Wisconsin schools will once again vote on NIL at WIAA Annual Meeting

STEVENS POINT, Wis. (Civic Media) – For the second straight year, Wisconsin schools will be put up for a vote at the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s Annual Meeting on name, image, and likeness for high school student-athletes.

Last year, member schools voted down the NIL measure 219-170.

Some administrators felt like they didn’t have enough time to review materials related to implementing a constitutional amendment for NIL, while others poked at the language being added or changed in the WIAA constitution.

The WIAA’s proposed amendment would allow student-athletes to have NIL agreements as long as they didn’t associate with their school, conference, school team, or the WIAA. The WIAA also added language to discourage what it calls “undue influence” over student athletes.

NIL fails 170-219 at WIAA Annual Meeting

— Jimmie Kaska (@jimmiekaska) April 24, 2024

It also states that student-athletes can’t endorse products or activities in adult-targeted categories, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, or firearms. NIL opportunities are also restricted to certain categories; in general, NIL deals have to be age-appropriate. Student-athletes also can’t be compensated based on their athletic performance, or “pay to play.”

WIAA Associate Director Mel Down said on a WisSports.net Podcast that those are some of the key differences between the college version of NIL and the high school version.

Wisconsin is one of a handful of states that doesn’t currently have an NIL provision. It’s part of a bloc of Midwestern states, including Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as West Virginia, Wyoming, Alabama, Texas, and Hawai’i, that has yet to pass regulations for student-athletes and NIL contracts.

41 states and the District of Columbia have rules in place for NIL for high school student-athletes, which is up from 32 at the same time that the WIAA proposed the measure last year. The NFHS said that when NIL was approved, it was intended for college student-athletes. However, because the laws that apply to NIL are tied to state statutes, eligibility for NIL varies from state to state.

The Board of Control approved several of the Conference Realignment Task Force recommendations for football-only & lacrosse conference realignment, & advanced five Constitutional amendments to the Annual Meeting at its March meeting today.https://t.co/2vfMNLDxcR

— WIAA (@wiaawi) March 11, 2025

The proposed NIL amendment was advanced to the Annual Meeting unanimously by the 14-member Sport Advisory Committee and the 17-member Advisory Council, as well as the WIAA Board of Control. In November, the WIAA announced an exclusive NIL partnership with Influential Athlete.

NIL isn’t the only hot topic on the Annual Meeting agenda. Schools will also vote on whether to increase summer contact days to a range of dates in June and July, leaving out the week of July 4th, as well as the week before fall practice begins for football in late July. The current rule is five days of contact in each sport.

Also on the agenda is a rule that would require spectators ejected from a contest to have take an online course in sportsmanship before being allowed back into that venue. In 2021, WIAA membership added a one-game suspension to the rules to discourage unruly fan behavior.

Another measure would take cross country out of the team sports subject to the Tournament Performance Factor. Small schools lobbied complaints that the system penalized programs that might not win a sectional or state event, but be forced to compete against schools multiple times larger in the postseason anyways in the three-division sport.

A proposal to allow freshmen (9th grade) teams to play the same number of games as JV and Varsity in the regular season also made the agenda. All four proposed amendments, as well as some proposed editorial changes to the constitution, were approved unanimously to be placed on the Annual Meeting agenda.

The WIAA Annual Meeting will be held on April 25 in Stevens Point. You can see the proposed amendments by clicking here.