New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘Bylaws were written decades ago’
Inside look at CT allowing high school athletes to profit
Name, image and likeness was in its infancy at the college sports level when one of the industry leaders reached out to Connecticut’s governing body for high school sports.
Opendorse, a sports technology company that seized a large NIL market share by providing guidance and a platform for colleges, was moving to the high school world last summer. NIL activity became permissible in college on July 1, 2021 and Opendorse immediately heard from high school athletes looking to profit off their name and image.
“What does this mean for me?” an
Arizona high school athlete asked in an email the day NCAA rules changed.
“Can I monetize my NIL?”
So Opendorse
— a company contracted by
UConn for NIL guidance — began combing through each state’s high school association bylaws and guidelines on amateurism. The company created a spreadsheet and reached out to the associations.
The contact with Gregg Simon, associate executive director of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, came last summer. According to Opendorse NIL specialist Braly Keller, there was contact each subsequent month until Connecticut became the country’s 10th state to allow NIL activity among high school athletes.
The change to the CIAC’s bylaws on amateurism became public with a tweet from Keller on June 3. The news took many by surprise, including coaches and administrators around the state.
But it was apparently months in the making, just as states around the country are redefining the term “amateur” in their high school sports association guidelines.
“The difficulty right now is how you differentiate between capitalizing on your athletic fame and being a social media influencer.” Robert Zayas, executive director of the New York Public High School Athletes Association
Connecticut became the 10th state to implement an NIL policy for high school sports but Minnesota has since changed its rule and more states are following, Keller said.
“Has it been a slow adoption?” Keller said. “I think it’s just a bunch of mini July 1’s happening across the country within these associations.”
By the fall sports season, there could be at least 15 states allowing athletes to profit off their name and image. There remains concern about preparedness — Ohio’s high school association rejected a change, primarily because administrators worried schools, coaches and athletes were not fully ready — but, like the NCAA, the state associations seem ready to adapt to a new landscape.
Opendorse, which has forged partnerships with a few high schools and seems poised to fill an NIL space with schools, leagues and associations across the country, has helped nudge the process. Keller said the company’s research show most states did not address the current state of NIL activity.
“We found that bylaws were written decades ago and did not encompass certain things like social media activations, and other modern forms of endorsements,” he said.
California allowed athletes to profit, a product of the state’s entertainment industry that enables high school students — including some athletes — to earn money.
Otherwise, state guidelines were clear. Athletes were unable to generate money from their status as an athlete in order to maintain eligibility as an amateur.
Connecticut’s shift came after neighboring New York altered its amateurism bylaw in October and New Jersey made a change in November. Keller said high school administrators tend to fall into two camps when pondering NIL activity.
“Some of the early adopters saw it through the lens of, we need to modernize our rules,” Keller said. “If this is something the NCAA is doing, and our high school athletes’ collegiate eligibility won’t be disrupted by them doing NIL deal, then who are we to say any different? So there was that camp.
“The other camp was very much, I think, resistant to change. I think this is almost on a micro level, a lot of the same conversations that happened within the NCAA in 2018, 2019, and 2020. … There are certainly universal concerns, what does this look like with, I guess you could say, the industrialization of youth sports in America. If we’re having 14, 15, 16, 17,18 year olds engaging in autograph signings, making appearances, getting paid in some cases for NIL activities … that raises the hair on the backs of a lot of administrators. It’s very foreign.”
But Keller points to a quote from Robert Zayas, executive director of the New York Public High School Athletes Association. Speaking in story composed by the the National Federation of High School Associations, Zayas acknowledged the new world order of generating income.
“The difficulty right now is how you differentiate between capitalizing on your athletic fame and being a social media influencer,” Zayar said. “I don’t think we can differentiate between the two any longer. And I think that’s where it becomes problematic. If a student is a social media influencer, and they have 100,000 or 3 million followers, then I think it becomes very difficult as the state association to try to determine how those followers were generated. I think when we try to do that, we’re putting ourselves in a really precarious position.”
So for every Paige Bueckers piling up social media followers with each basket and no-look pass, there are teenagers building a brand on social media … just because. And if they happen to be athletes, all the more followers.
Opendorse research has found close to 70 percent of college athlete’s NIL activity over the first 11 months has come through social media. It could be a sponsored post or an athlete promoting a product. It might be Bueckers and Gatorade or it could be former UConn teammate Olivia Nelson-Ododa amplifying a local pizza shop’s deals on Instagram.
“When you look at the younger generation, or more specifically looking at Gen Z, they are only accessible through social media and they are also willing to interact with people that they inspire or people that they know,” said Ceyda Mumcu, University of New Haven sports management professor. “So from that sense utilizing studentathletes, as a face of a brand makes sense, especially if they are trying to appeal to a Gen Z or a younger audience.”
The National Federation has not taken an official position on NIL in high school sport because, as chief executive officer Karissa Niehoff said last week, the NFHS “cannot require states to have one uniform policy about this.”’
Niehoff, the former head of the CIAC, said the NFHS supports an athletes’ ability to make money away from their life as an a student-athlete.
“However, we’re also very clear that we believe a high school student athlete should not be able to benefit as a professional for something that they don’t own,” she said. “And that would be the high school jersey, the high school uniform. So while we recognize that high school-age student athletes have an ability to benefit from name, image and likeness, through contract relationships with a fiduciary, we are very clear that we do not support the situation that would involve a member state association school and their student-athletes entering into professional paid contracts while representing that member school.”
Most states — including Connecticut — prohibit athletes from connecting their school uniform or marks with NIL activity. The state recently changed the law around college NIL activity to allow for athletes to wear UConn apparel in commercial or sponsorship environments.
But Niehoff is adamant that high school rules should hold firm.
“We wanted to be very clear about where the NFHS stands on that,” she said. “We hope that our position holds because we really believe that the purpose of high school athletics and performing arts is not to develop professional athletes. It’s to develop kids. It’s to develop life skills. It’s to develop relationships. And the high school locker room is arguably the last sort of pure bastion of amateurism, within an education-based setting that’s real, thorough, and supportive. We want to protect that.”
While Opendorse has been in contact with state organizations, the company has not had contact with the National Federation.
But one area where the NIL company, colleges such as UConn, and the NFHS can agree is that the focus on generating profit could stir some entrepreneurial interest among studentathletes. That’s the road UConn is using as athletics partners with the school’s entrepreneurship institute and Keller said there are examples at the high school level of athletes creating their own brand.
Framed like that, the idea of high school athletes living in the NIL world may be more acceptable for those raising concerns. Resistance, though, will likely remain strong.
But just as college athletics is enduring an upheaval, change seems inevitable.
“It’s slow but it’s coming,” Keller said. “These changes have been out of the blue for some high school associations. But I think it will certainly pick up over the next year as we start to get back into the academic calendar.”