JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Florida High School Athletic Association is set to make two very important and sports-shaping decisions at next week’s final board of directors meeting of the school year, including a vote to allow prep athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness.
On Tuesday, the FHSAA’s board will vote on a number of proposals, but two are the clear-cut headliners — the chance for athletes to profit off their NIL, and the addition of a championship division in all major team sports will go up for a board vote.
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NIL has the potential to be the biggest change ever to high school sports here, a total 180 from how it’s been since the inception of amateur sports. The amateurism model at the college level was all but erased on June 30, 2021, allowing NCAA, NJCAA and NAIA athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness. That process has been anything but uniform and continues to be a murky area with different laws in different states.
NIL began popping up across high school after that, including in Georgia last October. The FHSAA cites 30 states as of last October currently permitted NIL at the high school level. Since initially asking for input last January on NIL in Florida, the FHSAA has held multiple discussions, workshops and fact-finding conversations about the topic.
On Tuesday, it will come up for a vote for the first time. There’s little doubt that NIL in Florida high schools is just a matter of when and not if. That would open the door for elite blue-chip local football players like Solomon Thomas (Raines), Jaime Ffrench, Tramell Jones and Drake Stubbs (all Mandarin) and Elyiss Williams (Camden County) to earn significant money while in high school. Those players are all ranked in the top 100 in the On3 national NIL valuation chart. It would also allow female athletes to tap into their market value. In the fall of 2022, Bartram Trail girls lacrosse star Ryann Frechette was offered an NIL deal with sporting goods company, STX, but was blocked from taking it by the FHSAA.
If the FHSAA votes to allow NIL here, that would allow high school athletes to do it, with a few exceptions.
The championship division is a refresh of the open division concept that was presented to the board late last year. In the version that’s up for vote, it would take the top eight teams in the state via MaxPreps rankings and place them in two separate, four-team, double elimination brackets to determine a state champ.
Using last year’s top eight teams in the state, that would have meant Cocoa (1), St. Thomas Aquinas (4), Clearwater Central Catholic (5) and Plantation American Heritage (8) in one bracket, and Chaminade-Madonna (2), Miami Norland (3), Lake Mary (6) and Gainesville Buchholz (8) in the second bracket. The winners from each bracket would face off for the championship division title.
The championship division is essentially a compromise after a vote to scrap the two-year experiment of the Suburban-Metro playoff system, which put schools in the largest eight counties in Florida in their own division. It was done largely to thin out competitive balance in the state. A championship or an open division would seem to help push some of the teams that have had monopolies on state titles and title game appearances.