The Marketing of High School Athletes: A Rolling Tide

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The Growing Influence of Collectives

After the NCAA gave the green light for college players to become paid endorsers and earn money through marketing, college football boosters started forming NIL collectives—independent organizations that raise money to help recruit star athletes to a particular university. While collectives technically exist within the NIL framework, the contracts they offer are designed to pay for play, not to use the athletes’ name, image, and likeness for marketing purposes. According to the New York Times, 80 percent of college-level NIL payments come through a collective.

While the collective model is allowed at the college level, state authorities do not want it to filter down to lower levels. Georgia recently revised its policy to clarify the kinds of deals it does and does not permit at the high school level: “No student athlete may be a member of nor receive compensation or any other benefit from a Collective or NIL Club.”

States face an enormous challenge to maintain the ban on high school collectives. “Even though this will continue to be tested,” Carter said, collectives “feel to me like truly a red line. The state athletic associations will die on this hill. They are not going to allow this.”

Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), is wary of new players in the NIL marketplace. “Collectives are disturbing,” Niehoff said. “They’re popping up left and right. . . . They’re outside of the school. And there are a number of them now that profess to be the best at advising parents and getting kids connected, developing the potential of their NIL and assuring them a safe, positive experience. One of the latest things that we’re seeing is what I’ll call the booster club imposter, where anybody can join and name the team that you want to support, offer some money. You can name a student athlete that you want to support.”

High school NIL collectives are currently ill-defined and not monitored for quality, Niehoff said. The federation is working to ensure any organization offering to pay athletes follows state and national rules, and it has had to ask several sites to take down photos of high school players wearing team jerseys, which is strictly prohibited in all states. Niehoff is also concerned that school supporters will mimic colleges and attempt to use NIL for recruiting.

The federation is watching how NIL is influencing the transfer activity of student athletes, Niehoff said. “We’re seeing our state associations dealing with literally hundreds of transfer waiver requests. California had 17,000 transfers last year. . . . You’re seeing kids that want to move schools, following coaches, a lot of trying to get around the rules. Some of it is NIL induced.”

Vincent Minjares, project manager for the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, noted the downstream ramifications of recruiting. “Suburban private schools are consolidating resources,” Minjares said. They have “nicer facilities, they’re more likely to pay a full-time coach, have a strength and conditioning coach, a full-time athletic trainer.” Schools with winning programs begin to dominate even more as they pull students from other schools. “We’re seeing this inability to keep up with the Joneses. It’s creating a huge void for smaller public schools, schools that don’t have massive budgets,” he said.

For high schools that can’t retain athletes, Minjares has observed, shutting down programs can be a more viable option than trying to compete with wealthier schools. That means students who want to participate in sports, including non-elite athletes, lose that opportunity. Some families will add significant commuting time or move to another community just so their student will have a chance to play.

This situation also raises equity issues. “If alumni are donating to winning teams in suburban environments,” Minjares said, “if sponsors are focused on the elite players who have been consolidated in the suburban, affluent environments, then ultimately we are leaving urban, working class, rural, and predominantly Black and brown kids to the wayside. They are not getting systemic investment in the same way.”

Some schools put a particularly strong emphasis on recruiting student athletes. For example, IMG Academy, a boarding school in Bradenton, Florida, focuses on training young athletes and recruits its students from across the country. Elsewhere, a handful of local high schools—often private—have developed programs that dominate their divisions. As these programs become more successful, they attract coverage on networks like ESPN, and their student athletes amass social media followers. If NIL activity continues to increase in high school, students will be further incentivized to choose schools with outstanding sports programs.

“While a collective makes sense in the college context,” Minjares said, “we do not want recruiting to become a norm in high school. We want people to attend school for the purpose of getting their education, making friends, and playing sports as an avenue for enhancing that experience.” The introduction of collectives, he said, has the potential to “exponentially distort” the way student athletes choose a high school.

While the NFHS and state high school athletic associations are holding a firm line against collectives, their legal right to do so could be challenged. At the college level, the courts have repeatedly ruled against the NCAA and other entities that have attempted to restrict athletes from receiving compensation in any form.

The states that currently don’t allow any high school NIL deals will likely face legal challenges that force them to change their rules. Last summer the family of Grimsley High School quarterback Faizon Brandon, North Carolina’s top high school prospect, sued the state for what they asserted was a missed earning opportunity. In October, a Wake County Superior Court judge ruled that the NIL prohibition, which only applied to public schools, was illegal. North Carolina is expected to rewrite its rules to allow NIL for all high school student athletes.

“High school sports associations are non-governmental actors,” said Noah Henderson, a sports marketing professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. “For lack of a more precise term, they’re trade organizations. They don’t have any regulatory power.” If a school tries to constrain the market, it’s opening itself up for potential antitrust litigation, he said. “You’re essentially a price-fixing machine.”

The more critical challenge for state high school athletic associations is maintaining the ban on collectives. Because of the impact of collectives on student athlete transfers, courts might consider them a threat to the public school system.

“I think the courts will side with the state high school athletic associations” on the collectives issue, Carter said. “It’s not just about fair play, but it has to do with the structure of a public school system. You can’t have kids getting up and playing 40 miles away.”

State high school athletic associations, however, are not well equipped to fight legal battles to protect their rules. “High schools don’t have the resources colleges have,” Roger Noll said. “That’s why this is going to be so chaotic in the coming years.” Considering that the NCAA and colleges are consistently losing in the courts, state rules for high schools will be vulnerable to challenges.

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