Jake Daugherty, director of collegiate and high school partnerships with Opendorse — a platform that helps athletes and brands navigate the fast-evolving name, image and likeness (NIL) landscape — is getting a lot more calls from high school athletics directors these days. And most of them begin the same way.
“The first thing people say is, ‘I hate this. I want no part of this,’ ” Daugherty says. “In the world of NIL, people jump to extremes: It’s the best thing for kids, or it’s the worst thing to happen in the history of athletics. But the reality is that it falls somewhere in the middle. There are going to be bad actors in the space, and there are going to be really positive things that come from NIL.”
That’s the unlikely dichotomy facing high school athletics administrators who’ve been on the job since before July 1, 2021, when the NCAA’s NIL rule took effect. For them, NIL’s subsequent trickle-down to the high school level is a fundamental shift in the beliefs on which they built their careers.
“To be quite frank, I have a love/hate relationship with NIL,” says Kate Creekmore, executive director of athletics at Bixby (Okla.) Public Schools, as well as the Oklahoma Coaches Association-Region 7’s 2025 Athletic Director of the Year. “On a personal level, I want kids to play for love of the game, so it really makes me nervous about what NIL is going to do to high school athletics. On the other hand, I love the education piece that comes with this opportunity — not only to teach financial responsibility but also for kids to learn how to walk into a business that wants to partner with them, look someone in the eye, shake their hand and talk in complete sentences. It will help them put their best foot forward.”
Setting the rules
When defining NIL at the high school level, it’s more important to emphasize what it is not. Booster clubs are not donating money to high schools so those schools can turn around and give it to their student-athletes. Or as Creekmore puts it: “There’s not a bucket of money that kids get to scoop out of.”
In fact, most high school student-athletes shouldn’t expect to get rich from their NIL deals. Stories like those of Jackson Cantwell, a Class of 2026 offensive tackle at Nixa (Mo.) High School who signed with the University of Miami and has an estimated NIL valuation of $1.9 million, are uncommon. Rather, most high school students with NIL deals will earn much, much less via social media posts and influencer marketing, personal appearances, skills development and instruction (in the form of camps, clinics or private coaching), product endorsements or autograph sessions.
As of earlier this year, only five states — Alabama, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi and Wyoming — did not permit NIL at the high school level, according to Sports Illustrated’s High School on SI website. Policies vary by state, but most of them prohibit the use of a school’s intellectual property (including name, mascot, team colors or logo), as well as filming or other NIL-related activity on school property. Student-athletes also are not allowed to receive payment for such athletic achievements as reaching a certain state ranking or scoring a specific number of points.
It’s a lot to take in, which is why NFHS, the national governing body of high school athletics, offers a free “Name, Image and Likeness” online course through the NFHS Learning Center that details the expectations and realities of NIL. It defines NIL at the high school level and provides examples of how NIL can be leveraged, identifies misconceptions that various stakeholders (including local businesses) might have about NIL and highlights aspects that student-athletes and their families should consider when pursuing NIL opportunities. Some state associations even require student-athletes to provide a certificate of NFHS course completion before they can enter into an NIL agreement.
“The course was designed to give a high-level overview of what NIL actually is,” says Dan Schuster, director of educational services for the NFHS, noting that it has been viewed by nearly 19,000 individuals — the vast majority of them students and coaches. “We knew that the general public was exposed to a lot of pay-for-play narratives and stories from college programs. We simply wanted to begin the process of educating the interscholastic community.”
Dr. Karissa Niehoff, CEO of the NFHS, told AB in 2024 that even though most of the millions of student-athletes who play high school sports every year won’t go on to compete at the collegiate level, some of those who do will be valuable and marketable. “The truth is, kids do own their name, their image and their likeness,” she said. “What we tried to do right away was not stiff-arm this thing, not stick our head in the sand.”
“This is very similar to concussions,” Schuster adds. “Not all 50 states passed laws in the same year regarding concussion management, and this isn’t really that much different. Back then, it was, ‘How do we recognize the signs and symptoms of concussion? We need to be paying attention.’ Now it’s, ‘Let’s make sure that when we get asked questions about NIL that we actually know what we’re talking about.’ We’re trying to get rid of some of the myths. That’s the whole goal: To create more informed people in our schools.”
‘Chocolate donut deals’
While many high school state associations jumped on the NIL bandwagon in quick succession, the Ohio High School Athletic Association was among the final holdouts, passing NIL in November 2025.
“I don’t think our schools were really in favor of having this happen,” says Doug Ute, executive director of the OHSAA. But a lawsuit filed earlier last year against the association by Jamier Brown, then a junior wide receiver at Big Walnut High School in Sunbury and one of the nation’s top football recruits, “kind of forced it for us,” Ute adds.
Brown’s complaint claimed he missed out on more than $100,000 in NIL deals because the state didn’t allow NIL, a position that “unlawfully suppresses [student-athletes’] economic liberties, freedom of expression and restrains competition in the NIL marketplace.” The lawsuit was dropped days after Ohio became the 45th state to allow NIL at the high school level.
“Our schools felt very strongly that we and our member schools — and not a court — should control the narrative,” Ute says. “Because, as we know from the NCAA, when a court makes a ruling, there are no guardrails. So, for us, it was important to at least make sure we had guardrails and safety nets out there that protected our schools and the OHSAA.”
While it may have seemed like an 11th-hour decision to approve NIL under legal pressure, Ute says OHSAA’s leadership had been discussing the topic with members at regional meetings for at least a year and a half prior. And those discussions allowed ample time to create the language ultimately used in the association’s NIL bylaw.
According to Ute, only 32 student-athletes have NIL deals in a state that ranks third in the country in high school sports participation — almost 336,000 boys and girls. Of those, two have “significant deals” with national brands that include “a good sum of money,” he says.
“The other 30 are what I would call ‘chocolate donut deals,’ where an athlete will have a donut in their hand outside a donut shop and say something like, ‘I get my donuts from Downtown Bakery.’ And then that person gets $150,” Ute says, noting that such video clips typically end up on social media pages and perhaps in television spots.
It is not the role of a high school athletics director to negotiate, secure or approve NIL deals, Ute stresses — although some state associations do require school administrators, coaches and their local boards of education to have access to student-athletes’ NIL agreements.
“An AD’s responsibility lies in the education [about NIL] of student-athletes as a whole, not just one person,” he says. “They really have nothing to do with it other than making sure their athletes understand the safeguards that are put in place. The onus on schools is making sure their athletes are educated.”
‘Learn this together’
That onus requires that school administrators be educated first. This proved to be an issue for Bixby Public Schools, especially when it came to figuring out an effective way to monitor student-athletes’ NIL involvement and make sure they were staying within the guardrails put in place by the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association.
When Creekmore learned that the University of Oklahoma had partnered with Opendorse for its NIL student-athletes, she contacted the company. Bixby High went on to become one of the platform’s first high school clients (paying an annual fee of about $5,000, Creekmore says) and hosted an NIL educational meeting in fall 2025 attended by 80 or so parents and some of their student-athletes.
If a student-athlete opts to pursue NIL opportunities, the district asks them and their parents to sign forms acknowledging income tax responsibilities and other obligations. Student-athletes seeking NIL opportunities then create a profile through Opendorse for local and national brands to browse. Any potential deals are vetted by the platform, and Opendorse does not take a percentage of student-athletes’ payouts.
As of March, 26 of Bixby High’s 1,000 or so student-athletes across multiple sports had profiles on Opendorse, Creekmore says, adding that most of them were boys. At one end of Bixby’s NIL spectrum is a wrestler who was paid $22 to offer a one-on-one wrestling lesson; at the other end is a football player who received $500 for a personal appearance. (The football player’s parents, Creekmore says, were among those at the school’s initial NIL educational meeting.)
At this stage of high school NIL’s evolution, education remains the most essential piece, according to Opendorse’s Daugherty.
“Half of our business is a commercial sports marketing agency, and the other half is a technology, education and consulting business,” he says, noting that not all high schools will get involved in NIL. “This market is still very much maturing, but I think ADs feel pressured to have this grandiose answer when people ask them, ‘Hey, what are you doing with NIL?’ I tell them that it’s okay to say, ‘We think it’s great. It’s just not a priority for us here.’ But if you’re not at least getting educated about NIL, you’re putting yourself at a professional disadvantage.”
“I don’t have all the answers, and I’m okay saying that,” Creekmore admits. “But I’m not afraid to ask questions, and I’ll sure try to find out the answers. We’re all going to learn this together, and I want kids to have the best experience with NIL.”
