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Inside Pitch: What the Florida Law Passage Allowing College Player Endorsement Could Mean for Softball, Including Recruiting

With the Florida law passage on Friday giving college players in that state the right to receive endorsements for their “name, image and likeness: starting Jan. 1, 2020, it means coaches in the Sunshine State like Florida’s Tim Walton could have advantages other softball programs don’t have. Photo: Gators softball.

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law on Friday allowing athletes in college to benefit financially from their “name, image and likeness (NIL),” it raised a lot of concerns about how the law will impact not just the collegiate players, but also how it will impact recruiting.

Dan Murphy’s excellent article on ESPN Friday covered why the new state law in the Sunshine State has the NCAA very worried about recruiting overall.

Murphy wrote: “In response to legislative action in other states, the NCAA has taken recent steps toward revising rules that currently prohibit student-athletes across the country from accepting money from third-party sources.”

“Florida’s law puts additional pressure on NCAA leaders by significantly shrinking the timeline for them to enact the type of uniform national changes they say they prefer.”

In other words, as states such as Colorado, California and now Florida are looking to allow college athlete’s to receive endorsements and be compensated for their NIL, the NCAA thought it had time—more than 2 ½ years—to come up with a solution as the first two states approved laws aren’t set to go into effect until Jan. 1, 2023.

And it’s not just those three—expect every state to look to “keep up with the Jones” and come up with their own version of law allowing similar benefits to athletes.

Florida’s newly signed legislation kicks in this New Year’s Day and, suddenly, the scales of opportunity could be tilted heavily to Florida’s side and have a significant impact on recruiting sooner than the NCAA thought possible.

How?

“NCAA president Mark Emmert and other college sports stakeholders are strongly opposed to having individual states create new laws that dictate the rules for how college athletes can profit from the use of their names, images and likenesses (NIL),” Murphy explains.

“Emmert is concerned that a ‘patchwork’ of state laws would cause student-athletes to pick schools based on where they can make the most money and give some athletic programs an unequal recruiting advantage.”

*** Scroll down to read more about this suddenly time-sensitive issue for college sports…

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