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By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

I normally don’t catch a lot of flak for my columns, but one in particular from my first year made me persona non grata on the Shelby County Reporter Facebook page for a few days.

Last September, I wrote a column in response to the AHSAA’s decision to first strip, then reinstate Tuscaloosa County’s win over Bessemer City because multiple players who received Buffalo Wild Wings gift cards from the school after their Week 1 performances played in the Week 2 game.

The decision then led the AHSAA to update its amateur rule to stipulate that gift cards from “food establishments” as well as any gift cards that were returned unused would not violate an athlete’s amateurism and trigger an automatic one-season ban.

Frankly, I still can’t read that rule with a straight face because the AHSAA continued its long dance around the issue of athlete rewards and name, image and likeness deals by doing the bare minimum in updating the rule.

Instead of being proactive, the state was once again being reactive and kicked the can of a hard conversation down the road, and I said as much in the column.

Well, 11 months later, we’ve now reached that can. And it sliced open the state’s proverbial foot once again.

By avoiding the topic, Florida and Georgia have now joined Tennessee as states that allow high school NIL, and with Mississippi allowing college signees to begin signing NIL deals, every state that borders Alabama has some form of a high school NIL policy.

We’ve already seen some of the ramifications of out-of-state transfers as two of the state’s best basketball players, Buckhorn’s Caleb Holt and Thompson’s Colben Landrew, moved to Georgia just this summer.

While neither cited NIL as a reason to transfer, Holt has already signed with an NIL agent since the move. However, now that NIL is legal everywhere around Alabama, you can certainly expect other athletes to bolt once a company or another school comes calling with a promise of money.

I’ll say first that I’d be naïve to not say that transfers are already a problem in high school sports. It’s already a growing trend right here in our area, especially with kids from smaller schools going to larger schools.

However, there’s a key difference: if someone wants to play for a 6A or 7A program, they can just move across town. If someone wants to go from a public school to a private school or vice versa, they typically don’t even have to sell their home. If they want to take advantage of NIL, they need to completely uproot their family and move across state lines from their hometown.

That’s one of the many reasons Trent Seaborn turned down his NIL offer from Leaf trading cards: not even a million dollars could replace the relationships he and his family have in Alabaster or the training he gets at Thompson.

But as NIL becomes more and more prevalent in the high school space, I guarantee that not everyone will feel the same way or be in a position to turn that down.

That’s why it’s imperative that discussions on how to implement high school NIL in Alabama need to start and not stop until a policy is made.

I completely understand why many people feel apprehensive about high school NIL. The rushed implementation and lack of structure and enforcement around NIL by the NCAA have made it a wild landscape where just about anything goes, leading to lots of misunderstandings and hurt, either intentional or unintentional.

NIL has irreversibly changed college sports, and that may not sit well with a lot of people who grew up a decades-long status quo.

However, I believe NIL doesn’t have to be a bad thing in either high school or college.

Not only can deals provide life-changing amounts of money that can set up athletes and their families for success before they even reach the workforce, they can teach valuable lessons about money management, accountability in their behavior while representing themselves and their companies and provide opportunities to give back.

Money is a tool. The upside of that is that it can be used for good, but the downside is that it can lead to destruction.

Irresponsible spending has wrecked many a life, and today’s kids are growing up in an increasingly materialistic culture that puts more and more pressure on them to value those things.

However, let’s not pretend like this is anything new. Decadence has been a part of human culture since ancient times, and for the numerous kids who have ruined their lives through reckless living, just as many adults have as well.

While sudden wealth can absolutely be a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, I don’t think the solution is to completely prohibit it.

From the dawn of our country, our founding fathers recognized that certain tools posed a threat in the wrong hands, namely information and arms. But their response wasn’t to keep it to themselves, it was to create the First and Second Amendments and trust the people to use them wisely.

I think NIL works in a similar way. But just as people need to be educated on how to handle other potentially dangerous things, the same should happen with money.

Financial illiteracy has long been a problem in our education system, and that’s before you get to navigating the choppy NIL waters of who to trust, how to make deals and how to best manage your personal brand.

Like Jamie Wood mentioned in our deep dive on NIL, I’ve long believed that educating people on how to best use the tools that they have in their possession, and that includes the ability to make NIL deals.

Whether that comes as part of the state’s mandated policy for NIL or not, I believe showing athletes the best way to navigate NIL is what will help it succeed.

As time goes on, other states have gotten a better grip on NIL and been willing to try new things to get NIL back to what it was originally intended to be: a way for athletes to make money through either building their own brands or endorsing others.

To me, Georgia and Tennessee are on the right track of banning collectives which keeps the burden from falling on schools even if it may force athletes and companies to get creative on equitable ways to support every athlete, not just the star players. I also believe mandatory reporting is a great step to help avoid athletes and schools from getting burned by unethical deals.

However, there’s still plenty of other consequences that need to be addressed, including transfers and the natural inequalities of bigger schools and star athletes getting most of the money pot.

Some of those might be unavoidable in a free market system, and all of those have long been problems even without throwing NIL into the mix. Even with that, I think there still might be ways to minimize the damage and chart an equitable path forward.

There are still so many parts of NIL that need to be addressed and a lot that we will learn as the still-young industry progresses. I’m not going to pretend like I have all the answers, but I at least have an open mind, and I think that’s what’s key here.

I applaud the state for not rushing out of the gate with an imperfect policy and causing lots of unintentional harm. However, there’s a different between prudent patience and just sticking our heads in the sand pretending we can avoid it, and I think we’re now dangerously close to the latter.

The bottom line is NIL is coming for Alabama whether we like it or not. The time for waiting is over with neighboring states knocking on our doorstep and plenty of different policies out in the wild.

To Heath Harmon, the AHSAA, AISA, ACSC, athletic directors, coaches, and perhaps most importantly, the student-athletes: I call on you to work together and create a sensible NIL policy that works for everyone. If we want to keep our state as one of the best for high school sports, it’s the only way forward.

And if I have to take some flak on Facebook to start that conversation, then so be it.