GAINESVILLE, Fla. – A stack of recent news articles sat on the desks of board members of the Florida High School Athletic Association on Tuesday morning, largely untouched. The headlines all dealt with the shady side of name, image and likeness at the college level, where business is largely unregulated and booming.
It was meant to serve as a warning to board members who were preparing to take up the volatile topic in high school sports. It may as well not even been printed out. It wound up passing unanimously by a board that had little choice in the matter.
Name, image and likeness or NIL, which has blown up college sports since its introduction, is now headed for the gyms, hallways and football fields of high schools in Florida. It was bound to happen, be it on Tuesday or during the next school year. The freight train of NIL has picked up steam at an unbelivable pace and no sign of slowing down. Florida became the 36th state to green light NIL at the high school level, with others likely to follow by the start of school.
The board also voted to create an open championship division in major team sports, but pushed it back until 2026.
In the long run, it could be the biggest vote in board history because it hits two very large targets. The championship division is the FHSAA’s acquiesce to the thorny issue of competitive equity as the state powerhouses run wild and ring up championships in their divisions. NIL and allowing athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness goes against the bedrock of amateurism, but the FHSAA had little choice on whether to fall in line with the NIL wave that has swept across both college and high school sports.
It was seen as a foregone conclusion that the FHSAA would pass it. The association had been sued in court previously about NIL and momentum was clearly on the side of athletes, both at the college and high school level.
“In Florida, we have open enrollment where our kids get school choice, which is available for them. So it made it a little bit difficult, a little bit challenging, I say for the board to come up with what exactly our process would look like, our bylaws look like, what it was based on because we couldn’t emulate what any other state was doing just because of the differences,” said executive director Craig Damon.
The championship division was another significant step. That takes the top eight teams in the state by MaxPreps rankings points and puts them in a separate double-elimination postseason tournament. As a bit of a concession, that won’t go in place until the 2026-27 instead of 2025-26 as it was initially proposed. Damon said that teams who are in that top eight won’t be able to opt out and remain in their assigned classification.
While that will undergo a bit more scrutiny from advisory committees before becoming official, NIL will be official once the Florida Department of Education signs off on it. That meeting is scheduled for July 24.
“The landscapes have changed. And I think as they change, we have to really take a look at it, I think we took a little longer than some. But you know, it gets down to the point of there’s 30-plus states doing it, our state is definitely different, our rules and regulations are different,” said board member Trevor Berryhill. “The ability to transfer pretty much anywhere, whenever is different than almost every other state in the US, so we did take some time, I do think we have put out a good policy. And again, it’s the policy for today. But we have the ability to change and tweak things as we see fit. "
NIL has been a mess at the college level, largely unregulated by the NCAA as it pleads for congressional help on the topic. The governing body of college sports has been dismantled by one adverse court case after another, the headliner coming last month when it settled with its five power conferences for more than $2.7 billion in damages.
“I will be the one to stand up here in three years and tell you, I told you so,” said Shelton Crews with the Florida Athletic Coaches Association. “It’s going to create havoc.”
After months of fact gathering, workshops and legalese about NIL, the vote was relatively mundane. Eight months of exploratory work to craft a new bylaw to evolve with the times sailed through after roughly 25 minutes of debate, largely over use of the word collective, something that the FHSAA is largely against.
“This will put us on par with the rest of the country,” said FHSAA board president Monica Colucci.
Alabama, Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming don’t currently have full NIL laws in place. The South Dakota High School Activities Association is currently voting on adopting NIL language. South Carolina is in the process of crafting an NIL program, too, according to multiple media reports. The North Carolina Independent Schools Athletic Association allows NIL, but that doesn’t cover the entire state.
“It’s no different in recruiting, you know. The parts of it that we have issues with is the recruiting part of it. We want parents to make their own choice about what school their son or daughter attends, and so forth, participate in sports and not to be influenced by or pressured by anyone from from a particular school,” Damon said. “So, from that standpoint, it’ll be tough but you know, we signed up for this job and you know that’s what our responsibilities are, trying to create an equal playing field for all of our student athletes, and we’re going to do our best to ensure that.”
There are things that won’t be permitted for athletes. Adult entertainment products and services, any alcohol, cannabis, tobacco or vaping products, prescription pharmaceuticals, gambling, weapons, ammunition and political or social topics.
It wasn’t met with overwhelming satisfaction, rather acceptance that it was happening one way or another as the climate shifts across the country to give athletes more power and earning
Board member Paul Selvidio took umbrage with what he felt was too many details that were spread across multiple pages of the bylaw and said that NIL shouldn’t contain nearly the restrictions that the FHSAA had put on it. Fellow board member Berryhill voiced concerns about enforcement, but said that the state was headed in this direction as the NIL dominos started falling across the country.
“Change is hard but growth doesn’t happen without change,” board member Allen Shirley said in his closing remarks.