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This month Delaware joined the growing list of states that permit high school athletes to earn money from their “name, image and likeness” without jeopardizing their eligibility to play.
Scholastic athletes in America are piggybacking on what their collegiate counterparts have been able to do since 2021. Some NCAA stars, such as former University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark and current University of Colorado football quarterback Shedeur Sanders, have become millionaires under the so-called NIL rules even before turning pro.
In Delaware, however, appearing in commercials filmed at the school and displaying its logo, or wearing your team uniform, has been explicitly banned at least since 2005 by the Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association (DIAA), which governs high school sports. That rule remains in effect, even with the new NIL rules.
So what were Indian River High School’s administrators and coaches thinking last month when they let more than 20 football players appear in a 30-second TV spot for Hershey Exteriors, a Sussex County remodeling and roofing contractor?
The players wore their full uniforms and pads and were seated inside the school’s stadium. Three players stood and spoke, and two coaches also had speaking lines.
Indian River school and district officials won’t say what led them to shoot the ad whose production was in clear violation of longstanding state policies.
But the DIAA immediately began investigating, and last week formally reprimanded Indian River for “failure to comply with DIAA regulations concerning student-athlete eligibility and amateur status,” the agency said in a news release.
“While no direct compensation or benefits were provided to the students or school personnel, the participation in the commercial jeopardized the amateur status of the student-athletes.”
DIAA would not provide the reprimand letter to WHYY News. Spokeswoman Caitlin Finkley said the reason is because the disciplinary action is still “currently going through the legal process.”
But the agency’s news release said the Indian River players and coaches “participated in the commercial under the supervision of the [school] athletic department” and that “violations of these regulations risk compromising the integrity of Delaware’s high school sports programs.”
State rules stipulate that players could be banned from competition for ads like the one Indian River participated in, but DIAA decided not to penalize the students. All are still eligible to play for the Dagsboro school’s football team, which currently has a 7-1 record and is on track for a berth in the Division 1A playoffs for Delaware’s smaller schools.
Indian River Athletic Director Todd Fuhrman did not respond to a request from WHYY News about why he let the student-athletes appear in the commercial, which violated the rule and jeopardized their eligibility to play and amateur status.
Draper Media, which creates advertising for stations such as WBOC, an affiliate of Fox and NBC that is based in Salisbury, Maryland, and reaches Delaware’s Sussex and Kent counties, produced the Indian River spot.
Tyler Hershey, who owns Hershey Exteriors, said his sales rep at WBOC recommended making the ad and told him Indian River administrators had given it the green light. Officials at WBOC would not comment.
As part of the reprimand, DIAA directed Indian River to ask Draper Media and WBOC-TV to “remove the commercial from further broadcasts.”
District spokesman David Maull would not agree to an interview but said in an email that “the ad was actually pulled by the advertiser” earlier this month. Indian River High principal Michael Williams sent a letter last week to “Draper Media/WBOC” and asked them to remove the commercial “per our state athletic association request.”
While Maull would not disclose why Indian River permitted the commercial using players, coaches, uniforms, and the school stadium, he issued a statement that said the district is “grateful this issue will not affect the hard work of our team, coaches and volunteers.”
Maull added that “district officials commit to a thorough understanding of all DIAA regulations moving forward to prevent another issue arising in the future.”
‘Thankfully, none of the players are getting in trouble’
Hershey, a former high school and collegiate pole vaulter in Pennsylvania, told WHYY News he lives in the Indian River district and his children attend its schools. He stressed that he has no personal relationship with the high school or its football coaches or administrators.
“WBOC came up with the idea. They are the ones who approached the school district and then talked to the coach. They set up everything,’’ said Hershey, who said he was unaware of the rule and was disappointed the school permitted the ad that put kids in jeopardy.
“Thankfully, none of the players are getting in trouble. I would hate for them to be punished for something that an athletic director approved and said was okay to do.”
David Baylor, a former state trooper who has headed DIAA for the last 15 months, told WHYY News the students were not at fault.
“The conclusion we’ve come to is there was poor judgment and decision-making that allowed this to take place, and it was a clear violation of rules and regulation,’’ Baylor said. “In this case, the kids would not have done the commercial” if the administrators had not given their consent.
The disciplinary action “could have been more severe, but I thought the public exposure that came about because of their decisions also played into my decision as to what was appropriate,’’ Baylor said.
The DIAA boss also said he wanted this incident to be a teaching moment for Delaware’s other schools.
“This time we chose to make it an educational opportunity to make all schools aware,” Baylor said. “Indian River took a lot of criticism for doing the commercial.”
Baylor also clarified what schools can do going forward.
He said that an athlete for a school such as Indian River could do a commercial in which he mentioned that he was an athlete or even a football player, but could not mention the school, wear his uniform, show the school logo, or tape the spot at the school.
“I would tell them to be very careful,’’ Baylor said. “If it comes down to an issue of eligibility, there’s a fine line. You can get away with ‘I’m an athlete, or I play football,’ but when you start to be more descriptive, that’s where the challenges begin.”
New rule’s ‘impact is going to be relatively minimal’
Chuck Durante, an attorney and longtime chronicler of Delaware high school sports who heads the Delaware Sportswriters and Broadcasters Association, said he doubts the state’s scholastic stars will profit much, if at all, from the new rules.
Durante said few, if any, Delaware high school sports stars are household names, even in their own small communities. He contrasted the current climate with the one that existed decades ago, when the Wilmington News Journal dominated the state’s media landscape, had a large sports staff that copiously covered every high school sport, and frequently spotlighted the standout players to a statewide readership.
“If you were to go into a shopping mall [today]and ask anybody to name a Delaware high school athlete, you’d be staying there for 20 minutes before you would hear the name of anybody other than immediate family,’’ Durante said. “The celebrity that once adhered to the star athletes at the high school level just doesn’t exist anymore in Delaware.’’
“Over the 50 years that I have covered high school sports, one effort after another has been made in print, in broadcast, and online to leverage interest in high school sports into a business model. It tends not to go very far. We’re going to see this being a lot of bark, not bite.”
Durante echoed Baylor, saying that the rules forbidding athletes in uniform from doing endorsements have long been in place. He added that in the new, more permissive age of NIL, Delaware’s sports governing agency was sending a strong message to possible violators.
“The advertisement involving the football players wearing their school uniform is the kind of first-year mistake that one can see in a brand new era,’’ Durante said. “They are not disqualifying these athletes from participation, but by publicizing this reprimand, or this admonishment, the DIAA is saying to all 55 or so high schools, ‘Make sure this doesn’t happen again.’”
Durante said he’s curious to see what the change will bring to the high school athletic landscape in the coming years.
“What you have here is a change in sports that is going to have implications that were not foreseen,” Durante said. “It’s comparable to sports betting or cannabis legalization, or any of a number of other changes in the last five years, where the libertarian impulse is to permit what had formerly been prohibited. But once it’s legalized, then all of the implications start to become apparent and, in some cases, troubling.”
But the bottom line with NIL in Delaware, Durante said, is that “it’s fair to predict that the impact is going to be relatively minimal.”
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