TEXARKANA MAGAZINE
“The [NIL] definitely is something that all players at the [collegiate] level are happy about,” Jackson said. “All it is truly doing is helping athletes profit off their image while they can.” Another Pleasant Grove alumni, Nick Martin, now playing football collegiately at Oklahoma State University, is profiting directly from jersey sales. Athletes can earn a cut of the money when fans purchase their jerseys from the school. However, the great opportunities are accompanied by worries from the world outside of the athletes. Essentially, college athletics is a full- time job since most athletes do not have enough time to work on top of school and their sports. “It was very exciting just to know that I could be earning money while focusing on football,” Baylor University football player and Texas High graduate Brayson McHenry said. “A lot of people do not realize that this is a full-time job on top of school, so it is nice to be able to profit from our work.” So, while NIL allows collegiate athletes to profit from their “job,” some people think there needs to be a cap or limit on the amount of money the athletes can make from working. The idea of capping the amount of money that can be earned stems from many different problems that people see may arise in the future. “I think that it has started an imbalance among universities in that the rich are getting richer,” Gibson said. “Some athletes will be valued 100 times more than another one, and that can cause dissension in a locker room where we are trying to build unity.”
In other words, a freshman rising right out of high school with zero college experience can make hundreds of thousands of dollars just for being good in high school, and people see an issue. Another question is whether or not allowing the athletes to benefit financially from NIL will sway their team-based mindset to be a lot more selfish. “If you win the
Clayton Smith, Texas High School Class of 2021
$600 million lottery, you probably will not work much more the rest of your life; you may not work at all the rest of your life,” Stanford said. “So let’s take a true freshman coming in with nothing, and all of a sudden, he has all this money. Is he going to work as hard? Probably not. Will he keep putting in work and effort, or will he just settle?”
The bottom line is that money earned can not overrule the true reason these athletes are participating in their sport in the first place: passion. “I think a kid deserves to get what they have worked for,” Stanford said. “I think the biggest thing on the money side of things is can the individual keep their focus on trying to improve and continue to do their best.”
50
SPORTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs