The State Board of Education will hold its regular August meeting this week. Part of that meeting will include a presentation about high school NIL by Brad Alford, the Director for the Office of Athletics at the Department of Public Instruction.

High school athletes in North Carolina have had the right to monetize their name, image, and likeness for nearly two years now, but the number of NIL opportunities is small.

The N.C. High School Athletic Association had 446 member schools last year, and while we don’t have the participation data yet, it’s safe to assume there were more than 200,000 student-athletes. But when it comes to NIL, only 21 student-athletes at 18 schools signed a total of 24 NIL agreements.

Some of the agreements were simple complimentary nutritional drinks. The largest was a $25,000 agreement for an athlete to represent a company. The average value of a high school NIL deal in North Carolina last year was between $200 and $700.

According to the report, the NCHSAA reported zero NIL violations.

I wrote a column in July 2022 arguing that the NCHSAA should adopt NIL policies for high school athletes. My position was not that there were a lot of NIL opportunities out there, but that the NCHSAA could set rules and build guardrails about NIL before a court ruled it was legal in an inevitable lawsuit, thereby creating the opportunity for high school NIL with no rules.

That was the key.

As I predicted, high school NIL in North Carolina became legal because of an injunction after a lawsuit. Luckily, the NCHSAA and the State Board of Education had already begun drafting rules for allowing NIL activities, and the judge ruled those guidelines would be used.

Those guidelines prevent things like collectives, which we see in high school. Schools, coaches, booster clubs, and others are not allowed to pay student-athletes to attend a school. They’re not allowed to facilitate NIL opportunities. There are restrictions on the types of NIL activities students can engage in, and they’re not allowed to do anything in their uniform, while at school, or using any logos of the school, district, conference, or NCHSAA.

There are also stringent education and reporting requirements that prevent abuse of the rules and protect student-athletes and families from being taken advantage of.

All of these guidelines were necessary for NIL to be successful in high school. In my view, NIL is a success in high school if the very small percentage of athletes who can create opportunities for themselves based on their name, image, and likeness are able to do so while preserving the integrity of education-based athletics. So far, so good.

In my mind, the success of high school NIL has nothing to do with the number of NIL deals students enter into or the amount those deals are valued at.

And that’s a good thing, because there simply is not a market for NIL deals in high school sports. As I said more than four years ago, there aren’t a lot of people or businesses with money looking to drop thousands of dollars on high school athletes. Why? Because high school athletes don’t have the value that college athletes do. It’s debatable (or is it?) whether or not the economics work in college; they certainly don’t work in high school.

But if you’re an athlete who can get a $25,000 deal to use your name, image, and likeness, why would we stop that? We wouldn’t stop any other student. In fact, we’d celebrate it.

And we should celebrate this too. High school NIL in North Carolina has opened the door for a limited number of opportunities for student-athletes, and it has not changed the educational focus or integrity of the sports themselves.

Last week, I interviewed Brad Alford, the next commissioner of the NCHSAA who currently serves as the Director of the Office of Athletics for the Department of Education.

That means he’s currently overseeing NIL enforcement at the state level.

Alford said he was in favor of athletes being able to profit from their name, image, and likeness, and he emphasized that there have been no reported issues with high school NIL in North Carolina so far.

Davis Whitfield, who is now the Chief Executive Officer of the National Federation of State High School Associations, said there have not been any widespread issues with high school NIL nationally.

Whitfield also said he supports the true definition of name, image, and likeness — athletes using their own brands to create opportunities for themselves — but emphasized that the college model must not be allowed to trickle down to high school.

The approach to high school NIL from athletic administrators is a lot different today than it was four years ago when I wrote my first column endorsing the idea.

Earlier this year, I hosted a panel at the N.C. Athletic Directors Association Conference in Asheville about the changing landscape of high school sports. There were a lot of things we could talk about, and I had NIL on the list. But the panel wasn’t super interested in talking about it. Why? Because it just isn’t a big issue. It affects so few students, and as DPI has confirmed, there have been no issues.

And that’s a good thing.

NIL in high school is a story because of the impact it has had in college sports.

It is not a story because NIL is having a big impact on high school athletics itself.