In 2021, NCAA revealed that college athletes could now profit off of their own name, image and likeness. The NCAA is looking at ways to prevent predatory agents from taking advantage of their athletes.
When the associate athletic director for internal operations at Keene State College, Abe Osheyack, was asked about the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) rules, Osheyack explained his job is to, “Oversee almost everything that makes the department run, sports information office, the compliance, the NCAA and institution compliance and the management of contests and scheduling of them.”
“It was something that was long overdue, NCAA rules have not caught up to traditional and social media times,” said Osheyack. Therefore, he said he believes now that social media is what college athletes use for recruiting, it makes more sense that this rule changes.
Osheyack said he believed the NCAA should have made this change more gradually starting in the ‘80s and ‘90s. With this gradual increase of profit, Osheyack said he is confident that people would be less shocked about this major change involving collegiate athletics. Osheyack revealed that, “It was a little disappointing that it took a Supreme Court ruling to get to that spot, but it is something that the athletes should be able to do.”
Now that athletes can profit off of their name, image and likeness, the big question is whether predatory agents will capitalize off of this. Osheyack said, “I think that stuff, especially at the higher levels, is operated in the background for a long time without ever being able to prove anything, even prior to the change around NIL rules.”
Since the rules have changed, Osheyack revealed that it is more beneficial towards the student athletes.
“It now allows them to deal out in the open and more cleanly and not with somebody who may not have their best interest at heart,” he said. Osheyack said he thinks that the NIL rule change has helped the college athletes rather than hurt, however, predatory agents are able to profit off the athletes more easily if involved.
Osheyack said a good solution to stop predatory agents from taking advantage of the athletes would be to, “require agents to register with a governing body like the NCAA or to receive some kind of certification.” This will allow some sort of oversight on the agents to make sure they are not profiting off of their own athletes.
For example, Osheyack explained, “When an agent works for an NBA player for example, they have to be a certified agent with the NBA and they have to be embedded with the NBA and the NBA players association.”
Therefore, changes like this are already being made at higher levels and, according to Osheyack, there is no standardized union for college athletes. To fix this, Osheyack said many college athletes have tried to unionize at their schools but failed. He stated that there is a case regarding unionization at Dartmouth college.
“This may go a long way in changing that because the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize,” Osheyack said. “Until there is a way to properly vet these agents, then student athletes are on their own and need to use their best judgment.”
He said college athletes should rely on their connections like other teammates or relatives that played in college; however, most will have to educate themselves on the matter.
Athletic Director Marty Testo was unavailable to interview.
Elyse Picard can be contacted at
epicard@kscequinox.com
