing, Judge Daniel Coble, who is presiding over the case, ordered a review of the records, asserting that he wanted to “flesh out some of the things mentioned in the affidavit.”
