High school football powerhouse's NIL deal an example of what's coming – USA TODAY

Shortly after the powerhouse St. John Bosco high school football team out of Southern California finishes its season opener this Friday, dozens of players will swap their jerseys for T-shirts representing KONGiQ, a sports performance and technology company. The players will then post images of themselves on social media, selling a product they use in their weight room every day. 
And by that point, the first of two payments from KONGiQ to cover the 2022 football season will have already landed in their bank accounts. 
If there was any doubt that college athletes capitalizing on name, image and likeness rights would trickle down to the high school level, it has now arrived. Though only 16 states and the District of Columbia have currently authorized high school athletes to participate in NIL monetization through their state laws and high school sports governing associations, KONGiQ signing 70-plus players to endorsement deals at one of the top programs in the country could open the floodgates to something much bigger. 
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The company formally announced the deals on Monday. 
“We’re a very collegiate-minded program,” head coach Jason Negro told USA TODAY Sports. “If there’s something colleges are doing, what better way to help our athletes than to provide them the same type of opportunity? I want to be a pioneer at the high school level, and I think we’re doing that at Bosco.” 
The money St. John Bosco players will earn by promoting KONGiQ is not life-changing — financial terms weren’t disclosed but are believed to be closer to the hundreds of dollars than the tens of thousands — but it’s being offered to every player on the team. While Bosco is loaded with players we’ll soon be seeing on Saturdays, including six prospects rated as four- or five-stars by 247 Sports, they also have a lot of players who won’t make a cent of NIL in college because they won’t be playing the sport anymore. 
“The (California Interscholastic Federation) has some rules around NIL, but there’s a lot of money to be made for high-level schools with high-level athletic programs,” said Brian Wickstrom, a former Div. 1 athletics director at Louisiana-Monroe and Incarnate Word who is now St. John Bosco’s president and CEO. “I don’t think this is a one-time thing.
“When you have the visibility of our program or IMG in Florida or Mater Dei, which is our biggest rival, there are people who want to be involved in sponsorships.”
Similar to the NCAA, Bosco was not allowed to be involved in facilitating the deals with KONGiQ. But when Wickstrom took the job at Bosco in 2020, he was familiar with the company, which uses its video and biometric technology to collect advanced training data to help maximize performance in the weight room. 
“They can do videotape of ACLs when they’re sprinting and making a turn and seeing where the pressure is coming on the joint,” Wickstrom said. “It’s an amazing company with amazing technology. Our football program is such a high level, I wanted to make sure we could bring that to our team here.”
Earlier this year, KONGiQ approached Wickstrom about doing NIL deals with players. Though neither he nor Negro could be involved in the discussions, the school was happy to let the company meet with players and explain what they were offering. From there, it was completely up to the players to review the contracts and decide whether they wanted to opt into the deal. So far, Negro said he hadn’t heard of any players passing on the opportunity. 
“Not one parent has reached out to us with concerns or questions as to what this is about. The way they’re approaching it is that it’s a small job,” Negro said. “The kids are being paid for a service to be an influencer and talk about it in a positive light. They’re not getting rich off it, but this isn’t a gimmick. It’s basic and straightforward.”
It’s also, in a sense, real-world preparation for what players are going to encounter as they enter college football. 
Though much has been made about how NIL has changed recruiting and the jobs of college coaches over the last year, there’s hardly been any conversation about how it’s playing out at the high school level. The reality, though, is that many top prospects — including several at St. John Bosco — are already finished with or deep into the recruiting process. That means, like it or not, they’ve already had multiple NIL offers come their way. In some cases, they’ve already secured future deals.
For Negro, giving players some information about that world and making sure they know what to expect is now part of his job description, just like the role high school coaches played in the traditional recruiting process. 
The KONGiQ deal, in a sense, is like an NIL starter kit for teenagers who could be in line to make big money once they sign with a college. And because programs like Bosco have so many power conference prospects, agents and NIL middlemen are trying to build relationships with players earlier and earlier. 
“As a high school football coach, this is just another layer of information I’m going to have to learn and be knowledgable in to be able to educate our young men as they come through,” Negro said. “Just as an example, we’re implementing a financial literacy course to help them deal with that and understand how to manage money and things like that.
“But in California, this isn’t anything new. We have (high school) actors, musicians, influencers, video game players and all kinds of stuff going on. But I have to do a good job of teaching our kids how to fill out contracts, how to properly notarize things, making sure they’re reading what they’re signing and what their responsibilities are. This is like a job. They have requirements they must do to receive this compensation, and it’s part of my job to teach them that.”
With the current crop of high school seniors becoming just the second recruiting class to operate in the NIL world, everyone is still learning as they go. There has been chaos, for sure. But it’s going to trickle down to high school sports one way or another, and programs like Bosco aren’t going to resist. 
“The school won’t be involved in any negotiations or picking of companies going forward,” Wickstrom said. “But I think this will open up some doors to have opportunities. We won’t screen them. That’s not our role. What this will do is you’ll start to see other high schools having opportunities to have similar types of agreements, I think.”

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