Carrington list includes Huskies

DiJonai Carrington, a graduate transfer from Stanford, announced Wednesday that UConn is among the programs that she’s considering for the 2020-21 season.

Carrington, a 5-foot-11 wing from San Diego, Calif., said in a Twitter announcement that Baylor and Oregon are also in the mix.

Carrington only appeared in five games for Stanford last year due to a knee injury but was the Cardinal’s third-best scorer the season prior as a junior, when she averaging 14.0 points per game in 36 contests. Her 7.5 rebounds per game were also secondbest behind Alanna Smith.

The Huskies currently have 10 players on their roster — five incoming freshmen, two rising sophomores, two juniors and Evina Westbrook, who academically will be a senior but has two years of eligibility remaining.

Marshall, who played at UConn in the 1990s and later in the NBA, and is now head men’s basketball coach at Central Connecticut, offered his support for the concept.

“Just because you sign your name on a piece of paper doesn’t give them the right to take away all your ways to make money,” Marshall said. “They want players to do autograph signings, shows and all that, and yet they can’t make money off their own likeness. It gives you a chance to come play basketball and go to school for free, I get that. But I can tell you countless nights when I went to sleep hungry, my family couldn’t afford to send me money at school at that time. So I do think kids should be able to make money off their own likeness.”

Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, co-leader of the working group that along with Smith made the recommendations to the Board of Governors, told The Courant last fall that the question of name, image and likeness was separate from paying athletes to play, and in the modern world, social media was presenting more and more opportunities.

“It isn’t about pay for play,” Ackerman said. “It’s about the ability to monetize name, image and likeness in a non-playing setting. So it requires a different analysis. We were really mindful of the state legislation that is dropping and the national dialogue on this. We’re on our way through increasing opportunities for students of all types on social media that wasn’t in the mind’s eye of people who crafted the NIL legislation.”

According to the Board of Governors’ statement, student-athletes would be permitted to identify themselves by sport and their school, but the use of “conference and school logos, trademarks or other involvement would not be allowed.”

The money would not come from the NCAA, schools or conferences and there would not be a limit placed on what an athlete could earn, Smith said, but that the NCAA would attempt to monitor deals athletes make and require them to disclose details..

Ackerman, on Wednesday, expressed concern over the possible role of boosters in recruiting. She said there has been discussion about creating a third party to make those assessments and manage disclosure.

“This has been referred to alternatively to as a clearinghouse or a registry or an NIL center,” Ackerman said. “And I don’t know that there would be an approval mechanism, but the notion would be to create the sunshine and the transparency that would allow us to monitor valuations and booster involvement.”

Football and men’s basketball players would seem destined to benefit most from new name, image and likeness rules, but Williams believes women’s basketball could gain increased exposure from its stars, too. UConn, of course, has had many who might’ve benefited.

“How many people wanted to work with [Breanna Stewart] or [Oregon’s] Sabrina [Ionescu] too before any of this even happened?” she said. “I think it would bring so much more publicity for women’s sports in general. The thing is, those top people making money in the NCAA, they don’t want to share it. That’s really what it comes down too. … Stewie having some kind of endorsement deal, that goes beyond basketball. That goes beyond the university, that goes beyond the NCAA. That is just representative of women’s basketball, so it’s great for the entire sport.”

Among the issues to be ironed out in the coming months, the NCAA plans to work with Congress for federal legislation to preempt various state name, image and likeness laws and protect the NCAA from lawsuits. The NCAA said it wants to “safeguard the nonemployment status of student-athletes.”

“I’m not completely hopeful,” Williams said. “I’m just happy that the conversation is being had among more than just the athletes and more than just the fans, now it’s being had among Congress and the heads of the NCAA. But there are a lot of things that need to be undone. I think just the system and structure as a whole, it’s never going to benefit the athletes the way it should. … I just want to see it get chipped at and just get better and better.”

UConn’s Dan and ASU’s Bobby, against each other.

The Huskies played in the Bahamas event in 2011 and 2015.