Opportunity Knocks #109 - The Impact of NIL on Youth Sports
Every week I share reflections, ideas, questions, and content suggestions focused on championing, building, and accelerating opportunity for children.
College athletes should be compensated for the billions in revenue they generate through ticket sales, television deals, and merchandise. The benefit they provide to their schools—often under intense pressure in the classroom and on the field—has long been undervalued in an economic system that enriched the institutions and coaches while sidelining the athletes themselves.
The current paradigm, built on the 2021 Supreme Court decision NCAA v. Alston, sought to correct that economic imbalance. Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules allow college athletes to monetize their brand. NIL is great in theory, a long-overdue expansion of individual rights and economic opportunity.
In practice, however, NIL’s implementation has been profoundly uneven. A patchwork of state laws has created a system where financial upside varies wildly depending on geography. There is limited transparency in transactions, which allows bad actors to prey on talented young people. Student athletes are incentivized to transfer from school to school while shopping for the best deal. Finally, the entire structure operates with minimal regulation or oversight.
The NCAA hasn’t done enough. Neither has Congress (if you ascribe to the belief that a regulated NIL-marketplace is part of the answer). And in this leadership vacuum, we’re witnessing a slow erosion of the values that once defined college sports: education, personal growth, character development. Values like resilience, discipline, and teamwork are at risk of being overshadowed by short-term dealmaking and transactional opportunism.
Sure, money has always played a role in college sports. And the Supreme Court's decision rightly lifted the cloak of “amateurism” that the NCCA hid behind for decades to avoid compensating athletes.
But what were left with is a model centers economics above all else and thus raises a more complex question: If this is the new normal in college sports, what does it mean for youth sports? What are we teaching kids, not just about competition, but about why we play? And what we play for?
I worry that NIL, which is already trickling down into high school athletics, will exacerbate what I consider to be the significant challenges in youth sports:
sports specialization which has physical (injury) and psychological (burnout) downsides;
the quitting epidemic (most kids quit by age 11) because, well, sports aren’t fun at that point;
a caste system that excludes families who can’t afford the exorbitant costs of traveling team sports; and
“athletes as influencers” model that has young people spending more time on social media.
But, the more sinister danger is that kids might never develop an intrinsic love of sports because their families—and other adults in their orbit, including coaches—are too focused on the return on investment. And when that happens, we risk losing something more profound than talent: we erode the joy, belonging, friendship, and identity that youth sports can provide.
NIL was designed to create opportunity. And in some ways, and for some young people, it has. But if we don’t begin to seriously consider its downstream effects on kids we may wake up to find we’ve commercialized the soul out of sports.
Until next week, be calm and be kind,
Andrew