Quinn Ewers of Southlake, Texas, quarterback was due to lead his city’s famous high school team as the nation’s best football candidate in search of another state championship this fall.
Instead, Ewers announced on Aug. 2 that he would graduate early, skip his senior season at Carroll High School and enroll at Ohio State for his first quarterback job, potentially investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising contracts , the NCAA athletes are now free to negotiate.
Ewers, 18, said on Twitter that he was motivated in part by frustration over a new Texas law preventing high school athletes from signing similar agreements.
Another high school athlete, Mikey Williams, a 17-year-old basketball star in North Carolina with more than three million followers on Instagram, signed a deal with a management and marketing firm in July to secure advertising deals. He plans to play for an independent team this season, not bound by the rules of North Carolina high school sports. Excel Sports Management, which represents Williams, told ESPN that the business deal will gross millions of dollars in the teen, who won’t be eligible for the NBA draft until 2024.
Just as colleges have started wrestling with these issues in the past few weeks, so have high schools where some top players have social media numbers as impressive as their athletic stats.
Some fear that high school sport, and the unique pride and identity it gives places like Southlake, won’t be the same as big money affects top athletes.
“There’s almost a romance about traditional high school sports,” said Karissa Niehoff, executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations. She fears that advertising deals for preparatory athletes mean that “the last bastion of amateurism will be gone”.
But the truth is, many have questioned the limitations of amateurism for decades. And the age-old idea of what high school sport should be – local stars playing in front of bright lights, cheerleaders, and marching bands for nothing but a love of school and the community – continues to evolve as teenage athletes are recruited as recruits become.
In general, high school athletes are not allowed to enter into advertising contracts for their high school teams. However, in some states there seems to be scope for athletes to be paid to sign autographs or hold private camps. And the rules may vary by school based on whether they’re affiliated with a state high school sports association.
“This is the Wild West,” said Niehoff.
In Texas, one of three states that specifically bans high school athletes from signing advertising contracts, state lawmakers have already signaled their willingness to reconsider a July 1 ban after a star athlete like Ewers inadvertently skips his senior Year.
All states are likely to reassess their rules, experts say, given what Robert Zayas, executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, describes as an increasing difficulty “between a student who capitalizes on his athletic fame and one Social media influencer. “
A proposed New York state revision, similar to a California rule, would allow high school athletes to benefit from their name, image, and likeness as long as it wasn’t in connection with a school, team, uniform, or logo .
“If a student athlete can work at a dealership on weekends or in the summer and make $ 15 an hour washing cars, why couldn’t the same student be able to trick people into buying a car from the same dealership? and make $ 1,500? ”said Zayas.
The usual notions of amateurism are out of date. The Olympic Games lifted their ban on professionals in the late 1980s. Thirteen-year-old Momiji Nishiya from Japan, the gold medalist in women’s street skateboarding at the recently concluded Tokyo Games, lists more than half a dozen corporate sponsors on her Instagram account.
Ewers and Williams aren’t the first high school athletes to grow impatient with the limitations of amateurism in America.
Olivia Moultrie, a teenage soccer phenomenon from Portland, Oregon, received a scholarship offer from North Carolina at age 11 but turned pro instead and signed a advertising deal with Nike at 13. In July, at the age of 15, she became the youngest ever player in the National Women’s Soccer League after a successful antitrust challenge to the league’s minimum age of 18.
“I don’t have a problem with that impatience,” said Anson Dorrance, who coached North Carolina to 22 NCAA women’s football titles. “I support these children who want to use their name, their image and their likeness to generate income. Who are we to stop them? They monetize their passion. “
The United States is one of the few countries where youth athletics is mostly organized by schools rather than sports clubs. Some administrators, coaches and officials have raised concerns that star athletes like Ewers and Williams might ride the crest of a wave that could inundate the customs and norms of school-sponsored sport.
Joe Martin, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association, said several problems could arise if some players had advertising deals: tension and jealousy in the locker room, undermining team spirit and solidarity. Escalated abuse of transfer rules as high-performing high schools recruit players with the promise that they can better build their brands with improved visibility. Embarrassing situations where some high school players make more money than their coaches.
“The Ewers kid in Southlake deserves more than the entire coaching staff, period; Think about it, ”said Martin. “As coaches, we’ve never had to deal with that.”
Still, high school football and basketball at the highest level have long since become big business. The idea of a school team has also undergone a radical metamorphosis in some cases. Williams plans to play basketball for the newly formed Charlotte, NC-based Vertical Academy this season, which was founded by his father. It will play a national schedule and plans to be sponsored by a shoe company. The Vertical Academy is an independent team, not a school; Williams will take classes online or in person at a Christian school he previously attended, his father Mahlon Williams told The Charlotte Observer.
Recruiting is legal and secretive in high school football and basketball. The IMG Academy in Florida attracts athletes from across the country and internationally. Games are regularly shown on national television, and camps and tournaments for elite players are sponsored by shoe companies. Top players receive college scholarship offers from eighth grade onwards.
Carroll High School in Southlake, outside of Dallas, plays soccer in a $ 15 million stadium. (Another Dallas power, Allen High School, plays in a $ 60 million stadium.) Ewers’ star power, now unavailable to his high school team, helped Carroll get booked, to play his season opener on August 26th on ESPNU at the AT&T Stadium. Home of the Dallas Cowboys.
Ewers would have preferred to stay at Carroll High if he had benefited from the economic opportunities there, said he and his parents Pete Thamel of Yahoo Sports, who first reported on the quarterback’s intention to go to the state of Ohio.
“We don’t need the money,” Curtis Ewers, Quinn’s father and an oil and gas manager, told Yahoo Sports. “It’s just the principle.”
Quinn Ewers and his family did not respond to Times’ requests for comment. On the Monday before heading to Ohio state, he announced his first advertising deal with a Dallas-based beverage company called Holy Kombucha. It’s linked to a school-based suicide prevention program called the Hope Squad.
A 45-second video from Ewers showed him twisting a soccer ball on his finger and using a can of fermented tea to mimic a crack from the middle. As of Thursday, the video had more than 600,000 views. The company declined to provide details about the confirmation, other than that it took at least a year to complete. One person familiar with the deal said it would bring in a six-figure amount for Ewers, a number that would surely get as much attention as his high school stats of 73 touchdown passes, 6,445 yards, and just eight interceptions in two university seasons.
“We could have chosen any other athlete with a bigger name,” said Theresa Pham, co-founder and chief operating officer of Holy Kombucha. But given Ewers’ youth, visibility and social media influence – he has more than 123,000 followers on Instagram and Twitter combined – his ability to raise awareness of the company’s suicide prevention and beverages made his support one of “ perfect partnership ”.
In July, Williams, a 6-foot-2 guard ranked No. 7 in ESPN’s Top 100 Players for the 2023 Class, became the first high school basketball player to sign a contract to get his name, his image and monetize its likeness.
Originally from San Diego, Williams scored 77 points in one game as a freshman at San Ysidro High School. He is a skilled marksman and a thundering dark man. But perhaps most impressive is the carefully manicured brand he’s developed on social media. Allegedly, Williams is so popular that he recently needed a police escort at an AAU tournament.
“He’s an anomaly in the situation of someone who is a high school phenomenon,” said Matt Davis, vice president of Excel Sports Management, which plans to launch global branding partnerships over the next several months. “He’s a content creator. He is an exceptional basketball player. He has had a large following for over a couple of years. “
For most high school athletes, however, monetizing their name, image, and likeness will add up to “a few hundred dollars a month” using their digital media skills, said Blake Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of Opendorse, a technology company Helps athletes generate advertising opportunities.
“These aren’t your grandfather’s endorsements” for billboarding or public appearances, Lawrence said. “This is a sophomore high school student who is streaming on Twitch and drawing tens of thousands of viewers to join in live. What’s stopping him yelling at Subway or a local hospital? “
A sense of amateurism can be maintained as long as the high schools themselves don’t pay the athletes to play, Lawrence said. For fans who attend soccer and basketball games on Friday nights, he said, “Knowing a kid makes a dollar or two on YouTube or gets paid for an autograph won’t change the way they cheer.”
In fact, Lawrence said, “If a school gets it right, they’ll celebrate that their athletes are marketable and they might see more fans in the stands.”
[ad_1]
