https://www.youtube.com/@ScreencapswithJoeKinsey
Let's dive into the underbelly of 8U NIL deals and what people are telling me about what's available to families from organizations who are desperate to attract the top talent. If you haven't heard about Tonka, the 2nd grader who is in the transfer portal and looking for a team and NIL deal, you're in for a treat.
I thought this was all #fakenews until I started to investigate and do some BigJ work. It turns out there's a whole world out there that's crazier than you thought.
I coached youth football in Florida for about 8 years from about 2006-2014 (the years my son played), age range was 6-14.
Everything you wrote in the article from my experience is very accurate. But…it’s far from new. It was going on when I was there and well before I got there.
Our team (and we certainly were not the only team) recruited kids from other teams, waived kids registration fees (which wasn’t cheap, I want to say about $300-$400 back then), paying the parents with gas cards, gift cards, cash cards and even straight cash was common.
I coached a team in a suburban area and before every practice I’d have to drive about two hours round trip to "urban" areas to pick up our "good" players and take them home after practice. In many cases when recruiting a kid we had to promise the parents to start him at a certain position (QB or RB usually), which obviously got very tricky.
I think the difference in today vs back then is back then no one was calling attention to it, it was done mostly in secret. Parents and kids for the most part didn’t flaunt it because technically it was against the rules and was frowned upon (even though everyone knew it was going on and rule breakers were rarely punished).
Today it looks very out in the open (I’m speculating, I’ve been out of it for a while). I think that’s where NIL has changed things, parents definitely seem more comfortable marketing/shopping their kids around to the highest bidder. Obviously social media is a bigger influence now as well.
Do you have stories about NIL deals for youth athletes? I want to hear the stories. How much money have you been offered to have your son or daughter play for an organization?
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