Illinois high school athletes can profit on their name and likeness. Is that a good thing?
It used to be that star high school athletes, if they wanted to make some money, had to work part-time jobs mowing lawns or filling french fry boxes or digging ditches, just like everybody else in school.
Now?
In 40 states, including Illinois, high school athletes can make money off their name, image and likeness. Today’s star athletes, right after finishing their homework, can give “shout-out” texts or videos to fans, make appearances at events, sign autographs or recommend brands on their social media channels. All for a fee, of course.
Welcome to the brave new world of NIL deals – the high school version.
“There are high school athletes that are making droves and droves of money right now,” said Braly Keller, director of NIL and business insights at Opendorse, an NIL tech platform that currently has 150,000 athletes under contract.
According to the National Federation of High School Athletics, 7.5 million high schoolers compete in athletics. The vast majority probably won’t ever make any more than pocket change from NIL deals. The real NIL money is in college, where athletes made $338 million on such deals in 2024, according to Opendorse.
That number is expected to quadruple past $2 billion this year, and that doesn’t even take into account a new revenue-sharing model that, if approved on April 7 by a federal judge, will allow top revenue-generating schools to disburse as much as $20.5 million per year to college athletes – a so-called college “salary cap.”
But companies such as Opendorse hope to introduce as many high school athletes to brands willing to pay for their NIL rights as possible. Many top high school athletes already have large social media followings and are savvy to opportunities in self-marketing in ways their parents and grandparents never were.
While no metro east high school athletes are known to have any NIL deals at the moment, that could likely change very soon, as word on their availability gets out
Just this week, Marist (Georgia) High School junior Kate Harpring – a five-star basketball prospect with scholarship offers from all the top colleges – signed a deal with Leaf Trading Card to produce her own brand of licensed trading cards. Kiyan Anthony, the son of former NBA star Carmelo Anthony, signed his first NIL at 16 two years ago to represent underwear brand NSD. When they were still in high school, basketball star Cooper Flagg (Duke) and quarterback Arch Manning (Texas) were already making significant money from NIL deals.
Again, most high school athletes today don’t make much money from NIL deals. For one thing, 10 states, including Texas, where football stars abound, still don’t allow them. For another, there are lots of rules in place in states that do allow them. One of the biggest: the athlete can’t use their school logo or any other licensed image of the school in any NIL deal. They can’t advertise on school grounds. They can’t make money on any “performance-based” achievement.
In other words, a player can’t receive a financial bonus from a business partner if he/she scores, say, 40 points in a basketball game. Coaches or any other school staff can in no way be involved in such deals.
Illinois currently has tighter financial restrictions on high school athletes than some other states. Any “official” NIL deal signed by a high school athlete with a private company cannot exceed $75, according to the ISHA handbook
But any Illinois public high school athlete can make as much money as possible selling their own personal “brand” off things such as personalized texts, videos, homemade T-shirts or pretty much anything else that doesn’t use the school’s name or logo. That’s where “middlemen” companies such as Opendorse come into play. Sign up for a free account on their platform and they’ll handle the rest.
How do the financials break down? Let’s say you, the big fan of your local high school star athlete who is signed on with Opendorse, want to pay them $100 for a personalized video? Opendorse would give the athlete the $100, but you the customer would pay a 33% premium on top of that – or $133 in total.
“It’s still a niche thing right now, but nonetheless it was not allowable in the past,” Keller said. “When you look at the sheer volume of athletes, they are 14 (times) the number that play in the collegiate ranks. You’re talking about a much larger pool, and 95 percent of famous athletes in the collegiate pool are ones that come from American high schools. So, you’re already talking about a group of athletes that already have the notoriety to secure some deals.”
Althoff Catholic High School coach Austin Frazier, whose team won the 2024 Class 1A Illinois football championship, has mixed feelings about NIL coming to high schools.
“We’re a capitalist society, so if a high school athlete can make money as an entrepreneur in a fair and moral way, I don’t have a problem with that,” Frazier said. “You read about these teenagers, or even younger, now making millions of dollars on TikTok doing whatever.
“What scares me a little is how companies might try to take advantage of people who are still just kids, with shady deals and whatnot. You hope that they have parents or other adults who might say ‘whoa, let’s pump the brakes a little bit’ before they sign some deal they might regret. These are, for the most part, still minors we’re talking about.”
