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AUSTIN – The Texas House preliminarily approved a bill Monday that would allow universities to directly pay student athletes for their “name, likeness and image,” despite concerns from some lawmakers that the proposal would disadvantage smaller schools and fail to sufficiently protect the students at the center of these deals.

The House is expected to formally pass the bill in the coming days. It will then go to the Senate, where it may face a tougher road.

Texas’ current laws allow outside entities, like national advertisers or athletic boosters, to pay student athletes, but prohibit universities from paying them directly. House Bill 126, filed by Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican, would lift that restriction.

The proposal comes a year after the NCAA settled a class-action lawsuit that opened the door for universities to pay student athletes, creating a revenue-sharing model in which universities in certain conferences could distribute up to $20 million to athletes annually.

Supporters of the bill say it aligns Texas law with anticipated NCAA rule changes as a result of that settlement and ensures Texas schools can continue to recruit top-tier student athletes. Tepper said Monday that the Legislature would be “killing college football in Texas” if they voted it down.

But Rep. Mitch Little, a Republican from Lewisville, said Texas’ performance in college football and basketball was doing just fine without this bill. He said the proposal threatened to “grow the gap” between universities with big athletics budgets and deep-pocket donors — like Texas Tech, Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin — and smaller schools that can’t afford to pay large dollar amounts to attract student athletes.

He pointed to Cody Campbell, a former Texas Tech football player, university regent and oil and gas billionaire who founded an NIL collective to help recruit top-ranked athletes to become Red Raiders.

“What are the other universities to do who don’t have a Cody Campbell, or an Elon Musk, to help facilitate the athletic endeavors of their universities?” Little asked. “How can they possibly compete?”

Tepper said the settlement was expected to impose limits on how much universities could disburse. He added that he was also personally concerned about the widening gap between small and large universities, but “professionally, this is a decision of the courts. You can take this up with them.”

Several lawmakers raised concerns about what recourse student athletes would have to enforce their NIL contracts if they were injured, the university breaches the contract or their coach decides “they stink,” as Little put it, and kicks them off the team.

State universities typically enjoy sovereign immunity protections that prevent them from being sued. Tepper said he anticipated that student athletes’ agents would negotiate certain protections on their behalf and rejected proposed amendments to proactively waive universities’ sovereign immunity.

Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a San Antonio Democrat, said her concern was about young people suddenly having access to large amounts of money with few guardrails. She proposed that Texas require NIL money to be put into a trust fund that student athletes would only access after at a certain age, which Tepper rejected.

“I can tell you with firsthand knowledge, a lot of these players are getting in the millions of dollars,” she said. “My concern is protecting them not just in the short run, but the long run.”

“If they can get a million dollars, I recommend they take a million dollars,” Tepper said.

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

McALLEN — Democrats are ready to fight for South Texas.

That is the message Kendall Scudder, the new chair of the Texas Democratic Party, shared last weekend as he visited the Rio Grande Valley for the first time since being elected in March.

Scudder held two town hall events in the region — once considered a Democratic stronghold — on Saturday as part of a series of town halls he plans to host across the state to declare a new day for Texas Democrats.

Speaking to a crowd in the McAllen public library’s auditorium, Scudder, 35, said the party will throw punches, not just take them.

“If we keep moving backward here, we don’t just lose votes, we start losing sitting electeds that are good people that are fighting for their communities down here,” Scudder said during an interview before the event.

“This is a place that we have to be showing up in and fighting back, and we got into this mess because we weren’t,” they said.

Scudder replaced former Democratic Chair Gilberto Hinojosa, a Rio Grande Valley native, who stepped down in November after 12 years that included last year’s devastating election cycle.

All four Valley counties voted for President Donald Trump, including Starr County which hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in more than 100 years.

To begin making inroads, the party must fill vacancies in their ranks, including precinct chair and county chair positions which are 50% and 20% vacant, respectively, Scudder said.

The goal is to have more people on the ground who know what is happening in their communities and who can help the party reach more voters.

He knows Valley voters have felt that the Democratic Party has taken them for granted, but he hopes to rectify that by focusing on economic issues such as increasing the minimum wage and improving working conditions.

“I think this area has felt kind of abandoned by our party for a while and I want to make sure that it is crystal clear to folks that the Valley matters to us,” Scudder said. “The working people down here deserve advocates who will fight to make sure they get fair wages for working conditions.”

The Democrats have been ceding ground in the Valley to Republicans for years.

In 2022, Democrats lost the 15th Congressional District for the first time to Republican Monica De La Cruz after the Texas Legislature redrew the congressional maps, making the seat more favorable to Republicans.

Congressional Republicans recently have come under fire for declining to hold in-person town halls, on advice from the National Republican Congressional Committee. The guidance came after lawmakers faced public backlash during town halls over federal funding cuts mandated by the Trump administration.

Though De La Cruz held a telephone town hall last month, Scudder and leaders of the Hidalgo County Democratic Party criticized her for not taking questions in person.

Organizers of Saturday’s event placed an empty chair on stage with a photo of De La Cruz that said “Where’s Monica?”

“Is Monica here? We have a seat for her,” said Richard Gonzales, chair of the Hidalgo County Democratic Party.

A spokesperson for De La Cruz called Saturday’s event a political stunt and said the congresswoman would be happy to consider invitations to events from nonpartisan, credible organizations which, they said, the Texas Democratic Party is not.

“On most days, it barely qualifies as an organization,” they said.

“Congresswoman De La Cruz loves nothing more than meeting with the people of South Texas—and she does so often,” the spokesperson said. “That’s why she regularly holds office hours in all seven counties and hosts virtual town halls so that working parents, veterans, and the district’s nearly 19,000 disabled residents can attend.”

Michelle Vallejo, De La Cruz’s two-time Democratic opponent, accused her of taking pre-screened questions during the tele-town hall and further argued that De La Cruz does not represent the region’s interests.

Hoping to inject optimism into the Democrats in the audience, Vallejo pointed out that while De La Cruz won the majority of the votes in the district, she was carried to victory by the voters in counties north of the Valley.

“She has not once won in Hidalgo County,” Vallejo said of De La Cruz’s home county which also has the most voters in the district.

When Democrats next take on De La Cruz in 2026, they might have some star power behind them.

Gonzales confirmed that Bobby Pulido, a Latin Grammy Award-winning Tejano artist and Edinburg native, is interested in running for the Democratic nomination. However, Pulido, 51, will not be making an official announcement until the end of his farewell tour at the end of 2025.

Scudder said the party needs to start putting in the work into building relationships within the community, long before election season comes along, to be successful.

“People would love to be able just to come in and buy their way out of a problem,” Scudder said. “That’s not going to happen here.”

However, money is an issue for the party.

During a stop in Brownsville, Scudder said the party is not in great financial shape but is working on raising money to help it get out of that situation.

When they do have the resources, he pledged he would not hire additional staff until they could have a Spanish-language communications department.

“Thirty percent of Texans speak Spanish at home. In House District 15, which is highly viewed as one of the most contentious races in the state of Texas, that number is 67%” he said. “For us to not have a Spanish-language comms department is completely derelict.”

Andres Rios, a 65-year-old accountant from Brownsville, questioned Scudder about the party’s focus on social issues, saying that older voters told him they voted for Trump over Kamala Harris in the presidential election because they believed Democrats were focusing too much on issues like transgender rights.

Scudder said the party should not lead with those issues but emphasized that the party is a coalition of different types of people who all had a seat at the table and they should not run away from their beliefs.

“We believe what we believe, because it’s the right thing to do, and we are not sellouts,” Scudder said. However, he added that the party should not lead with social issues but, instead focus on problems that affect people of every background.

“What every group of people within our coalition has in common is that they all pay bills,” he said. “We want to make sure everybody … is welcome and being treated appropriately.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

DALLAS – Star guard Paige Bueckers has been drafted as the first pick in WNBA draft by the Dallas Wings on Monday after leading the University of Connecticut to its first NCAA championship title in nine years, according to our news partner, KETK.

Bueckers flies her way into the WNBA as a Dallas Wing, hoping to change the tide of a team that finished 9-31 last season. She first put herself in the spotlight back in 2021 when she became the first freshman to win multiple awards for collegiate player of the year.

Despite multiple leg injuries hindering her sophomore and junior season performances, Bueckers still finished her college career averaging 19.8 points per game, shooting 53% in field goals and 43% for three-pointers.

With the WNBA setting an all-time record 54 million unique viewers in 2024 behind popular players such as Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson; it’s fair to wonder if Bueckers will become a new face of the league.

East Texans can catch Bueckers during her WNBA debut when the Dallas Wings play the Minnesota Lynx at home on May 16, 2025. She is expected to join the team for training camp which will begin on April 27.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Rancher Brett Kenzy hopes President Donald Trump’s tariffs will make imported beef expensive enough that Americans will turn to cattle raised at home for all their hamburgers and steaks.

That might raise prices enough to give Kenzy and others the incentive they need to expand their herds for the first time in decades. But doing that would take at least two years, and it’s not clear if Trump’s tariffs on most of the world besides China are high enough to make that worth the investment.

“If we can just fix a few key things, I think that we can reinvigorate rural America,” said the South Dakota rancher. “Just get these imports under control, get them to a level that we can understand and plan on, and then let us fill the void. And I think that the American rancher can do that.”

Trump has enjoyed overwhelming support in rural parts of the country in his three campaigns for president. Still, the uncertainty created by the trade war he instigated has given some ranchers pause as they’ve watched cattle prices drop after the tariffs were announced.

“I just don’t like manipulated markets because somebody is going to artificially win and somebody is going to artificially lose,” said Bryant Kagay, who raises and feeds cattle as well as growing crops on his farm in northwest Missouri. “And how do I know it’s not going to be me?”

Ranchers hope the tariffs might create an incentive for them to raise more cattle, and the National Cattlemen trade group is salivating at the idea of selling more cuts of meat overseas if the tariffs lead to new trade deals with countries that don’t buy much U.S. beef.

That’s a big if — Trump has said dozens of countries have reached out to negotiate new trade deals, but no agreements have been reached.

About the only thing clear so far is that American ranchers will likely lose one of their biggest markets as a result of the 125% tariffs imposed by China in response to Trump. They sold $1.6 billion worth of beef there last year, and since many ranchers also raise crops, they are reeling about the prospect of losing China as a market for those, too.

Most beef exports to China are already on hold because the certificates from that country that meat plants need weren’t renewed at most beef plants in the United States after they expired in March. So the U.S. Meat Export Federation said few American beef plants are even eligible to ship to China right now.

Kenzy hopes Trump’s tariffs represent a lasting change in U.S. trade policy. So far the tariffs have been changing so much since they were announced that ranchers can’t count on them yet.

“If this is just a short-term negotiating tactic — Tarzan beating his chest — then I would say that that would be an epic failure because that will not result in reshoring industry,” Kenzy said.

The problem, as Kenzy and other members of the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America see it, is that the more than 4 billion pounds of beef that’s imported every year — along with cattle brought in from other countries to be slaughtered here — keeps cattle prices lower.

Much of what is imported is lean beef trimmings that meatpackers mix with fattier beef produced here in the United States to produce the varieties of ground beef that domestic consumers want. Even though Trump placed most of his proposed tariffs on hold, the across-the-board 10% tariffs he imposed for 90 days will make imported beef more expensive, so consumers are likely to see the price of hamburger increase.

Even if ranchers decided to raise more cattle to help replace those imports, it would take at least two years to breed and raise them. That means meat processors will likely pay higher prices for that imported beef for at least that long. And the ongoing drought across most of the West will continue to make it difficult to raise more cattle.

Plus, if American ranchers want to produce more of that lean beef they might have to change the way they raise their animals because the entire system in this country is designed to produce fattier meat to get deliciously marbled and tender steaks that help ranchers make the most money. Kansas State University agricultural economist Glynn Tonsor said most of the lean beef America buys comes from Australia and New Zealand where cattle are fed grass — not grain — their entire lives, and that’s an entirely different system.

The number of cattle being raised across the country has been shrinking for decades to reach the current historic lows of around 28 million, but Texas A&M livestock economist David Anderson said even though that’s less than two-thirds of the number of cattle there were in 1975, more beef — some 26.7 billion pounds — was actually produced last year. That’s because the American beef industry has become so good at feeding cattle and breeding larger animals that now every head of cattle produces more meat. Anderson said that means there’s less incentive to expand the herd.

Casey Maher, owner of the Maher Angus Ranch in Morristown, S.D., said he hopes Trump’s tariffs will level the playing field for American beef producers.

“We’re optimistic and we’re going to stay the course,” said Maher, a third-generation rancher. “We’ve gone through tough times, and if it’s for the greater good, I think ranchers are all in.”

Not all of them, though. Kagay, the Missouri farmer, said uncertainty causes problems of its own.

“I’m not real confident about these tariffs,” he said. “Will they stick around? Will they not stick around? Can I count on them? What exactly is going to happen? You know, nobody knows. So it makes it hard for me to plan my business. I just don’t like it.”

That uncertainty could extend well beyond farming and ranching if it creates new fears about the economy as a whole. If consumers buy less beef because they are worried about their grocery budgets, it won’t matter how much beef is imported.

“You’re less likely to pay up for a ribeye steak if you’re worried about losing your job,” Tonsor said.