Following the GHSA’s recent decision to allow Georgia high school student athletes to benefit monetarily from the use of their name, image, and likeness, many fans, coaches and others aligned with high school athletics have voiced their opinion, mostly against the new NIL rule benefitting the players.
To many, NIL will have a mostly negative effect on Georgia high school athletics and its student-athlete participants.
But in a recent interview with Dr. Robin Hines, the GHSA executive director contended that many of those fears and concerns are largely unfounded. And I couldn’t agree more.
Dr Hines told ITG Next that he and the GHSA did their due diligence in benchmarking against all other state associations that allow NIL deals with potential benefit available to their student-athletes.
“I’ve looked at every other state association’s rules and how they are doing things, so we went into this vote with a ton of information,” Hines said.
The GHSA executive director said everyone, whether they are a student or not, and whether they participate in athletics or not, owns their own name, image, and likeness, and has a right to benefit from that. Participation in athletics shouldn’t make a difference.
“It’s as simple as this,” Hine said. “The whole thing is based on the premise of everyone’s individual right to publicity, and there’s three things with regards to publicity, and that’s name, image, and likeness.
Hines did, however, acknowledge one major difference: “While every individual owns their own name, image, and likeness, they do not own the intellectual property of the state association or the local school or school district; therefore, there can be no mention of that individual’s school, their uniform, footage, etcetera. It has to be independent of all that.”
The overwhelming attitude has been against NIL deals in high school athletics, and Hines said he believes there’s a good explanation for the opposition.
“When most people hear ‘NIL,’ they think of the NCAA and what that has become,” Hines said. “They didn’t deal with that for a long time, and it just became this thing that got bigger and bigger. It just happened to the NCAA, and they were finally forced to deal with it.”
In becoming the 31st state association to approve NIL, it’s clear the GHSA also decided to deal with it in Georgia high school athletics, but with a much more proactive approach than the NCAA, and with the benefit of seeing what has worked within other states’ NIL agreements.
Armed with that information, Hines and the GHSA have put into place several restrictions and precautions that should avoid many of the perceived pitfalls that many feel will occur with NIL.
“Under our rules, you can’t be pictured in your uniform, or use footage from a game or practice, or any other mention of your school, mascot, period,” Hines said. “By having these guardrails in place, we feel that there won’t be a lot of problems. I don’t think it’s going to be as prevalent as a lot of people are making it out to be.”
I agree. I think the GHSA has approached this about as well as they could have. Let’s relax and let this play out.
