Phil Esten, vice president and director of athletics at the University of St. Thomas, recently spoke with the Star Tribune about the ever-changing NCAA rules and regulations related to paying players in the name, image, likeness (NIL) era of D-I college sports.
From the story:
In the NIL era, even the two men at the top of the state’s two Division I athletic programs continue to search for answers.
For St. Thomas athletic director Phil Esten, the changes come amid an unprecedented transition by the school from Division III to D-I.
“We don’t have 30 or 40 or 50 or 80 years of Division I experiences,” he said. “There’s good and bad to that. The good to that is we don’t have to change anything that we have become used to or accustomed to or are integrated into the fabric of who we are as a Division I institution, because we’re not really established yet in Division I.”
