Indiana became the sixth state to sign the fledgling Uniform Athlete Agents Act into law on May 1, but is the first state to give its Attorney General enforcement power over the law. Attorney General Steve Carter was given this power yesterday, and plans to implement it and enforce it strictly when it becomes effective on July 1, 2001.
The law is a major step toward reducing the intervention of and controlling the contact between sports agents and student athletes at the collegiate and prep-school levels. The UAAA was proposed by the NCAA and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to all states in an attempt to set a strict code by which professional agents can have contact with amateur athletes.
Given the recent increase in agent-related suspensions and the media frenzy that such problems incur, such as the flak about money being taken by New York Knicks forward Marcus Camby when he was at UMass-Amherst and the allegations last summer about Jason Terry of the Atlanta Hawks taking more than $11,000 from agents in his junior and senior seasons at the University of Arizona.
These actions resulted in teams being stripped of prize earnings from postseason tournaments and forfeiting postseason victories, such as UMass being forced to forfeit its Final Four standing from Camby's senior year in 1995.
The new law allows for agents to have their licenses suspended or even revoked as a result of a conviction under the new law. Agents will be required to register within the state of Indiana before being allowed to have any contact with the state's athletes.
A series of statutes have been set forth in the law, and any violation of the statues will be considered a Class D felony and is punishable by up to 18 months in prison and a $10,000 fine in addition to the possibility of license revocation within the state.
The Attorney General's office will monitor all athlete-agent interactions within the state and can base its license decisions on activities outside the realm of those interactions.
Agents can be prosecuted for: "giving any materially false or misleading information or making a materially false promise or representation, furnishing anything of value to a student-athlete before the student-athlete enters into the agency contract, or furnishing anything of value to any individual other than the student-athlete or another registered athlete agent," according to the UAAA.
Agents can also be prosecuted for having contact with athletes without registering, failing to permit inspection of records of or monitoring of interactions with student athletes and failing to notify a student-athlete of the consequences of signing an agency contract with regard to his participation as a student-athlete in that sport.
The law will finally give states the ability to prosecute agents whereas in the past the only body with jurisdiction over these matters was the NCAA which could only sanction the players and the academic institutions, but not the agents.
Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Mississippi and Utah have all joined Indiana in passing the law, but have not yet given enforcement power to their State Attorney Generals.
