The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association should forbid name, image and likeness deals for its athletes. It’s bad for high school sports, which have already assumed an unhealthy intensity. And it’s bad for high school athletes who, promised freedom and power, get locked into business relationships and public personas that they’re not mature enough to handle.
Enabling athletes to cash in on celebrity might make sense for the NCAA. Colleges are already profiting from lucrative endorsements for the work of their student athletes. In a just world, adults should benefit from their own work.
But NIL schemes are inappropriate for high school kids, for whom the pleasure of playing should be enough. Extending NIL to high school — and eventually, inexorably, to lower grades — exposes children and their families to agents, consultants and other sharks seeking to profit from their talents and dreams. It makes the kids themselves “brands” and commodities in a massive marketing machine that is indifferent to their best interests.
Sports are professionalizing at younger and younger ages. What’s next? Consultants promising the parents of star middle-school quarterbacks to get their boy’s face on children’s products and pizza joint billboards?
Since the introduction of NIL in college sports, officially “independent” agencies, called “collectives,” have appeared around every major school to launder corporate and donor money to college athletes. (The infamous booster clubs have gone legitimate.) With NIL at the high school level, expect private schools and wealthier districts to dangle financial incentives to recruit athletes, aggravating existing inequalities.
Everybody knows that informal student-athlete compensation systems have always been in place. The star quarterback and his friends get free pizza (and sometimes drinks) at the local joint. Schools lean on neighborhood institutions to give their athletes and their families sweetheart deals. It’s unsavory but nearly unavoidable.
Eight state athletic associations already sanction NIL deals, and 17 more are considering it. PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi said that “none of us want to be categorized as a stick in the mud.” But, as parents tell the teens whose interests the PIAA ostensibly represents, everyone else doing something doesn’t make it right.
The difference between college and high school NIL schemes may not be clean or obvious, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. The PIAA should stand up to the NIL speculators and to other state athletics associations and draw the line here.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP
