Dawn Staley: South Carolina women's basketball to sign NDAs for revenue sharing

South Carolina head women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley recently sat down with former First Lady Michelle Obama on her podcast to discuss the recent growth in attention on women’s sports, but may have made some news when the topic veered into the future of revenue-sharing in collegiate athletics.

The landmark House v. NCAA Settlement, which was approved June 6 but went into affect July 1, awarded colleges the opportunity to share as much as $20.5 million with its student-athletes as part of a $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that effectively ended the NCAA’s outdated “amateur” model.

During her Aug. 13 appearance on “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,” Staley revealed her Gamecocks players must sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in order to receive any revenue-share money from the university, to which the former First Lady agreed that college athletes don’t need to know each other’s rev-share take, according to the Greenville News.

“Now whether they can stick with that or not, some of them get disgruntled and maybe transfer and just say what ‘I was making (amount)’ and it can stir up the pot but I’m very honest,” Staley said June 10, when the episode was recorded, per the Greenville News. “I’ll tell them, there’s a reason why you get paid this and you get paid that. I’ll explain that to them.”

Michelle Obama was particularly interested in how college athletics’ new financial opportunties, including NIL, have already impacted locker rooms, especially among women’s athletics, which are only slotted to receive a fraction of each school’s $20.5 million cap figure. For her part, Staley said she hasn’t personally seen any detrimental impact yet.

While not a hardline dispursment figure, as schools can spend their allotted revenue-share as they see fit, football programs are expected to receive roughly 75-percent with men’s basketball garnering 15-percent. That leaves the remaining 10-percent of the $20.5 million to be split between women’s basketball (5%) and all other sports (5%), an issue that’s already resulted in multiple Title IX lawsuits against the settlement.

Staley made it clear to Obama that she’s been upfront in all financial conversations she’s had with her South Carolina athletes, including having direct conversations with their respective agents when necessary, though several of her players have the same agents, according to the Greenville News.

While South Carolina hasn’t specifically revealed how it will dispurse its revenue-share allotment, Staley confirmed to Obama that it’s “probably $20 million per school, but that’s football, that’s men’s basketball and maybe sprinking women’s basketball and other Olympic sports,” per the Greenville News.

Staley, who won her third NCAA Division I National Championship last season and remains one of the sport’s winningest coaches in major women’s college basketball, specifically cited the impact revenue-sharing and NIL have had to recruiting as “the difficult part,” according to the Greenville News.

“The market says that if you’re a non-contributor and you go into the portal, they can go ask a school like us for $100,000,” Staley said, per the Greenville News. “If I entertain that, they’re going to take it to another school, (and say) ‘Hey, South Carolina offered me a hundred grand, you got $150,000?”

Difficulties aside, Staley called for college athletics to find a way to balance that allows smaller sports to continue to embrace the amateur and scholastic side of collegiate sports while also allowing student-athletes to “benefit” financially from their own name, image and likeness.

“I’m supportive of it, I really am,” Staley said, per the Greenville News. “I think it’s long overdue. … (But) we got to find a way to balance. To keep it an amateur sport while allowing young people to go out there and benefit from their name, image and likeness.”