What Texas Parents Actually Need to Know About NIL

Most of what parents hear about high school NIL in Texas is either too optimistic or too pessimistic, and both versions cost families something.

The three brackets

Which one your athlete is in changes everything.

Sixteen and younger. They may not sign a name, image and likeness agreement with anybody. Not a university, not a collective, not a brand, not a local business. Neither may a family member on their behalf.

Seventeen and older. They may sign a scholarship agreement with a college, and they may sign NIL agreements, but only with postsecondary institutions. A university, in other words. Not a shoe company.

Everybody else. Any NIL agreement with an entity that is not a postsecondary institution may not be executed until the athlete has exhausted their UIL eligibility in that sport.

Always off limits

Texas law bans student-athlete endorsements in specific categories regardless of anything else:

• Alcohol, tobacco and nicotine devices
• Steroids and performance enhancing drugs
• Sports betting and casino gambling
• Firearms the athlete could not legally buy
• Sexually oriented businesses

The lane nobody explains

NIL is an athletics category. It governs agreements tied to an athlete's status as an athlete, and it is aimed squarely at the small number of kids who are genuine college and pro prospects.

Being a creator is not the same thing. An athlete who builds an audience and becomes known as a person rather than only as a roster spot is operating somewhere else entirely.

The money has rules. The name, image and likeness do not.

Your athlete owns all three today, at eleven, at fourteen, whatever the signing rules say about this season. Every year they play is a year that asset is either being built or quietly wasted.

Why this argues for starting now

The door opens on their seventeenth birthday for schools, and on the day their high school eligibility ends for everyone else. Both dates are on the calendar right now.

An athlete who arrives at those dates with four years of film, an audience that watched them get good, and the ability to speak on camera is a different proposition from one who arrives with a phone full of screenshots.

Brands do not build you an audience. They rent one that already exists.

Eric
NVision Films