“Women are really excluded from professional (sports) opportunities and so they really should have a shot at getting something while they’re in college. It was the women themselves who began to point out to me the ways beyond my understanding how the NCAA’s rules hurt women athletes.”
Hayley Hodson provided a case in point. She was a volleyball player so gifted that she was a member of the U.S. national team at age 17, set on an Olympic path. She felt there were two options open to her after high school graduation: Play professionally in Europe, where she might not get the best coaching or face elite competition, or play at a major American university.
Hodson chose to compete at Stanford and was careful to turn away any endorsement deals.
As a freshman, Hodson suffered two concussions so severe that she eventually had to retire from her sport, never making a dime. Now a law student at UCLA, she testified on behalf of Skinner’s bill and wrote a letter of support to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“I wasn’t trying to put food on the table. I was living at home, so I said ‘better safe than sorry.’ I’m not in dire need,” Hodson said of not accepting any money before competing at Stanford, not even her Olympic stipend, for fear the NCAA might rule her ineligible.
“But that’s me. There are all these other athletes in the world. There’s so much money that these families spend and have to sacrifice.”
Hodson believes women’s sports is an untapped market, and the California law might bring that to light. Women who compete in volleyball, gymnastics, soccer and more have large social media followings among youth participants in those sports, Hodson said. And that should be attractive to sponsors looking to move merchandise.
“With social media these days and the Internet and the speed of communication, the sky is the limit. There’s no set slice of the pie. I know a lot of women’s volleyball players who will probably make a good amount of money just because they’re talented and they already have a platform,” Hodson said.
“The monetary value hasn’t been proved yet. Whether you’re playing tennis at Notre Dame or water polo at Long Beach State or squash on the East Coast, there are people who really support those sports.”
Jonathan Jensen thinks national brands will see the value in promoting female athletes at universities alongside their male counterparts. It’s good business, said Jensen, an assistant professor of sport administration at North Carolina who spent more than a decade working out sponsorship deals with professional sports teams, leagues and athletes.
Jensen pointed out university athletic departments already have contracts with corporate sponsors who can use the school logo in advertising, meaning it would be an easy transition for those companies to extend those agreements to individual athletes.
“You can have the quarterback and the point guard on your packaging, but also the field hockey and women’s soccer player,” Jensen theorized. “Given that females make more than 90 percent of the buying decisions in the grocery store, why wouldn’t they leverage the images of great female athletes that every university has along with the male student-athletes?”
Untapped markets of video games, apparel sales
Football is by far the most popular sport in America, so it’s no surprise that those athletes stand to get a financial benefit that no others will. It may come in the form of annual payments from EA Sports, assuming that company revives its “NCAA Football” game once the names, images and likenesses rules take effect.
EA Sports discontinued the game in 2013 after former college athletes sued the NCAA and the video-game maker seeking a cut of the money for the use of their images.
Dan Rascher is the professor of sport management at the University of San Francisco who was hired for that trial to estimate what college football players would make off the video game. He said he went with a conservative figure of $1,000 to $1,500 per year for every player depicted. That’s about 30 players per team — the starters and key backups — at the 130 FBS programs.
“That’s a nice chunk of money to have in your pocket each year,” Rascher said.
He also pointed out another new source of revenue that some star athletes will be able to tap into: Jersey sales. Under current NCAA rules, apparel companies can’t manufacture jerseys of specific players while they’re still competing. The Collegiate Licensing Co. conducted a 2006 analysis that found more than a billion dollars of potential merchandise going unsold because of that.
That value has probably doubled since, given that college sports revenue grows 7 to 8 percent each year, Rascher said.
What does that mean? If apparel companies can make and sell jerseys of the starting quarterback or leading scorer on the basketball team, some of the profit would be split between the university and the athlete. That’s potentially hundreds of millions of dollars nationally to divide up.
“In a competitive market, some players could be making five and maybe even six figures,” Rascher said. “Think of the four- or five-star athlete coming out of high school with a lot of anticipation from fans. Marketers haven’t been creative before because there’s been no need to be. It will be the same sort of model used for professional athletes. Olympic athletes who come back to school. Anyone with a large following on social media. I think it really is just a matter of who is popular in the marketplace.
“The universities, they’re going to fight this the whole time. But as soon as it becomes law, then they’re going to want to be in on it, too. They can finally fully monetize the athletes.”
Ultimately, the marketplace will dictate how much college athletes can make, and which ones will reap the largest benefit.
Jensen said that’s the way it’s always been. A company will determine if, for example, paying Hurts $10,000 in order to put the Oklahoma quarterback’s picture on their packaging will result in additional sales of that much money or more.
“That system essentially already exists,” Jensen said. “The economists would probably simply suggest: Let a free-market mentality manage this and the companies can decide what the athlete is worth.”
Skinner said that’s all her legislation was intended to do. She can’t understand why it took so long to get to this point.
“This bill is going to benefit everybody. It’s not just about the elite athlete,” she said. “You could be the hometown hero of your small town because you won the statewide wrestling championship at your high school. Your local car dealership, for example, may want to sponsor you.
“This is really about much more than the big endorsements that might invoke in some people’s minds.”
LINK:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/spor...eness-control-could-make-millions/3909807002/
