Seismic shift coming for high schools

One of my favorite paintings is “The Song of the Talking Wire” done in 1904 by Henry Farny, which depicts a lone Native American leaning on a telegraph pole and listening, unaware or at least unprepared for the immense changes headed his way.

As a sports writer for nearly 40 years, I’m still struggling with recent changes for college athletics that resemble free agency and pay-for-play, and I’ll be absolutely unprepared if high school sports programs adopt similar rules.

There’s a large package of stories in the sports section today that examines the issue from every angle with the strong possibility Arkansas will follow other states and allow athletes not yet out of high school to benefit financially from their name, image, and likeness, just like the college players. The change I fear most is whether an athlete can jump from one school to the next if someone sweetens the pot for his name, image, and likeness. Whether that happens, no one knows for sure. But change is likely to come that could blow up how we’ve traditionally approached high school athletics.

“I think 27 states are doing [NIL] right now,” said Lance Taylor, the executive director of the Arkansas Activities Association. “There’s interest in the legislature about trying to do something. I don’t think the colleges have figured it out yet. If we’re going to do something, we need to go really cautiously and see what it’s going to do.”

After covering baseball and some other college sports for 15 years, I welcomed the chance to cover high school sports full time in 2012. I wrote at the time it was the purest form of amateur sports because the athletes played mostly for their school and community. Throw money into the mix, and it’s a whole new dynamic.

I’ve been in locker rooms where there was some tension after the girl dating one player did the ol’ switcheroo and began dating another player. Happens all the time. Throw money into the mix where the hotshot quarterback receives the bulk of NIL payments while his teammates receive very little or nothing at all, and the tension ramps up considerably.

There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there’s certainly an ‘I’ in NIL.

“There are more questions on the high school level than college because we’re dealing with minors,” Taylor said.

Minors making money, and we’re not talking here about a group of Little Leaguers holding a car wash. Besides, when did states in our region begin copying anything that comes out of the liberal state of California, where NIL payments for high school athletes began?

I thought that was a non-starter for middle America, where Red states greatly outnumber Blue states.

OK, so maybe the changes I fear with NIL money for high school athletes won’t be so dramatic. Maybe it’ll help ease the financial stress for student-athletes in the poorest neighborhoods where there may be a single parent trying to raise multiple children. I could certainly support that.

But what if an athlete from Pine Bluff, for example, decides he wants to be a Charging Wildcat at North Little Rock rather than a Zebra at Pine Bluff. What if a player from County Line is confident he can get a better NIL deal at Greenwood or one of the Fort Smith schools? Will someone be able to legally buy him a car for transportation back and forth under an NIL deal?

Will he be allowed to transfer without penalty? Can he transfer and receive NIL payouts before the start of any season or does he have to wait until he turns 18? Those are major decisions that must be addressed and whether pay-for-play happens in five years, 10 years, or 15 years in Arkansas, no one knows. But it’s coming, apparently.

In the meantime, I’ll just end here by quoting that great American sportsman Charlie Brown when he turns to his little friend and says “I just don’t know, Linus. I just don’t know.”