Paying college athletes before it was legal

 Yesterday I blogged about the new NCAA rules on allowing college athletes to be paid: The ban on paying college athletes is history

It will no doubt shock you to learn that payments were made long before they were legal.  

The Guardian has a book review about that:

Hot Dog Money: behind the bribery scandal that rocked college basketball. A new book looks back at the federal investigation that found bribery and corruption within a major industry, by Andrew Lawrence, Tue 4 Jun 2024

"On 26 September 2018, 10 prominent US college sports figures were arrested in connection with a federal investigation into fraud and corruption. Specifically, the government alleged that business managers and financial advisers had bribed basketball coaches to secure business with NBA-bound players, and that a senior executive with Adidas had further conspired with them to funnel payments to high school players and their families in exchange for their commitment to Adidas-sponsored college sports programs.

"The scandal – which ensnared the top NBA draft pick Deandre Ayton, hall of fame coach Rick Pitino and Kobie Baker, the associate athletic director at Alabama, one of the country’s premier talent factories – was a black eye for the NCAA, the keystone cops who style themselves as virtuous defenders of amateurism in college sports while reaping billions off the backs of student-athletes, the majority of them Black and quite economically disadvantaged. The extent of the scheme wasn’t fully understood until one of the schemers, a middle-aged moneyman named Marty Blazer, was turned into an FBI informant. 

...

"Lawson’s latest nonfiction book, Hot Dog Money, is Blazer’s Goodfellas story – one largely told from Lawson’s one-on-one interviews with Blazer

...

"He was a mid-level financial adviser making six figures trading stocks and bonds with a client roster that slowly grew to include select members of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. The story of William “Tank” Black, the powerful football agent indicted for running a Ponzi scheme fueled with Detroit coke money, sparked Blazer’s larger ambitions.

"Blazer teamed up with an agent and recruited football players from Pennsylvania colleges with the aim of attaching himself to future pros. That’s where the “hot dog money” came in. Blazer didn’t just pass cash-filled envelopes under the table. He sent money home to players’ struggling families, supplied them with luxury cars, paid for lavish trips to Miami and Las Vegas, and comped their inevitable strip club binges. Sometimes he’d arrange to have girls flown in for parties closer to campus. “The girls are being trafficked, the kids are being trafficked,” says Lawson. “Forget morality, how do you even describe the decency of it all? This is what the swirling of a flushing toilet looks like.”

"In a typical hot dog money scheme, a college player receives cash in the form of a forgivable loan with the understanding that the bagman’s aboveboard services will be retained once the player turns pro; depending on the player, the bagman can make his money back many times over in boring management fees. A proudly devoted husband and father of three, Blazer was more interested in helping his clients make the most out of a corrupt system and went the extra mile to look out for them, paying for information that could help clients avert potential disaster.

Payment to college athletes: Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) Deals

 The recent changes in what college athletes can be paid for  (and in their ability to transfer freely between schools) has made it profitable for some football players who are eligible for the NFL draft to remain in school.  The NYT has the story:

How transfer, NIL rules thinned out NFL draft QB class: ‘It’s an anemic quarterback class’ by Kalyn Kahler

"the reason for the mid-to-late-round quarterback mass desertion has a lot to do with the growth of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness (NIL) deals.

"In April 2021, the NCAA changed its rules to allow transfers without sitting out a season. A little more than two months later, the NCAA announced its first-ever NIL policy, allowing college athletes to take deals with individual companies, like Bose, and sign deals with collectives affiliated with their schools.

"Collectives are generally made up of donor funds, and they offer contracts to athletes in return for services like autograph signings or event appearances. And in the second season of NIL, collectives are succeeding at incentivizing players at all positions to return to school, and most of all the most important position on the team.

“You’re not necessarily allowed to pay players to return. Like, that can’t be the reason,” said an executive for a collective affiliated with a West Coast university who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity in order to openly discuss details of the hush-hush world of NIL. “But you can talk about their potential when they come back, you’ll have significantly more NIL opportunities than maybe you had the prior year.

...

"You’re not exactly allowed to disclose what people are making,” said the West Coast collective executive. “It has not been laid out from the NCAA and a lot of schools on exactly what you can and can’t talk about. It’s very unclear in a lot of situations, so people naturally get uncomfortable because they don’t know the rules, especially coaches.”

"A veteran NFL agent who represented two draft-eligible Power 5 quarterbacks for their NIL deals said that one transferred to a new program this offseason with the understanding he would make a million-plus through that school’s collective. The agent said the other turned down an offer of more than a million in favor of a transfer to the best football situation, where he’s been promised an amount comparable to an NFL practice-squad salary (in the $200,000 range)."

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Related posts on (previously repugnant) payments to student athletes here.

Payments to college athletes, no longer so repugnant

 The longstanding debate over whether college athletes must remain unpaid to preserve their 'amateur' status is starting to reach some conclusions.  Expect more to follow. 

The NY Times has the story:

Supreme Court Backs Payments to Student-Athletes in N.C.A.A. Case. The N.C.A.A. argued that the payments were a threat to amateurism and that barring them did not violate the antitrust laws.  By Adam Liptak and Alan Blinder

"The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that the N.C.A.A. cannot bar relatively modest payments to student-athletes in a decision that questioned the association’s monopoly power at a time when the business model of college sports is under increasing pressure.

"The decision concerned only payments and other benefits related to education, but its logic suggested that the court may be open to a frontal challenge to the N.C.A.A.’s ban on paying athletes for their participation in sports that bring billions of dollars in revenue to American colleges and universities. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed to invite such a challenge.

“Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The N.C.A.A. is not above the law.”

"In a statement on Monday, the N.C.A.A. said the ruling “reaffirms the N.C.A.A.’s authority to adopt reasonable rules and repeatedly notes that the N.C.A.A. remains free to articulate what are and are not truly educational benefits.”

"Next week, student-athletes in at least six states are poised to be allowed to make money through endorsements — not because of action by the N.C.A.A., but because of state officials who grew tired of the industry’s decades-long efforts to limit the rights of players.

...

"Less than two weeks before some of the new laws are scheduled to take effect in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas and allow athletes to make endorsements and make money from their social media presences, the N.C.A.A. has not agreed to extend similar rights to players nationwide. And in a setback last week for the association, senior members of Congress said that they did not expect to strike a deal for a federal standard before July 1."

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Several months ago, SCOTUSblog gave a nice summary of the issues (HT: Kim Krawiec):

Amid March Madness, antitrust dispute over college athlete compensation comes to the court   By Amy Howe

"What differentiates college sports from professional sports, the NCAA stresses, is that college sports are played by amateurs – who, by definition, are not paid to play. Having amateurs in college sports, the NCAA adds, promotes competition by giving consumers a choice between college sports and professional sports; that choice is only possible, the NCAA explains, because of the agreement among the NCAA and its members on eligibility and compensation for college athletes.

...

"As far as the athletes are concerned, the court’s inquiry is a straightforward one that boils down to whether the NCAA’s restrictions, imposed in the name of amateurism, create enough benefits for competition to offset the harm that they create. Whether those restrictions are necessary to preserve amateurism, the athletes reiterate, is irrelevant.

...

"A brief by historians derides the concept of amateurism in elite college sports as a “myth that is neither necessary to the activity nor fair to the students who participate.” To the contrary, the scholars note, “top-tier college sports” have flourished even as “amateurism” in the athletes playing those sports has decreased. What’s more, the historians continue, the NCAA’s efforts to rely on amateurism as the basis to shield its eligibility rules from antitrust scrutiny is “profoundly unfair,” as those rules often led to coaches and schools making millions from poor students."

NCAA takes steps to allow college athletes to be compensated

Here's the NY Times:

N.C.A.A. Considers Loosening Rules for Athletes Seeking Outside Deals
The governing body for college sports appeared to soften its long-held stance that athletes should not profit from their fame. But it gave no details and said any rule changes required much more discussion.

"ATLANTA — The N.C.A.A. Board of Governors, under increasing pressure from legislatures around the country, voted Tuesday to pave the way for college athletes to profit off their fame, but the decision came with an elephant-size caveat: Any policy changes must maintain clear distinctions between amateur athletes and professional ones.

The vote was a surprising turn by the N.C.A.A., which for years has resisted calls for athletes to be compensated for the use of their names, images and likenesses. The board was responding to a report from a committee studying the issue and was expected to do little more than give the committee extra time to do its work.

The N.C.A.A. president, Mark Emmert, acknowledged that the passage of a bill in California that would permit sponsorships, the emergence of more than a dozen others like it nationwide and calls for change from prominent athletes like LeBron James had nudged his organization into action."
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See previous post:

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

College athletes can be paid for endorsements in California: an end to an American repugnance?

College athletes can be paid for endorsements in California: an end to an American repugnance?

College sports in the U.S. has long been an anomaly--our overseas colleagues must run colleges for reasons other than sports, but in the U.S. college sports are a big deal. And being a big-time college athlete leads to lucrative professional careers for some, but while in college the powers that be have long ruled that athletes can't be paid.  That may now be changing.

The NY Times has the story:

California Governor Signs Plan to Let N.C.A.A. Athletes Be Paid
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to allow college athletes to hire agents and make money from endorsements. The measure, the first of its kind, threatens the business model of college sports.

"The governor’s signature opened a new front of legal pressure against the amateurism model that has been foundational to college sports but has restricted generations of students from earning money while on athletic rosters.

"If the law survives any court challenges, the business of sports would change within a few years for public and private universities in California, including some of the most celebrated brands in American sports. So, too, would the financial opportunities for thousands of student-athletes, who have long been forbidden from trading on their renown to promote products and companies.

“Every single student in the university can market their name, image and likeness; they can go and get a YouTube channel, and they can monetize that,” Newsom said in an interview with The New York Times. “The only group that can’t are athletes. Why is that?
...
"In a statement on Monday, the N.C.A.A., which had warned that it considered the measure “unconstitutional,” said that it would “consider next steps in California” and that “a patchwork of different laws from different states will make unattainable the goal of providing a fair and level playing field.”

The state’s rebuke of a system that generates billions of dollars each year went against powerful universities, including California, Stanford and Southern California. The schools said the law would put their athletes in danger of being barred from routine competitions and showcase events like the College Football Playoff and the men’s and women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments, made-for-TV moments that help some universities log more than $100 million each in annual athletic revenue."

Gambling and Sports

A class of repugnant transactions (gambling, subject to many legal restrictions designed to limit its availability) and  protected transactions (sports events, subject to many regulations designed to protect their integrity) have come a bit closer together through a recent Supreme Court decision about a complicated law.

Here's the news story from Inside Higher Ed:
Gambling on Sports Legal
The Supreme Court has opened the way for states to legalize betting on athletics, a defeat for the National Collegiate Athletic Association and professional leagues.

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a law that had forbidden gambling on college and professional sports outside Nevada."

The link above goes to the Supreme Court decision.
But what makes the law that they struck down complicated is that it didn't make sports betting a crime, rather it forbade States from allowing it.

Here's some legal commentary on the decision from a law firm involved in the case:
https://www.gibsondunn.com/supreme-court-strikes-down-federal-limits-on-sports-gambling/

"The Supreme Court held 7-2 that a federal law prohibiting States from authorizing sports betting violates the Tenth Amendment because it impermissibly commandeers state legislatures.

"Background: A federal law – the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) – prohibits States from authorizing or licensing sports gambling.  In 2014, the New Jersey legislature repealed existing prohibitions on sports gambling at casinos and racetracks.  The NCAA and the four major professional sports leagues sued the State, arguing that the decision to allow sports gambling violated PASPA.

"Issue: Whether PASPA’s federal prohibition on state authorization of sports gambling violates the Tenth Amendment because it commandeers state legislatures.

"Court’s Holding: Yes.  PASPA unconstitutionally commandeers state legislatures by dictating the content of state law regarding sports gambling (i.e., preventing States from legalizing sports gambling).

“A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine.”

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Here's the Volokh conspiracy on possible broader implications of this decision

Broader Implications of the Supreme Court's Sports Gambling Decision
Commentators are right to suggest that Murphy v. NCAA will help sanctuary cities, but wrong to claim it is like to undermine federal laws restricting state taxes.

The NCAA cartel

The March 2018 issue of the Review of Industrial Organization is devoted to a Symposium: The NCAA Cartel

In the Introduction, Roger Blair begins by noting
"Becker (1987) once characterized the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as a “cartel in Sheepskin clothing,” which seems to be an apt description. Under the organizing umbrella of the NCAA, the member institutions collusively exploit both monopolistic and monopsonistic power. "

Here's the table of contents

1. Symposium: The NCAA Cartel—Introduction

   Roger D. BlairPages 179-183
   
2. 

   OriginalPaper

   The National Collegiate Athletic Association Cartel: Why it Exists, How it Works, and What it Does

   Allen R. Sanderson, John J. SiegfriedPages 185-209
   
3. 

   OriginalPaper

   Athlete Pay and Competitive Balance in College Athletics

   Brian Mills, Jason WinfreePages 211-229
   
4. 

   OriginalPaper

   Modeling Competitive Imbalance and Self-Regulation in College Sports

   Rodney FortPages 231-251
   
5. 

   OriginalPaper

   Rent Sharing and the Compensation of Head Coaches in Power Five College Football

   Michael A. Leeds, Eva Marikova Leeds, Aaron HarrisPages 253-267
   
6. 

   OriginalPaper

   State of Play: How Do College Football Programs Compete for Student Athletes?

   Jill S. HarrisPages 269-281
   
7. 

   OriginalPaper

   Strategic Interaction in a Repeated Game: Evidence from NCAA Football Recruiting

   Brad R. Humphreys, Jane E. RuseskiPages 283-303
   
8. 

   OriginalPaper

   The Role of Broadcasting in National Collegiate Athletic Association Sports

   Allen R. Sanderson, John J. SiegfriedPages 305-321
   
9. 

   OriginalPaper

   The NCAA and the Rule of Reason

   Herbert HovenkampPages 323-335
   
10. 

    OriginalPaper

    Whither the NCAA: Reforming the System

    Andrew ZimbalistPages 337-350
    
11. 

    OriginalPaper

    The NCAA Cartel and Antitrust Policy

    Roger D. Blair, Wenche WangPages 351-368
    

Unraveling of college sports recruiting--continued

Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Too Young to Commit?
Urging colleges to change a recruiting culture that targets middle schoolers, Ivy League announces proposals for curbing early recruitment of athletes.

"The Ivy League will announce today a series of proposals aimed at curbing early recruiting in college sports, urging other National Collegiate Athletic Association members to “change the culture of recruiting that forces prospective student-athletes to commit earlier and earlier.”

The proposed Division I rule changes, which would potentially be voted on at the NCAA’s annual meeting in January, would prohibit verbal offers from coaches to potential recruits until Sept. 1 of the student’s junior year of high school. The legislation would also prohibit players initiating or receiving phone calls with and from college coaches, and ban any recruiting conversations at camps or clinics until that date.

"Current NCAA Division I rules differ among sports, but they largely already prohibit players from receiving phone calls from a coach, going on official campus visits or getting an offer before their junior or senior year. Prospective athletes are allowed to initiate phone calls with coaches, however, and are allowed to visit campuses and meet with coaches prior to their junior year, as long as the trip is an unofficial visit not paid for by the institution.

...

"Harris pointed to increasing transfer rates in intercollegiate athletics as evidence athletes are making recruitment decisions too early. According to the NCAA, one-third of college athletes transfer to another program.

“There’s a lot of talk about there being a transfer problem,” Harris said. “Well, I would say a lot of the problem with transfers is the fact that we have individuals making decisions too soon that are too rushed.”

Early recruiting is especially prevalent in sports like women’s soccer and lacrosse, where some players are being recruited as early as middle school. An analysis by the New York Times and the National Collegiate Scouting Association in 2014 found that 36 percent of women’s lacrosse players who use the consulting firm to commit to colleges are doing so early, as are 24 percent of women’s soccer players.

The athletes cannot sign binding letters of intent at such an early age, but middle school students are increasingly announcing verbal commitments to specific institutions after receiving unofficial scholarship offers from coaches."

Antitrust, repugnance and expert testimony in NCAA case

My colleague Roger Noll gets top billing in this story about the courtroom plays being executed in a trial that touches on whether paying college athletes is repugnant: O'Bannon economist may be MVP

OAKLAND, Calif. -- The big names in the lawsuit against the NCAA are Ed O'Bannon, Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell, but the key to the plaintiffs' attempt to transform the NCAA is a 74-year-old economist named Roger Noll who has studied the sports industry for more than 40 years.

The tall and scholarly Stanford professor emeritus already has testified for nearly eight hours and will return for more on Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken. Noll's job for the players is to convince Wilken that the NCAA's refusal to allow college athletes to sell their names, images and likenesses is a violation of American antitrust laws.

LIVE TWEETING THE TRIAL

ESPN reporter Tom Farrey (@TomFarrey) is tweeting from inside the federal courtroom in Oakland, Calif., alongside legal analyst Lester Munson.Follow the trial live here beginning at 11:30 a.m. (ET).

Relying on exhaustive research and extensive experience testifying in court as an expert witness in antitrust trials, Noll must be able to show that the NCAA is using its stranglehold over college sports to deprive current and former college athletes of their fair share of the money produced by sales of live broadcasts of games, rebroadcasts, video games and other merchandise.

Noll has already shown that the NCAA's restrictions that prevent athletes from selling their names, images and likenesses limit competition in recruiting high school stars (the colleges cannot offer payment to the athletes for use of their names and so forth). He also has shown that the restrictions "distort the industry" and push huge revenue from football and men's basketball into coaches' salaries and palatial facilities.

He also responded on Tuesday to the NCAA's claim that the restrictions on athletes enhance "competitive balance" among NCAA teams by showing, with a compelling chart, that there has never been competitive balance in major college sports and that a small number of schools dominate top 25 lists and national championships.

Noll's research for his testimony is impressive. In a chart that demonstrated the current level of competition for high school stars, he showed the outcomes of recruiting efforts in football and basketball for the five power conferences and Notre Dame. According to Noll's research, for example, the Irish succeeded in 11 out of 17 attempts in 2012 to recruit four- and five-star high school athletes.

During the pretrial stage of the O'Bannon litigation, Noll prepared 750 pages of reports and testified in a pretrial interrogation that went on for four days and filled more than 1,500 pages.

Noll is no stranger to the courtroom. He was the star witness for the NFL Players Association when the players used antitrust litigation to establish free agency. Noll's testimony in a federal court in Minneapolis in 1991 was the key to a verdict from a jury that the NFL's restrictions on player movement violated antitrust laws.

This is not his first time in Wilken's courtroom, either. He testified before Wilken for the winning side in an antitrust trial involving HIV drugs.

The NCAA is responding to Noll's expertise with a cross-examination that began Tuesday and with its own economists, including James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winner from the University of Chicago. The NCAA's principal witness against Noll will be Daniel Rubinfeld, a professor at New York University. Noll and the O'Bannon legal team have already started their attack on Rubinfeld, offering excerpts from a Rubinfeld textbook that admit that the NCAA is a cartel, the first step in any antitrust trial.

Rohit Singla, the NCAA attorney assigned to the cross-examination of Noll, did not make much progress on Tuesday, with Noll repeatedly suggesting that Singla's questions were "vague and based on facts that do not exist."

Singla and the NCAA insist that the players have no ownership of their names, images and likenesses that would permit them to bargain for a share of television broadcasts. All ownership, the NCAA says, resides with the schools, the conferences and itself.

If the NCAA is correct and the players have nothing to sell, it remains unknown why the NCAA would restrict the players from selling what they have no right to sell. It's a question that Noll may address as he continues his testimony on Wednesday.

O'Bannon, Robertson and Russell were highly successful in competition on the basketball court, but Noll's testimony on economic competition in a courtroom will determine the fate of the NCAA's current way of operation.

A union for college football players?

Here's the story from ESPN a little while ago:

For the first time in the history of college sports, athletes are asking to be represented by a labor union, taking formal steps on Tuesday to begin the process of being recognized as employees.

More from ESPN.com

Lester Munson writes that the Northwestern football players' attempt at unionization is likely to fail, but the impact could still be far-reaching. Story

Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, filed a petition in Chicago on behalf of football players at Northwestern University, submitting the form at the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board.

Backed by the United Steelworkers union, Huma also filed union cards signed by an undisclosed number of Northwestern players with the NLRB -- the federal statutory body that recognizes groups that seek collective bargaining rights.
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And here's the CBS coverage: Road ahead for college football players union isn't an easy one

The obstacles members of the Northwestern University Wildcats football team face on the road to forming a union are formidable.

First,  there are a myriad of legal questions that need to be answered, such as is there an employer/employee relationship that exists between the players and the Evanston, Ill. school that meets the criteria set by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Northwestern, not surprisingly, argues that such a relationship doesn't exist. Whether the players can make such a claim against the NCAA, which seems to be the focus of their wrath and also is opposed to their efforts, also is unclear. The players, though, do have the backing of the NFL Players Association, the union that represents their counterparts in the pros.

"Most of the grievances cited by the players concern the NCAA as a monopolistic cartel that wields unbalanced and unreasonable labor market power against the players in terms of compensation and scholarship limitations among other issues," writes Vanderbilt University Economist John Vrooman, a former college football player who studies the economics of sports, in an email. "The issue here is that the NCAA is clearly a cartel but it is not necessarily the employer."

The other obstacle facing the players affiliated with the National College Football Players Association is a practical one. Since members of the team graduate, creating a cohesive bargaining unit will be difficult if have to frequently recruit new members. That's one of the reasons why efforts to unionize teaching assistants on college campuses have faltered.
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Here's a report from the first days of hearings:

March 3, 2014

Are College Athletes Employees? Former Labor-Board Chairman Says Yes

Here's an earlier, related post:

College football is big business (who knew?)

Unraveling of college athletic recruiting

At Stanford, when I meet student athletes I sometimes ask them when they first met a Stanford coach, and the earliest answer I've gotten so far is 8th grade. Here's a great NY Times story by Nathaniel Popper that confirms this isn't an extreme outlier.

Committing to Play for a College, Then Starting 9th Grade

"In today’s sports world, students are offered full scholarships before they have taken their first College Boards, or even the Preliminary SAT exams. Coaches at colleges large and small flock to watch 13- and 14-year-old girls who they hope will fill out their future rosters. This is happening despite N.C.A.A. rules that appear to explicitly prohibit it.

"The heated race to recruit ever younger players has drastically accelerated over the last five years, according to the coaches involved. It is generally traced back to the professionalization of college and youth sports, a shift that has transformed soccer and other recreational sports from after-school activities into regimens requiring strength coaches and managers.

...

"Early scouting has also become more prevalent in women’s sports than men’s, in part because girls mature sooner than boys. But coaches say it is also an unintended consequence of Title IX, the federal law that requires equal spending on men’s and women’s sports. Colleges have sharply increased the number of women’s sports scholarships they offer, leading to a growing number of coaches chasing talent pools that have not expanded as quickly. In soccer, for instance, there are 322 women’s soccer teams in the highest division, up from 82 in 1990. There are now 204 men’s soccer teams.

“In women’s soccer, there are more scholarships than there are good players,” said Peter Albright, the coach at Richmond and a regular critic of early recruiting. “In men’s sports, it’s the opposite.”

"While women’s soccer is generally viewed as having led the way in early recruiting, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey have been following and occasionally surpassing it, and other women’s and men’s sports are becoming involved each year when coaches realize a possibility of getting an edge.

"Precise numbers are difficult to come by, but an analysis done for The New York Times by the National Collegiate Scouting Association, a company that consults with families on the recruiting process, shows that while only 5 percent of men’s basketball players and 4 percent of football players who use the company commit to colleges early — before the official recruiting process begins — the numbers are 36 percent in women’s lacrosse and 24 percent in women’s soccer.

At universities with elite teams like North Carolina and Texas, the rosters are almost entirely filled by the time official recruiting begins.
...
For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.

“It’s detrimental to the whole development of the sport, and to the girls,” Haley’s future coach at Texas, Angela Kelly, said at the Florida tournament.

:The difficulty, according to Ms. Kelly and many other coaches, is that if they do not do it, other coaches will, and will snap up all of the best players. Many parents and girls say that committing early ensures they do not miss out on scholarship money.
...
"The N.C.A.A. rules designed to prevent all of this indicate that coaches cannot call players until July after their junior year of high school. Players are not supposed to commit to a college until signing a letter of intent in the spring of their senior year.

"But these rules have enormous and widely understood loopholes. The easiest way for coaches to circumvent the rules is by contacting the students through their high school or club coaches. Once the students are alerted, they can reach out to the college coaches themselves with few limits on what they can talk about or how often they can call.

"Haley said she was having phone conversations with college coaches nearly every night during the eighth grade.
...
"Mr. Dorrance, who has won 22 national championships as a coach, said he was spending his entire weekend focusing on the youngest girls at the tournament, those in the eighth and ninth grades. Mr. Dorrance is credited with being one of the first coaches to look at younger players, but he says he is not happy about the way the practice has evolved.

“It’s killing all of us,” he said.

"Mr. Dorrance’s biggest complaint is that he is increasingly making early offers to players who do not pan out years later.

“If you can’t make a decision on one or two looks, they go to your competitor, and they make an offer,” he said. “You are under this huge pressure to make a scholarship offer on their first visit.”

"The result has been a growing number of girls who come to play for him at North Carolina and end up sitting on the bench.
...
"Once the colleges manage to connect with a player, they have to deal with the prohibition on making a formal scholarship offer before a player’s final year of high school. But there is now a well-evolved process that is informal but considered essentially binding by all sides. Most sports have popular websites where commitments are tallied, and coaches can keep up with who is on and off the market.

"Either side can make a different decision after an informal commitment, but this happens infrequently because players are expected to stop talking with coaches from other programs and can lose offers if they are spotted shopping around. For their part, coaches usually stop recruiting other players."
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The article makes reference to a 2011 paper by Boston College Law professor Alfred Yen: Early Scholarship Offers and the NCAA

HT: Stephanie Hurder