The Washington Commanders football team has failed to block a workers’ compensation claim in Maryland by a former defensive tackle injured at the team’s training facility in Virginia just three days after he was signed by the team.
In 2024, the Maryland Workers’ Compensation Commission (MWCC) denied the claim filed by player Curtis Brooks for his ruptured left Achilles tendon, finding that he was not a covered employee under Maryland law and thus not entitled to workers’ compensation benefits.
However, the circuit court in Prince Georges county reversed the MWCC and concluded that Brooks was a covered employee. The Appellate Court for Maryland has now agreed with the circuit court and granted summary judgment in favor of Brooks.
According to the appeals court opinion, a professional football player who has not physically completed any of his job duties in Maryland may nevertheless be a covered employee because he expected to be “regularly employed” in Maryland as a professional football player.
In its ruling, the Appellate Court drew upon two Maryland Supreme Court rulings involving football players for the Washington team.
The Washington Commanders (officially named Pro-Football LLC) is a Maryland limited liability company that plays its home games in a stadium in Landover, Maryland and has a training field in Ashburn, Virginia.
(The team retired its Washington Redskins name in July 2020. It briefly played under the name Washington Football Team, before permanently changing the team’s name to the Washington Commanders in February 2022. The same Maryland corporation, Pro Football, Inc. — now Pro- Football, LLC — has owned and operated the team throughout.)
The Maryland Workers’ Compensation Act says that an individual is a covered employee while working for the employer in the state, or outside of the state on a “casual, incidental, or occasional basis” if the employer regularly employs
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the individual within the state. Under the law, an individual is not a covered employee while working in the state for an employer only intermittently or temporarily if the individual and employer make a contract of hire in another state; neither the individual nor the employer is a resident of th
e state; or the employer has provided workers’ compensation coverage under a law of another state to cover the individual.
The courts rejected the Commanders team’s arguments that Brooks’s employment in Maryland needed to be but was not “consistent and predictable” for him to qualify as a covered employee. The team noted that Brooks had only been employed for three days prior to his injury, had never played a game
for the Commanders, and was not expected to be signed to the active roster for the 2023-2024 football season. The team maintained that the entirety of Brooks’s career with the Commanders was a “football tryout” in Virginia and his stint
outside of Maryland was not employment on a “casual, incidental, or occasional basis.” Furthermore, the injury did not take place in Maryland.
