Yesterday, January 27th, news broke that the MHSAA passed a new rule allowing high school athletes to sign NIL deals. NIL has existed for a couple of years in college athletics and has had dramatic effects on teams and players. Will having NIL for high school athletics have a positive or negative impact on athletes?
To start, I see ways it could benefit athletes, but also ways it could be detrimental.
Part of me thinks having NIL in high school is absurd.
Yes, recruiting has gone to new levels over the past couple of years, and colleges are going to be able to pay their athletes soon, but using money as leverage for high school athletes is going too far.
We have seen the effect NIL deals have had on college athletes. They enter the transfer portal as soon as they find a school willing to pay them more than the last. Loyalty simply doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t see athletes playing all four of their years at one school; instead, they play for two or three.
Yes, I’ll admit transferring is harder to do in high school, especially in the state of Michigan. However, if the MHSAA can pass a rule to make NIL “legal,” they definitely have the potential to change the transfer rules.
We’re not even talking about how this rule could affect middle school students. There are no transfer limits in middle school, and we could see 7th- and 8th-graders transferring all over, trying to find the best school that would offer the best deal.
With college NIL, athletes often hire agents to handle the negotiating process, which often leaves them out of the process until it’s time to actually “sign” the contract.
Is that what we want high school sports to turn into—teenagers hiring agents to determine where they are going to go to school? At that point, it seems like high school athletics are turning into a minor league.
I’ll admit, as an athlete myself, signing an NIL deal with a brand or local company would be cool. I don’t expect high school athletes to make millions of dollars (unless you are part of the top 1%), but making some money by playing sports would be kind of awesome.
This doesn’t prevent me from thinking this rule change is going to permanently change high school athletics for the worse.
The disparity between sports at the high school level and worldwide is already very apparent. Take a sport like football and compare it to something like tennis or swimming. While all three sports are popular, football draws in the most attention from boosters and administrators. I worry that NIL will make this disparity even worse.
Who knows—years from now, NIL could evolve from what it currently is. High school athletics could look more like how college teams operate. To me, the way the NIL landscape is laid out, the MHSAA just made a huge mistake.
