Growing up, I was always taught that too much white space is a bad thing. You had to fill the entire page in school to show that you were writing enough and had enough information. In design or blank space, white space is your best friend, and I forgot that.
The past couple of weeks have been difficult. I lost a lot of my creative energy and found it hard to complete the assignments for my graduate school class. But, after some Google searching and a meeting with my professor, I felt refreshed. I was ready to redesign my Toolkit for NCAA student-athletes about their name, image and likeness and have all of the white space that I needed.
I discovered a photo sharing website called Unsplash, which is a photo gallery community where photographers share their high-resolution pictures and anyone can download them and use them for free. This website is home to over one million beautiful photos and really helped me with my redesign.
My professor also helped recalled information that I learned in my undergraduate time in my newspaper, yearbook and publishing classes. The grid structure of Adobe InDesign helps create a uniform look and feel for the document. I went with a three-column structure for my copy and photos throughout the toolkit. This also helped my mind become less cluttered and unorganized by giving myself something more to work with.
The purpose of this toolkit is to help student-athletes understand the potential gain and the dissect the vague restrictions behind the NCAA’s name, image and likeness ruling. Now more than ever before, social media will be a student-athlete’s best tool to use once the collegiate athletics world merges with the $5-10 billion influencer business. (Planos, 2020).
Social and digital media played a significant role in these proposed changes, according to the NCAA Board of Governors’ meeting report from April 17.
“The rise of social media and other digital distribution and monetization platforms has dramatically increased the opportunities for college students to make commercial use of their NIL.”
NCAA Board of Governors meeting | April 17, 2020
And it looks like the NCAA is truly trying to make this all happen, but with their own guardrails. The NCAA has stated in their initial decision to move forward with compensation rules that endorsements student-athletes can receive will be independent of athletic activity and not an endorsement payment for athletic activity. The NCAA says there will be regulations on third-parties or agents, but they do not provide any further details (Sallee & Silverstein, 2020).
Conferences are trying to push for this to happen, too. The Power Five conferences spent $350,000 on lobbyists to attempt to influence Congress on legislation allowing collegiate student-athletes to earn endorsement money, which was more than they have previously spent in any full year. The Southeastern Conference spent the most out of any conference – $140,000 (Nuckols, 2020).
“We look forward to a constructive exchange of ideas about ways we can further enhance our student-athletes’ educational and athletic experiences while ensuring that any future changes can be administered fairly on a national level.”
Greg Sankey, SEC Commissioner
According to Nuckols, the SEC has never employed Washington lobbyists and left the work for influencing Congress to the universities and the NCAA until now.
And as we could have predicted, student-athletes are involved in the legislation process, as well. Current and former collegiate student-athletes across the country are a part of the working group with the NCAA that will help provide information and experiences related to earning money for their name, image and likeness during the time when that was impermissible.
“We’re the solutions group,” Jaila Tolber, former student-athlete at Virginia Tech said about joining the working group. “So, coming up with some kind of framework is going to be a huge part of our plan. My goals are to make those recommendations that align with the NCAA principles and allow student-athletes to benefit from their name, image and likeness. Having that same access that regular students have.
Looks like there are a lot of people in this process who have student-athletes’ best intentions at heart. Let’s keep the momentum going forward.
MAGGIE PRUITT 