Something doesn’t quite add up with the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association’s (PIAA’s) new rules regarding high school student athletes making money from their names, images or likenesses, commonly referred to as NIL.
And a serious question arises through a statement made by Bob Lombardi, the PIAA’s executive director.
Fast on the heels of the NCAA allowing college athletes to turn a buck on their NILs (based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling), high schools across the nation have started to do the same thing.
The base theory behind allowing student athletes to profit from their sporting endeavors is that colleges and universities profit, and profit handsomely, from promoting the name, image and likenesses of their stars and, now, so shall these athletes.
While the same thing happens to a lesser degree with high school athletics, the “logic” supposedly follows that prep athletes have the same earnings right.
Beginning this month, prep student-athletes are allowed to obtain commercial endorsements and earn money from promotional activities, including a social media presence. Pennsylvania is the 22nd state to allow prep athletes to do so.
Here’s some more background and context, from a Post-Gazette report:
“The new legislation comes with quite a few stipulations. NIL opportunities can’t be used ‘as an incentive for enrollment decisions or membership on a team.’ No school, coach, booster clubs, collectives, administrators or alumni may arrange or pay for a student’s NIL deal.
“Additionally, students are not permitted to use a PIAA school, team name, nicknames or logos in their NIL deals. Students are also prohibited from endorsing adult entertainment products, alcohol products, casinos or gambling operations, tobacco or electronic smoking products, prescription pharmaceuticals or weapons, firearms and ammunition.”
But then comes this interesting quote from the PIAA’s Bob Lombardi:
“This is the kid treating his own name, image and likeness as a business,” Lombardi told the P-G. “If he can be compensated for that, then why not? But we think the rules help protect the student-athlete against someone who is unscrupulous.”
OK, let’s take a step back here:
If this new rule is designed to pave the way for a “kid treating his own name, image and likeness as business,” then let him treat his own name, image and likeness as a business. Period.
Simply put, the PIAA’s throwing in prohibitions preventing students from using a PIAA school, team name, nicknames or logos in their NIL deals unfairly handicaps them from maximizing their income. And it just might be considered restraint of free trade.
In fact, this new rulemaking smells. If the PIAA is imposing such a restriction, what business does it even have promulgating such rules at all? Do these individuals not already have a natural, personal right to market themselves as they see fit and earn income from that effort?
Of course, they do. That’s not a right to be granted or denied by the PIAA, “The State” or any other entity; that right pre-exists.
Indeed, the PIAA is a nonprofit private corporation. But by its very nature – being the athletic governing body for the state’s public (and other schools), it should be considered a quasi-government agency.
After all, it operates under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Right to Know Law and member schools (public, private and parochial) pay annual dues. Unless those dues are being paid by boosters or other supporters, those dues paid by public schools are coming from public coffers.
The bottom line here is that the PIAA, in its new NIL rulemaking, has granted a right that in all likelihood it does not have the power to grant and with restrictions that very well don’t pass legal muster.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
