Writing Boots

The New York Times had a big piece Sunday about how colleges and universities are hiring marketing firms to turn their student-athletes into big social media stars. Like a firm called Article 41, whose founder believes that “every athlete—benchwarmer or not—can have a following,” according to the Times.

U.N.C. doesn’t have a formal contract with Ms. Segar or her firm, Article 41. But the school has encouraged students and coaches to work with them. Later this year, the firm’s pitch will also be a part of orientation for freshman athletes at the school.

This hoped-for, large-scale conversion of college athletes to influencers shows how N.I.L. deals “have grown exponentially in ways that nobody could have imagined or predicted,” said Michael H. LeRoy, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “This is another milestone in how this is evolving.”

This is at once inevitable, in the age of the Name-Image-Likeness deal and universities competing desperately for portal-hopping players—and completely insane.

If you know a Division I “student-athlete,” you know that much of the time they are actually “athlete-students,” cramming in studies on bus rides and in other stolen moments between practices, weightlifting sessions and games. Their sport dominates not just their days but their social lives. Most of their friends are the same people with whom they are competing for playing time. Their sport is most of their world, and that world is intense.

Now these colleges propose to add to the workaday student athlete’s packed schedule and heavy emotional load, becoming sporty social media influencers.

During her sophomore season my daughter had a star turn, scoring a goal that made ESPN’s Top 10 Plays, and then in the next game, another goal that won her team the conference championship. A few days later someone from the school started coming around and asking her if she wanted to get involved in hawking branded cookies for some local bakery. I told her to absolutely ignore that nonsense, that she did not have one more brain cell left to spend on becoming a cookie pitch woman.

My daughter has trusted her parents’ instincts on her generation’s influencer impulse since she was about 10, and asked me if she could start a YouTube channel. I told her I’d just as soon let her perform a solo variety show on a busy Chicago street corner on her way home from school, before a gallery of whatever passersby found the show scintillating, for whatever reason. “Oh my God, thank you for not letting me get a YouTube channel,” she told me five years later when she looked at the videos she’d been hoping to post back then. “Me just dancing in my room!”

I know there are some college sports stars who are natural TikTok superstars and Insta-standouts and would fit this role into their college schedule with or without NIL money. I also know that some kids could really use the NIL dough and can’t afford to listen to one soccer dad’s self-righteous privilege. But what the Times is talking about is schools making commercial social media preening a standard part of the student-athlete’s job. And that’s unreasonable, unfair and really unmanageable, whether the young student athlete realizes it or not.

Happily, my student-athlete is graduating next year, and will complete her college sports career without having to perform an ongoing one-woman variety show, too.

Too bad the athletes coming after her won’t be so lucky.

“This saddens me,” University of Illinois law professor Michael H. LeRoy says in the Times piece. “Their bodies are being monetized on TikTok for the benefit of the school.”

Their souls, too.

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Note: Next April, Disruption Books will come out with Soccer Dad, my tale of one bumbling dad wandering with his daughter through the mad, mad world of serious youth sports, all the way to a dream—a Division I sports scholarship—that turned out to be an epic journey all its own. —DM

Dumb Old Joke, Dumb New Context

Birthday Happy Hour Photo: Fifty Years Ago This Day—April 30, 1975

From a Division I Soccer Parent: No, You Do Not Want Your Kid to Be a Student-Athlete-Influencer