UH Athletics NIL Endowment bill passes first Senate hearing

A bill that would establish an endowment fund to pay student-athletes at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is moving forward in the Hawai’i Senate after passing its first committee hearing with amendments on Wednesday.

Senate Bill 3263 would establish a Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) endowment fund administered by the university to compensate student-athletes. The endowment would consist of funds appropriated by the legislature that would be equivalent to monies raised by the university to create this principal investment. The annual interest accrued in this endowment would then be used to pay the university’s student-athletes.

The endowment fund amount listed in the original measure is $10 million. The bill also requires the university to publicly report how much a student-athlete is getting paid from the endowment fund. Athletes that are paid through this fund would also have to use a registered agent.

The creation of SB 3263 by Senate lawmakers is in response to a part of the university’s operating budget request for fiscal year 2026-27. The university’s athletic department was seeking over $15 million in additional general funds to maintain competitiveness at the NCAA Division-I level, with $5 million going towards establishing a NIL program to attract and retain top talent.

“This bill is our bill that was introduced,” said Senate Education Chairwoman Donna Mercado Kim. “It was done so that there would be a pot of money that would be consistent over the years. It would be a one-time $5 million and the requirement is (the university) would match the $5 million so there would be $10 million in the corpus (principal) and then they would get the interest from that going forward as long as there is such a thing as NIL.”

Beginning in July 2021, college athletes were granted the ability by the NCAA to legally earn money through the likes of third-party endorsement deals. The landscape of college athletics changed again in 2025 after the House v. NCAA Settlement gave institutions the ability to pay athletes directly through what is known as revenue sharing.

That went into effect on July 1, 2025 — one day after Matt Elliott started as the athletics director at the university. Elliott was on hand at the state capitol Wednesday to testify in support of SB 3263 before the Senate committee on Education and committee on Economic Development and Tourism.

“We are in support of SB 3263,” Elliott said. “NIL is a new challenge for college athletics across the country and in this state. We believe it requires a range of solutions to be able to successfully take this on.”

While the university is seeking funds for to be able to use in the short-term, Elliott highlighted the bill’s effort to provide some long-term funding stability for the NIL program.

“This endowment program that is outline in this bill, we think makes a lot of sense because not only does it allow us to emphasize the importance of keeping up with the current athletics landscape, but it creates a long-term sustainable solution as well. While we still do believe that it’s important to have immediate short-term funding, this endowment is something that makes a lot of sense for us in the future.”

The main point of discussion for most of Wednesday’s hearing was the $10 million dollar amount in the original language of the bill. In order for the university to see this fund, it would need to raise $5 million on its own before the legislature matched that amount with taxpayer money.

Elliott requested that the endowment started at a lower amount to give the university time to raise funds to match what the legislature would appropriate.

Sen. Samantha DeCorte criticized this ask and called it “contradictory” because it appears that the university is asking taxpayers to front the cost of the endowment fund.

“Instead of giving us a plan on how you folks are going to be raising funds in an urgent way, you’re asking us to scale back on the threshold,” DeCorte said.

Elliott noted that the NIL endowment introduced with SB 3263 is a new potential source of funds for the future and that the university is trying to raise $3 million for the NIL program in the current fiscal year. (He confirmed later in the day that the university has raised $1.6 million already towards that amount.)

“We’ve been trying to raise money to pay our obligations real time, so those are the conversations — that’s the kind of fundraising we’re doing right now,” Elliott said.

“This is a different concept. This is a concept of raising money for an endowment. So to talk to donors now about asking money from the private sector to put in an endowment that will then generate some interest, that is something new. This is a new proposal this is coming in this bill.”

To push the bill forward, Kim recommended that the $10 million amount in SB 3263’s original language be “blanked out” as something for the Senate Ways and Means Committee to revisit in the future.

All committee members present Wednesday voted in favor of the bill with its amendments, with the exception of Sen. Glenn Wakai voting yes with reservations.

During the discussion period, Wakai wondered if Hawai’i could ever compete against power conference teams, claiming that the University of Texas is paying quarterback Arch Manning $6 million in NIL.

Wakai also wanted Elliott to disclose how much kicker Kansei Matsuzawa made from his NIL deal from participating in the 2025 football season. The senator called Matsuzawa “the highest-valued athlete” at the university after the kicker gain national fame for game-winning kicks and breaking school records with the moniker ‘the Tokyo Toe.’

Elliott said no individual athletes’ NIL deal is public knowledge and that there would be privacy concerns if it were made known. While SB 3263 would disclose how much each individual athlete makes, Elliott’s preference would be to limit that information on a team-by-team basis rather than a player-by-player.

The athletics director would also like to loosen the bill’s requirement on needing a certified agent as some student-athlete’s NIL portion could be $1,000 and under.

The next time SB 3263 will be revisited in a public hearing is in a joint Ways and Means Committee meeting with the Senate Committee on Commerce and Consumer Protection. That hearing has not been scheduled yet.

On the House side of the legislature, House Bill 2384 relating to NIL was also passed on Wednesday. Click here to see how the two bills are different.