That, you know, Friday, hurdles and home runs, Busted Pencils fully let it, Education
Educated Educators, Tucking Education, Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
Jacob Chairman of the Boards, and me, Dr. Tim Slecker, we are here. Oh yeah, it is another
awesome Friday, special, you know, our return guest, whenever we need truly the depth of
understanding when it comes to anything with constant sports, but this whole
business of name, image, likeness, and how it affects high school athletes going forward,
big meeting. Johnny, you and I tried our best to kind of make sense of it with Jacob and how
that goes. In fact, Jacob, what, what did you say, you know, if it was a Jimmy's chicken shack?
It was Al's orange chicken is going to be sending big checks out to high school athletes,
and that was my concern, so hopefully Jimmy can assuage those fears.
So yeah, that's it. So Jimmy, you know, we're talking about this name, image, and likeness,
and I, you know, just to remind people again, my kind of back on this was just like I couldn't
believe, and this is probably almost a year ago when you brought this up that this was an issue
that high school. So we're wrestling with this, and you know, first thought, my mind was, you
know, so, so high school kids are being put on weedies boxes and stuff like that. It's not really
at that level, but Jimmy, help us understand big meeting rules. What's going on? So, you know,
whether it's Jimmy's chicken shack or Jacob, again, who's the other chicken place there?
Tim, that would be big Al's orange chicken.
Big Al's orange chicken, or maybe Tesla. What's the deal? What are high schools got to do? What
are students doing? What about coaches? Help us make sense of the rules because, you know,
if I get a smart, really awesome athlete that I see around at high school here, tell me why I
shouldn't transfer them to Wisconsin. Take on a manager position of this student and try to
cash in myself as a manager over a student athlete, Jimmy. So I think I'll just start with this because
you've asked a lot of questions in that. I'm going to try to narrow it down to the fact that,
you know, first of all, just about every state now has NIL. Wisconsin was one of nine that didn't
have an NIL clause in their state guidelines, whether it was done by their state athletic
association or in a couple of states done by their state legislatures, which as we all know,
when the state legislatures involved in high school athletics, it doesn't end well. It just does
not end well. You know, the athletic associations, the schools themselves like to have some ability
to control what's happening within their rules. And I know here in Wisconsin, there are always
bills going up every single year that are trying to find ways to, you know, kind of rein in the
control of the WIA, which by the way, in Wisconsin, the WIA is the member schools. It's not some
monolith. It's the member schools make up the WIA. So there's always rules this year. They're
the big one that's up in the legislature. This is a good topic for another day, but they're trying
to make the WIA meeting subject to open records and open meetings laws in Wisconsin, like a public
entity. So there's a lot of things happening in Wisconsin besides that, but when the legislatures
involved, doesn't typically end well. So Wisconsin became, I believe, the 42nd state by my math,
the day NFHS has a different number, a couple of other people reporting on how different numbers,
but I'm going to go with 42nd state, Dev and IL. And so what does it mean? Well, first of all,
it's not like the college rules that we're not handing out contracts to kids. We're not signing
them up to collectives to the schools, things like that. We're not doing that in Wisconsin or
pretty much any other high school organization in the United States. No high school association is
doing this. Furthermore, in Wisconsin, it is more restrictive than the college rules and also
more restrictive than other high school associations. I think the biggest one that is the kind of
limiting factor in this is that a student athlete becomes ineligible if they are entering into
NIL deals with, first of all, with any, if there's a coach or a staff member acting as an agent,
that makes you ineligible. You're not allowed to as a coach, recruit or pitch kids to NIL,
or become an agent yourself. You can't be an agent if you're a coach or a staff member at a school.
Second of all, if you're someone who's donated to a booster club to the athletics department,
to a team or anything within that district, during the time that student athlete has been
WIA eligible, for example, being in high school for the four years. At any point, you're not allowed
to contribute to an NIL contract for that student athlete. If you think of small-town
Wisconsin, you think of the rules schools that make up about 70% of the districts in the state.
You think about that. Typically, in those districts, you've got really a core handful of businesses
in town that contribute directly to athletics. They might be putting up 100 bucks to help by
mouth guards. They might be putting up 500 bucks to help, I don't know, pay for a score,
whatever it is, right? You're donating to a booster club to the school directly. Maybe you're
donating your car dealership and you're donating a stack of books to the library. Whatever it is,
you can't enter into an NIL deal with a student athlete in that high school while they're in high
school or they become ineligible. It is very restrictive. This is the one I think that is going
to receive the most attention. This specific part of the rule, because what how terrible would it
be to be a local business and all of a sudden, you're just trying to help a student athlete,
get their name out there a little bit, try to get the little notoriety, and then all of a sudden,
because you donated something three years ago when they are a freshman. That was a senior you
have in a NIL deal. You make them ineligible. How terrible would that be? The WIA stance on this
once this rule becomes effective with the WIA Bulletin at the end of May, I think May 26 or 27
is the target date for that. When that Bulletin goes out, that rule is now in place along with the
three other ones that passed at the annual meeting last month. When that rule becomes effective,
the WIA is leaving it to the schools to educate their community members on the do's and don'ts with
it. One great thing that the WIA has already provided on their website is a whole list of FAQs,
potential case studies, things like that. What if this happened? Is this eligibility? Is this not
eligibility? There's a very, very, very long list of potential issues that they've taken from
other states, and they've got a lot of data to use, and they've put it all in a one spot now
with this rule. It is a very complicated issue because of the fact that the WIA has started
up so many guardrails to keep the same kind of on track. However, it does not preclude someone say
of a large business that hasn't donated to the school before, from offering NIL deals. I know
this is getting very long-winded at this point. I do want to mention, though, quickly that the other
part of this, too, is that there are some guidelines in place for what can actually be in an NIL deal
the student athlete can use their name, image or likeness, but they can't show their association
to their school, to the school's sport team, to the conference, or to the WIA. So you can't just
have a kid in your town go up and say I'm the quarterback for this high school here, you know, come
by whatever it is I'm selling. You can't do that. You can't associate with your high school team,
your high school, any of that. So there are some guardrails up for this. It's a lot different
than college, and I think that's going to be the part that the WIA and all 421 school districts
in the state of Wisconsin are really going to have to educate their community members about.
Man, Johnny, help me out here. No, I love that. I think we did pretty good, Tim. I'm listening
back to Jimmy's summary of this, but I'm going to ask the question here, Jimmy. As a coach,
when we talk about these are essential curriculars, and that they don't exist without coaches,
and coaches are a form of democracy and action. I mean, it's like doing civic duty, and
yeah, we love the sport. Yeah, we love, you know, what it does for the community in terms of these
young athletes, you know, having a well-rounded education. It's a big part of their lives,
and what they love, and you know, that keeps them not only in school, but learning life lessons
that they apply. But like this coach advisory committee, that WIA listens to, you know, and
consults with, there's a form of democracy. I just wonder as a coach, Jimmy, how do you feel about
NIL, and like, what do you think? In general, I'm reading that coaches seem to be like, hey,
this is these new rulings on it, are going to help programs. They're going to be, you know,
helpful in our state. So, you know, here we have a coach, you know, coach K with us here.
You know, tell us a little bit like, as a coach, that civic duty, that coaches are participating in,
and then like, how do you feel about this? Two parts for me. First of all, if it's good for the kids,
it's good for the kids, and I work as a school board member as well. Whatever I will always vote in
favor of what's best for kids. I don't, if I ever stuck on a decision, I'm like, hey, is this good
for kids? That's all I ask myself. And if the answer is yes, then it doesn't matter if I feel one
way, you know, on or whatever. If it's good for the kids, I'm going to go for it. It makes sense if
it's sort of financially responsible. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes I'm just like, yeah, I think the kids
definitely need bounce house Fridays. You know, we just put up bounce houses and we just don't have
classes that day. I'm all for it. No, kidding. I'm always going to be in favor of what's good for kids.
I think in Wisconsin, the other part of this, I think in Wisconsin, this affects such a small
group of student athletes, the truly elite student athletes, the ones that are training for the
Olympics, the ones that are going to be going, they're four or five star recruits for whatever sport
they're in. They're either already in some form of travel ball, they're out of state already,
or if they really need it, they're going to transfer out of state to a state, you know,
somewhere like Florida, IMG Academy, they're going to go out east, they're going to go south,
they're going to go to California, they're going to go find this elite prep school,
and that's how they're going to build themselves up to become a professional athlete, right?
That's the truly elite. We're talking 10, 20 tops kids a year. They're already just leaving the
state and doing things. I can I speak to this from personal experience. We had an SEC recruit
at my very tiny high school here in Southwestern Wisconsin. She's playing at Mississippi State right
now, and she played travel softball all over the country, and she was one of the top 100 recruits
in the nation, right? So obviously a very elite athlete, but you know, she stayed in high school
here and was very small town to the family's credit with NIL. I don't know that it would have
really changed anything every single business in this town already donated to the school. So
here it went to matter so much, but I will say that this rule that the NIL rule is really only
for the truly elite of student athletes in Wisconsin. We're talking less than a percent of kids that
are actually going to have some kind of NIL deal. What you're going to see a lot of it is going to be
is that you're going to put some kids on a poster, right? They can't associate by school,
they can't associate by conference or any of that stuff, but you're going to see some skills posters
go up that are run by clubs, things like that that don't have a school mentioned in them at all.
And you're going to see some of these kids faces on posters and come to the skills camp and learn
how to throw football. We'll learn how to shoot the double, come to this wrestling clinic for you.
That's what it's going to be for the vast majority of NIL cases, right? That's that's really where
I see it going. I think when people are talking about somebody rolling up in a brand new car,
things like that, getting a restaurant chain endorsement, that kind of stuff, the things you
think about with the college student athletes, right? That's just not going to happen to the degree
people think it will. It's going to be a handful, probably. If I'm going by the WIA data, they're
expecting this to be a fewer than 100 student athletes. They released data ahead of the first time
that this went through, saying that of all their ineligibility cases, if they had NIL in place
at the time of the ruling, I think they said in the year before the 2024 vote, it was 16
student athletes in the whole state, 16 that would have been eligible under what is now going to be
the NIL rule. We're talking about a very small handful of student athletes. So I think that this
ruling, as much attention as it's going to get, I think the greater impact of it is really just
going to be for students and for community members to be a little more creative in helping market
those students into opportunities, putting their face on the counter at a restaurant or a grocery
store or something, things like that. I don't think that with all these guardrails in place that
you're going to see someone on a billboard, the whole John L.A. with the arm back kind of thing,
the Heisman Pose, you're just not going to see a lot of that. This is really truly for the
very elite. And as a coach, I'm all four kids finding their way and finding ways to make the
most out of out of what they're doing. So I mean, yeah, it's so much there, Jimmy, like you're so
well versed in this. I mean, tell me about like, how is there a place that if I'm interested,
just go back to my kind of, you know, sarcastic on like, hey, I'm going to find a student
outside the state. I'm going to bring them in. I'm going to be their manager.
Everything you told me is that actually sounds legal to do something like that.
What are their guardrails? Have people brought up scenarios like that? I mean, and then
if I want to find out the rules, how do I learn about them?
So, so the scenario you're laying out, as long as you're not already donating to the school,
or you're fine to try to enter into an NIL. If you're not coaching that student, you're not a
staff member. As long as you're not violating the rules, they've laid out. You're fine to do it.
Like, that's the thing. I think doing something with the obvious intent of recruiting. There's other
guardrails for transfer students, obviously. You have to sit out a year if you transfer without like
your family specifically relocating, right? So, you know, there's there's there's already rules
in place for transfer students. Open enrollment to think in Wisconsin, right? There's open
enrollment's always been here. You know, but there's you know, there's rules in place to prevent
kind of that that player movement. I think this was a big concern and you're you're right to
bring this up. This was a big concern brought up by coaches and by my parents, right? That, you
know, well, this is going to just increase player movement. Well, there's already things in place
to kind of limit that. If your family's not uprooting completely relocating during your high school
years, you know, you're going to have to sit out of your varsity action. So that's there's already
a rule in place that exists for that. However, it doesn't stop families from being creative and
just renting an apartment or whatever it is. Although with rent prices now, if you're renting
an apartment these days at $2,000 or whatever it is for rent, boy, I mean, you're really, really
invested in high school. I guess at that point, to your point about education, like I said, the
WIA is really leaving this up to schools to educate their communities or coaches, their student
athletes on. I guess on the WIA's website with regards to eligibility on their student eligibility
page, they have a long FAQ and they list a lot of different examples to help people kind of work
their way through it. I do know from talking to them, I asked them from a media perspective,
some of the executive board, if they can provide some guidance to media because we create advertising
and if we get approached by somebody saying, hey, we'd like to use, you know, the star picture
from the baseball team. We want to use them in this ad for this card dealership. Card dealership's
not donating anyone into the school. They're not in the booster club. There's no coaches or staff
members at this card dealership, right? Everything is good and they put them in the game. They don't
violate any of the rules. Everything is good. Up until the point, I said, what would happen then
if after the commercial, the announcer turns around and says, oh, by the way, you know, Bob there,
he's on the mount here for the third inning. You know, it's great to see he's supporting
local business. I'm like, is that a violation? Like are we as a radio station that if we broadcast
this game, are we risking the eligibility of a student athlete? So these are some of the examples
I brought up and they turn me back to you, not only the FAQ, but also turn me to you need to,
you need to work with your school districts, your partnering with on these broadcasts to make
sure you're following it with the added little pinch at the end. We just hope that radio stations
would do something like that. Johnny, you got a question there in the chat.
Well, Jimmy, you know, we were doing a little digging around last week when we were talking about
NIL and we thought, you know, if we had so many questions about it, that certainly, you know,
you know, players out there, athletes, families, you know, folks just with general curiosities
might want to know more, especially these young folks. Like we said, if it's good for the youth
that we love, you know, seeing these changes, but it sounds like it's, you know, district to
district, you know, kind of going to differ a little bit. And athletes may have questions about it.
And I read that the WIA had partnered, you know, with a Milwaukee based company influential
athlete. Do you anything about that? I would recommend people with more questions, go that direction.
I mean, I was like, wow, this is great. Sounds like there's a resource where people listening,
who have questions, like, oh, my son, you know, as a pitcher and thinking about, you know,
wait, is this possibly for me? How do, how do families navigate that?
So this, this partnership, they entered into this between the two votes. They did this towards
the end of last year. And they did this because, yes, there is a need for education. But there's also a
need, you know, really for there to be some kind of model to follow. You need experts in any subject,
and especially something like this, you need to have a resource. This is a company that is, is already
provided materials to membership in the WIA reviewing everything for this annual meeting vote that
happened last month. There's, they're there really as a resource. And they're going to help
basically steer student athletes towards, you know, towards the right use without risking their
eligibility to enter into NIL deals and to help them set them up for post high school NIL as well.
A lot of colleges, even small colleges are offering at division three colleges offer NIL,
and it's much different than the high school level. This company is a lot of already pretty well-known
people in the Milwaukee area. I believe there's a couple of former broadcasters, even part of it.
So there's already, you know, and some coaches to some well-known coaches are part of it. So it's,
it's one of those things where we all knew this was coming. This was kind of an inevitability.
It's a big word for me. This was, it was really hard to get out. This is, this is something that
everybody saw kind of happening. And the WIA was smart in getting out in front of a potential
yes vote this year, and just having this as a resource for people. I think like everything we
talk about on this show, whether it's NIL or anything else impacting high school student athletes,
students in general, you want to have the best resources, the best education on these topics,
right? And this is a company that has been there pretty much every step of the way, even before
they officially partnered, creating materials, showing student athletes what you can and can't do,
and showing a way forward for people who are trying to find ways like, hey, you know, I never
thought about NIL. I'm in a small town. But maybe it's something we can do here, right? And we,
we all want to do its best for kids, give them these opportunities to, to be able to grow themselves,
not only as a student, not only as an athlete, but also to kind of grow themselves as becoming,
you know, going from being a teenager to young adult, you want to be able to speak to yourself
clearly, represent things in a, in a responsible and positive manner. That's where I really see
NIL shining in high school is that this is something that can teach you the importance of a
personal, I say personal brand, I mean, you know, not having things up on social media that can
get you in trouble, right? Not having, you know, having the support of people working with people
in a business setting, something that you're going to have to do as an adult, you're going to have
to go buy a car someday, you're going to have to, you know, sit down and negotiate pay raise,
things like that, right? These are all skills you develop. So I look at this partnership a little
differently, maybe than others. I see this more as a resource, as a way for, for students,
parents, community members, schools themselves, to really learning grow, especially in the context of
what, as you, as we've talked about here for the last 20 minutes, is a very, very loaded subject
with a lot of questions at. Yeah, it is. There's so much there, but Jimmy, like always, though,
having you on the show here to join us on Fridays for, you know, now hurdles and home runs,
there's a clarity, I think, that comes across it. That's why we, you know, really appreciate
you stopping by, you know, and as we say, busting some pencils with us. So Jimmy, man,
thanks a lot for hanging out and make sure everybody if you're listening to follow Jimmy
through all the civic media places. Jimmy, it sounds like you're, they're, they're putting you to
a little bit more extra work these days, you were talking about.
Civic media keeps me busy. It's, it's fun. If I didn't have something to do, it would be,
be really boring day. I love it when I'm busy. I thrive when it's busy, especially during sports
season. I, if I have all this free time, I don't feel like I'm at my best. So I, I really enjoy all
the work that I get to do here. And as you said, if you need to learn more about it, there's a
plenty of recaps up on civicmedia.us and you can reference these podcasts. We've talked about
the several times here on busting pencils. Absolutely. And now it's time for your moment of zin.
What most of us must be involved in is to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing.
Change the world.
Hey, thanks for listening to hurdles and home runs with special guests from civic media, Jimmy Kay.
And if you want to grab more busted pencils podcasts, just go to Apple Spotify or you can always
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always get great busted pencils content like today's show on Mondays for home rooms, Wednesdays for
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for an hour of your favorite blue collar scholars. Dim and Johnny, a keep busting pencils.
you