The Bank is Open for Collegiate Student-Athletes What You Should Know About Name, Image and Likeness
By Judy Simmons Henry and Collins Hickman
Judy Henry serves in management of Wright Lindsey Jennings as its business litigation chair. Henry has led the charge for NameImage-Likeness/Publicity Rights representation of businesses and athletes in Arkansas and regionally. Collins Hickman is an associate attorney who joined Wright Lindsey Jennings in 2020. He supports clients as a member of the firm’s sports law team focusing on Name-Image-Likeness regulations. **For more information on the authors' bios, please see the endnotes.
Henry 32
The Arkansas Lawyer
Hickman www.arkbar.com
June 30, 2021, July 1, 2021, and January 1, 2022—these three dates have and will alter the landscape of collegiate athletics in Arkansas and elsewhere as we’ve known it for the last century. But first, let’s roll backward to 2019. The amateur sports world was calmer, although a soft roar of collegiate athletes’ voices was rumbling across the nation.1 By summer of 2020, student-athletes were chanting loudly to lift the NCAA ban on their “right to work.”2 Claims of disparate treatment among college students and profiteering at the expense of student athletes were the heartcries of the movement. But athletes were unable to muster enough force to impact the rigid NCAA regulation prohibiting payments to most amateur collegiate athletes.3 Undeterred, student-athletes, their parents and in some instances, coaches and athletic directors of institutions of higher education took their concerns to state legislators, who listened.4 By summer 2021, the movement had reached its peak. A few states’ newly-passed laws giving athletes more control over their publicity rights were on the verge of becoming effective on July 1, 2021.5 The NCAA was now under immense pressure to address its conflicting bylaw prohibiting work compensation for athletes. The NCAA’s initial hope was that Congress would pass a federal law to make a uniform solution to its impending problem.6 However, after a pair of Senate hearings in June 2021, it was clear that no federal law was on the immediate horizon.7 And around this same time, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the NCAA’s rules that limited the amount of education-related benefits that schools could provide to their student-athletes in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston.8 With the unfavorable ruling in Alston, the NCAA was concerned that antitrust liability would result if it issued a blanket restriction on compensation rights for student-athletes.9 Backed into a corner, the NCAA had no choice. Its actions on June 30, 2021, will forever be recognized as a monumental day in collegiate sports.
