Interested observers, including coaches, are speaking up about a growing need to regulate so-called "street agents" who seek to profit by putting themselves between NIL money and high school and college athletes.
As reported by Paula Lavigne of ESPN, these agents typically aren't certified and they likely aren't even attorneys. Nonetheless, they "recruit players around the edges of the game and promise to represent them in pursuit of college scholarships or deals for their name, image and likeness," Lavigne wrote.
"Street agents existed under the table in the pre-NIL era, but their prevalence, and the dollar amounts involved, have grown exponentially in the new college sports era, according to coaches and sports administrators interviewed by ESPN," added Lavigne.
"I think it's almost at a crisis, to be honest," said Joe Martin, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association. "We've got situations where we ... have the street agents moving kids from place to place and representing them, that are charging them a lot more money than they should be charging them."
According to Lavigne, coaches say high school athletes are more at risk of being exploited than college athletes because they lack the support and structure of a university compliance office, and they are sometimes the only student at their school weighing an offer, with no points of comparison.
Street agents are often former players, trainers, parents, coaches or just people who say they have a connection to NIL collectives, recruiters or sponsors, Lavigne reported, adding that coaches say these agents contact athletes through social media, private training facilities, AAU basketball or other non-school leagues.
"Unlike in professional leagues, where agents are certified by the players' unions," Lavigne wrote, "agents negotiating deals at the high school and college level do not have to register with a national governing body."
"So many of our student-athletes have agents that help them with NIL that aren't really agents," South Carolina head football coach Shane Beamer told a congressional committee last March. "Some are being taken advantage of."
Per Lavigne, citing a December survey of 1,000 college athletes conducted at ESPN's request by Bill Carter, founder of Student-Athlete Insights, an NIL consulting and education firm that operates the NIL Research Poll:
- 18% of the athletes said that someone helped them with NIL deals while they were in high school.
- About 67% of athletes who responded said they agreed to give the person who helped them a percentage of their earnings.
- Just over half said they were completely or somewhat satisfied with that person.
In an unscientific survey of Texas high school football and basketball coaches, conducted by the Texas High School Coaches Association in cooperation with ESPN, about a fourth of coaches said they had athletes who had been approached by agents, some of whom make money by charging parents an upfront fee, while others negotiate a percentage of any NIL or college offers.
Among the coaches whose athletes had been approached by agents, 70% said that they did not believe the agents were acting in the athlete's best interest, Lavigne reported.
"Coaches described agents who jeopardized offers the athletes already had received or were not qualified to advise on such decisions," she wrote. "One football coach wrote that an all-state running back switched high schools because of an agent, lost out on playing time and 'went from having college interest to nothing.' "
"There are some people that are in this industry that are doing the right thing," said Tim Prukop, co-founder of Eccker Sports Group, which provides athletes and their families with NIL guidance. "But for every one of those, there's 10 that are out there just trying to make a buck the fastest that they can on anybody that they can."
