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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

Recently, a 15-year-old was sitting on the couch in his family’s living room, playing games on his phone while enjoying a summer afternoon.

While that may be a common image in homes across America, what happened next wasn’t.

Sitting there without any knowledge of what was coming next, Trent Seaborn’s dad, Jason, then walked into the room and told his son that he had received a $1 million offer from a company to use his likeness for a product.

That scenario may sound impossible to believe for some, but it didn’t just happen. It happened in Alabaster, Alabama to the reigning All-County First Team quarterback.

The Thompson quarterback was the latest in a new wave of high school athletes from around the country to receive offers for to use their name, image and likeness. Those deals have commonly become known as NIL deals and been the center of a flashpoint in amateur sports since the NCAA began allowing them in college athletics on July 1, 2021.

Three years since the legalization of NIL, the deals that once were only received by the top collegiate athletes are making their way down to high school sports. And while high school NIL is still illegal in Alabama, situations like Seaborn’s have led to questions about what NIL would look like at the high school level and if there is any way it could be positively implemented.

Million Dollar Baby

On Friday, July 26, Seaborn and his father, Jason, went public with the news that the sophomore quarterback had been offered an NIL deal from trading card company Leaf that was worth “seven figures” over the life of the deal.

With that deal came a caveat–Trent could not take the deal and remain at Thompson, or even in the state of Alabama. He would have to transfer out-of-state in order to do so. It was one of the reasons why the family turned down a previous “five-figure” offer from Leaf.

Jason reminded Trent of that stipulation when he was sitting on the couch on his phone and heard of the deal.

Trent’s response to the million dollars? A shoulder shrug.

“I was kind of surprised in the moment,” Trent said. “But then after that, I didn’t even think twice about it because I knew that in order to take the deal, we would’ve had to move out of state, and there’s no way that we were moving from Thompson. So, I was just like, ‘That’s pretty cool,’ and I just thought of it as a stepping stone toward what I’m working for and what I want to achieve.”

For both Trent and his family, transferring from Thompson was an absolute deal-breaker because of the bond he had formed with coach Mark Freeman and the deep roots that the Seaborns had laid in Alabaster. Even in the face of a million dollars.

Both reiterated that the reason they moved from Hawaii to Alabaster when Trent was young was because of Thompson and Freeman. Trent recalled the first time his family met Freeman when they were visiting their family friends, the Tagovailoas, and it was an instant connection because of their shared values.

“He’s a great character, great personality and he really values God just like our family does,” Trent said of Freeman. “And then obviously when we moved out here, the locker room and my teammates, they all welcomed me in. I had older guys take me under their wing, and now that I’m older, I do the same thing for the younger guys and it’s just an ongoing thing with kids in the locker room. We all support each other. We all cheer for each other, and then when it comes to game time, we have that chemistry that I don’t think I would find anywhere else other than Thompson.”

Jason pointed to those bonds and friendships they have made since moving and firmly believes Alabaster is the place their family needs to be.

“We have close friends throughout the community, and really through our journey as a family here in Alabaster, we’ve been embraced by the people here and made to feel very welcome, and so that’s something that we know we’re not going to find just anywhere else,” Jason said.

Freeman also believes the Seaborn family is in a good position to turn down the money now because of both their current financial situation and Trent’s potential. He thinks that if Trent keeps working in Thompson’s system and chooses the right college, his success there could lead him to the NFL and a very rich contract.

“You look at it, and you say, ‘How could somebody turn down $1 million?’” Freeman said. “But I think in his particular situation, that $1,000,000 could be 100-fold to him one day.”

However, the Seaborn family’s love and loyalty for their new hometown isn’t a universal sentiment across high school athletics. Throughout the last few years, athletes have transferred to out-of-state schools in pursuit of their goals.

Those transfers recently hit home as two of the top basketball recruits in the state of Alabama, Buckhorn’s Caleb Holt and Thompson’s Colben Landrew, both transferred to high schools in Georgia.

Neither athlete disclosed the Georgia High School Association’s October 2023 decision to allow high school athletes to profit off their NIL as a reason for their transfer, and Landrew did not respond to a request for comment. However, that didn’t stop part of the social media discussion to center around their newfound ability to earn NIL deals.

An emerging frontier

In short, name, image and likeness deals allow athletes to endorse brands and earn money.

A few high-profile examples recently from college football include Colorado’s Shedeur and Shilo Sanders appearing in an ad for KFC and former USC quarterback Caleb Williams starring in Dr. Pepper’s “Fansville” commercials.

The deals began at the college level where the NCAA permitted its student-athletes to seek out NIL deals to earn income outside of the traditional scholarships and benefits the university may provide, and they came about after laws from state legislatures put pressure on the NCAA to create its own overarching policy.

That policy included a few key rules, namely that universities could not directly sign athletes to NIL deals, the money could not be tied to on-field performance and NIL deals could not be used to recruit players to a school by making the money tied to playing for that school.

In practice, those restrictions have become blurry. Coaches regularly cite the need for businesses and boosters to offer strong NIL offerings to attract the top players, and players have cited NIL opportunities as a reason for signing with particular schools.

This is all while collectives are prohibited from contacting athletes until they sign their National Letter of Intent to a school or begin practices or classes at the school. Multiple schools have been punished for violating this rule, including Miami, Florida and Florida State, with an investigation also underway for NIL’s role in Tennessee’s recruitment of Nico Iamaleava.

In addition, athletic departments have become increasingly connected with the school’s NIL efforts, particularly in the form of collectives, even if no school can legally be associated with a specific collective or NIL organization.

Two of the biggest in-state collegiate examples, Alabama’s Yea Alabama and Auburn’s On To Victory, are LLCs that both facilitate athlete-business relationships and allow donors to directly contribute.

For donor-driven collectives, athletes can then opt in to receive payments from collectives in exchange for NIL activities like signing autographs, appearing at events or allowing the use of their NIL on merchandise such as custom jerseys and t-shirts.

Within Shelby County, the University of Montevallo does not have either form of collective but allows businesses to sign its athletes to NIL deals and also partners with Influxer to allow fans to buy merchandise of their favorite athletes with the money returned to them through NIL.

While more uniform rules exist at the college level from the NCAA, states have once again led the way in legalizing and setting up rules around high school NIL, leading to more of a patchwork approach that varies across the country.

Currently, Alabama is one of 12 states where high school NIL is completely illegal. Hawaii, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming also forbid it in addition to North Carolina’s public-school association, the NCHSAA. North Carolina private schools permit NIL activities.

Most notably, all four states that border Alabama allow at least some form of high school NIL. Mississippi’s is the most restrictive, only allowing athletes who have signed their National Letter of Intent with a college or university to engage in NIL deals.

In Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, the rules begin with the NCAA’s guidelines that NIL can’t be used for recruiting, be coordinated by a school or be tied to performance, but they go deeper from there.

None of the three states allow any references or logos from a school or the state in the NIL deal, and clubs and collectives are illegal. In Georgia, deals must be reported to the athlete’s principal or athletic director within a week, and in Florida, deals with minors require going through either parents or courts with guardian abilities.

Florida and Georgia also prohibit high school athletes from signing with alcohol, tobacco, drug, gun or gambling companies. Tennessee does not currently have these restrictions or any required documentation.

As a result of banning collectives, athletes have mainly signed deals with individual companies either through companies reaching out to them or through an NIL agent.

While Leaf was unsuccessful in signing Trent Seaborn to a trading card deal, it has signed other top quarterback recruits like Georgia’s Julian Lewis and Antwon Hill, Tennessee’s George MacIntyre, Mississippi’s Deuce Knight, Louisiana’s Peyton Houston and Illinois’ Trae Taylor.

High school NIL deals also take many different forms. National companies like Klutch Athletics by New Balance have signed basketball players Isiah Harwell and Caleb Wilson, and adidas recently signed seven football players, including five wide receivers, a linebacker and a quarterback, to its “adizero 7 Class.”

Local companies can be involved, like Pennsylvania’s Matt Zollers signing with local home repair company Westwood Home Services in exchange for a Dodge Challenger SRT to drive while he is in high school, and athletes like North Carolina offensive tackle recruit David Sanders can make and sell their own merchandise.

There are also sites like NIL Club which allow players to create premium digital content that people can access when they pay to support the athletes, similar to how Patreon operates for influencers and content creators. According to The Florida Times-Union, the site had over 50,000 high school athletes and 200,000 college athletes as of late June.

Education and empowerment

NIL’s legalization has also created new jobs both within universities to ensure compliance and connect with stakeholders and outside universities connecting and educating athletes about NIL opportunities.

Jamie Wood has worked on both sides of that divide, first working in compliance at his alma mater of Ohio State and then as an assistant AD for NIL at Texas A&M before founding Hyphenated Athletics to facilitate connections and collaborations with stakeholders in NIL.

Wood saw firsthand one of the infamous examples of players profiting from their NIL before its legalization. He played football at Ohio State in 2010 when quarterback Terrell Pryor and four of his teammates were suspended for selling jerseys and awards for cash and tattoos.

He admitted that while he was a player, there were some restaurants that the team knew would serve them free meals if they wore team merchandise. He believes that even back then, nearly 15 years ago, business owners recognized the value of local athletes to their businesses and wanted to give back to them.

“In a lot of ways, I think the mindset of a lot of retail people was like one, my business benefits from these kids playing,” Wood said. “So, on Saturdays, any business that you can walk up and down High Street, which is one of the main roads in Columbus, Ohio, they benefit from us winning games and just having games on Saturdays, and so those people, I could see it as almost like an act of service or giving back for all the benefits that they reap from our football games.”

Now, he works in an era where those activities are legal and helps to educate people about NIL. It took over a decade of lawsuits before the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in June 2021 that the NCAA could not control athletes’ NIL.

In his opinion, this era has been a long time coming.

“I think there’s a bunch of factors in why it probably hasn’t, but in a lot of ways, I think it’s just people’s unwillingness to change and the unwillingness to recognize the value that a lot of these athletes are bringing to these institutions,” Wood said of the reasons why NIL was never discussed or legalized.

In the past three years, the NCAA, and now high school athletic associations, have largely had to figure out how to navigate NIL on the fly.

Add in the near-simultaneous decisions by the NCAA to grant extra years of eligibility to athletes who played during COVID-19 restrictions and allow unlimited transfers without penalty, and it created what he calls a “perfect cocktail of disruption and change and honestly, empowerment” in favor of the players.

In the process, a lack of structure, enforcement and education around NIL has led many to dub the landscape “the Wild West” where anything goes, and both the universities and athletes have struggled to make sense of it all.

“The challenge is there’s no infrastructure, there’s no guidance, and if colleges and the institutions at the highest level are struggling and being challenged by this, I could imagine the high school level is dealing with it at a different degree,” Wood said.

Now, high school is taking a piecemeal approach to NIL implementation, and the different rules across states and a lack of transparency about deals and player valuations have caused another level of confusion.

“I think it’s a different perspective and parents are struggling to figure out, ‘Who do I trust, who is giving me sound judgment, which of these numbers are real and where do I go from here?’” Wood said.

All of that has led to the big question–are NIL deals a good thing, and if so, what is the best path forward?

In Wood’s opinion, there’s no going back to the old model of amateurism, not now that players are recognizing their worth and capitalizing on it.

However, he believes there are positives to athletes engaging in deals, particularly how they carry themselves when they know they are representing a brand, either their own personal brand or someone else’s.

“I think when you have a brand and when you are a public figure, there are pressures that come with that and there’s some responsibilities that come with that, but oftentimes, I think there’s also some behavior modification that can come with that where you know that you represent something else,” Wood said. “You represent a business that has been established for years, and so I might conduct myself different.”

He believes that educating is one of the ways some of NIL’s negative effects or misconceptions can be prevented. However, he doesn’t believe a lack of education about NIL is justification for its removal.

“I think empowerment without education is dangerous, and what I am a champion for is education,” Wood said. “I believe in the importance of learning, and it doesn’t have to be structured in the classroom learning and even college, but I’d support educating and making well informed decisions. I think the due diligence that is lacking in this space is a problem, but I don’t believe that we should restrict the opportunities considering all the wealth and the money that’s being generated due to the performance and the stature and the brand of some of these athletes.”

More money, more problems

Some of the backlash surrounding NIL, particularly at the high school level, has come from the natural inequalities that the current system creates or exacerbates.

Even at the college level, NIL activity is largely concentrated in football and men’s basketball.

According to the NCAA’s NIL Assist database, 37% of the NIL deals it tracks are for football and 15.5% are for men’s basketball. The next highest percentages are for women’s basketball (8.3%), baseball (7.6%) and softball (7.3%).

Those football and basketball deals are also for significantly more money on average. While the average disclosed deal across all sports was $2,673, football sits at $4,825 and men’s basketball at $4,244.

Those increase an athlete’s average total earnings from $21,331 across all sports to $39,944 for football and $65,853 for men’s basketball, although those averages are inflated by high-end deals that raise it from the average athlete’s median earnings, which are $480.

In addition, multiple coaches and players have expressed concern with how the structure largely only benefits elite athletes. With no rules stating that NIL money must be equally dispersed across all sports or athletes, the vast majority of high school athletes will not earn any money from their NIL.

That wouldn’t stop athletes like Trent from giving back to his teammates if high school NIL was legalized and he signed a deal, mainly so he could prevent any feelings of jealousy or separation from his teammates.

“Maybe the kids that aren’t getting paid are seeing these other kids and thinking, ‘Why is he so special? Why is he getting all this money?’” Trent said. “And that’s why it would be a good thing for me to give back to my teammates if that money ever does come through because they’re the reasons why I got the money, and they’re the reasons as to why I am where I am right now.”

Jason echoed his son’s concerns, saying that the problems that already exist in sports where only a few players get credited for success would only be worsened by the addition of money. He also believes adding another factor for teenagers to deal with on top of the difficulties of high school life would be very detrimental.

“High school in general is a time when these kids’ brains are still being formed,” Jason said. “They’re young men, young girls that are still developing, still figuring themselves out, still learning how to work with each other in the pursuit of a shared common goal, it’s they’ve got a lot to deal with. And then you add all this stuff off the field too with maturation during your teenage years, so throwing NIL in the middle of all that is almost like tossing a hand grenade in a sense. Now, they’ve got to navigate that too.”

Freeman believes that the money can even divide locker rooms, especially if the players believe the wrong person is getting paid.

“I think that one thing is if you got one kid on your team that’s getting something, and it can present a lot of locker room trouble,” Freeman said. “If the wrong person is getting money and the majority of the team is not getting it, that can present trouble in the locker room, and it has at a couple of places.”

Those bad actors spending money in lavish ways, such as on sports cars or diamond chains, have also given NIL a negative perception.

Wood noted that when he was at Texas A&M, some of the players were even earning more than the athletic department staff was, including him, which created even more of a disconnect for some people in the building.

Historically, money from boosters and donors has gone toward improving facilities or hiring coaches to create more attractive environments for players to come to.

Now with collectives at the college level diverting some of that money toward paying players, he believes those images of lavish spending may not sit well with them, especially with the attention those lifestyles get from the national media.

“A lot of people, I think there’s a general sentiment of like, ‘This feels bad and wrong because it’s been against the rules and under this whole amateur model for so long,’ and in reality, there’s a lot of people that feel like we shouldn’t be doing this,” Wood said. “And then I think the national news and national coverage of NIL and how much we romanticize these deals and the cars and the money and the jewelry, if I had to guess, a lot of the generation and the people that have built fortunes to be able to give back to the institutions, I’m not sure that they gave back with that in mind.”

Part of the allure of high school and college sports has come from the idea of players taking the field solely for the love of the game. To some, NIL takes that away now that students can earn money simply for playing sports.

That is one of the reasons why Jason would not like to see NIL be implemented because of the very small amount of people who will profit from its legalization.

“One of the things that I’ve talked about that coach Mark (Freeman) had brought up to me is high school football being the last place where the sport is really pure,” Jason said. “Ninety-eight percent or whatever high percentage majority of these kids, this is the last time they’re ever going to play football, and these memories are going to last them a lifetime. It just would be a shame to have a dynamic like NIL ruin that for the majority of kids whereas it really just benefits a very, very few number of kids.”

Looking out for the little guys

Chelsea head football coach Todd Cassity also believes that NIL will not affect the vast majority of the high school athletes, but for those who do, it will be a good thing.

“It’ll be a positive for about 2% of the kids,” Cassity said. “It won’t really influence 98% of the kids.”

Cassity and others at smaller schools also don’t foresee their schools having any athletes who can take advantage of it or the resources to pursue it. For them, it will simply be another part of the high school sports landscape, but one that rarely impacts them directly.

“It’s one of those things I don’t think will affect us at Chelsea High School,” Cassity said. “It’s going to affect some of the bigger schools or some of the schools that have the means and the ways of doing it, and to us, it just is what it is.”

However, just because those athletes may not be able to take advantage of NIL at a smaller school doesn’t mean they won’t seek out opportunities where they can earn better deals.

Transferring to bigger schools to either earn playing time or play for a team that might increase your potential to play at the next level–and thus your potential earnings–has been a tense debate across high school sports.

Those transfers are already happening within Shelby County, as just this past year, former Chelsea quarterback Carter Dotson first transferred to Hoover before ending up at Tuscaloosa County and former Spain Park defensive linemen Jared Smith and Nik Alston transferred in-county to Thompson.

Freeman has been on both sides of the small-school and large-school fence with 10 seasons at his alma mater of Bessemer Academy in the AISA and now 10 years at Thompson. He fears a world where players from smaller schools transfer to bigger schools solely because they can’t provide an NIL opportunity and wants a system that accounts for their concerns.

“What I would worry about with NIL would be the smaller schools and how are they going to be taken care of,” Freeman said. “What’s going to happen to the smaller schools? Are all their players one day going to want up and leave over NIL? And I just think that NIL needs to be really thought about on how to go about it.”

Jason also wants to avoid a world where NIL is used as a recruiting tool for transfers and creates chaos across the landscape. He also wants the state to find some way for NIL to benefit as many people as possible, no matter where they are from.

“I would like to see it done in a way that many kids could benefit, schools, programs could benefit in some way, shape or form, so that all these kids in Alabama high school can benefit from money being infused,” Jason said. “I think that the obvious ones are like you don’t want to have it turn into pay for play or have it be used as a recruiting tool to where the rich schools are now suddenly showering all these kids with money to get them to transfer and you’re dealing with that whole hornet’s nest. But I think the main thing that I would like, just my personal opinion, would be is if it could be done in a way that could benefit a large number, even the entire segment of high school football.”

Defending the home field

While it’s clear that high school NIL is still in its infancy and there are many layers and factors to consider in legalizing it, the one thing that Trent’s offer shows is that despite it still being illegal, high school NIL has already come to Alabama.

To Freeman, scenes like the one at the Seaborn household just a few weeks ago will become more common as more and more companies and out-of-state schools reach out to athletes from Alabama with NIL offers. And not all of them will have Trent’s mindset or be financially stable enough to say no.

“There are some families that I understand, they can’t turn that down,” Freeman said. “That’d be a situation where certain families, they might not have the option of turning it down. They might be in a situation where they lost their job, don’t have a job and something like that comes along.”

In order to make it so that families can both financially benefit and stay close to home, a policy must be put in place by the state to allow it. The question is, what do they look like? Does the state model the NCAA, a neighboring state like Georgia or Florida, or blaze its own trail with an original framework?

That’s been both the biggest key and concern for those both in favor and against high school NIL. Coaches across the state already lash out annually against the AHSAA for either its policies or regulations against transfers, recruiting and illegal benefits.

Those criticisms have only grown louder since the AHSAA appointed Heath Harmon as its new executive director in June.

Cassity said that as long as rules exist and are followed by both the schools and athletic associations, he’ll be alright with high school NIL’s legalization.

“Just as long as they have regulations behind it,” Cassity said. “As long as everybody’s following those regulations. I think it’s OK. The problem is when people are overreaching or doing things outside the mandates, which we’re already seeing with a lot of the transfers anyway, so you just need to make sure they stay within the regulations and the rules.”

Wood believes that the varying degrees of enforcement and rules from state-to-state and even institution-to-institution have created a game where each state aims to create an attractive policy. The key now is for states like Alabama to make a sound policy to prevent losing players over NIL.

“Even up to this point, the NCAA had an interim policy that they rolled out for NIL, and the policy existed, but you didn’t see much enforcement and the interpretation of that policy varied on each campus,” Wood said. “And I think that that’s what you’ve seen now is that each state has kind of postured or positioned themselves to be set up an advantageous way, and I think that’s where you lead into what has become high school NIL. If these kids can stay in the state or we can find partnerships within the state, keep them and to entice them to stay, that’s the probably the next wave.”

To date, that has remained the biggest task of all stakeholders: create a system that works for Alabama and prevents star players like Holt and Landrew from transferring out-of-state, leaving behind their respective communities in New Market and Alabaster.

To get kids to stay in-state, Freeman believes that the AHSAA must play defense and have a framework in place to keep players within their home state while abiding by a common-sense set of rules.

“Our state has to do something to give us a chance to save our own kids that are already in our state,” Freeman said. “That’s what I worry about is right now we don’t have a plan to counteract what these other states are doing to our kids. We just need a plan that we can counteract if needed.”