Phillip Bell III was in tears when he phoned his grandparents’ farm outside Sacramento.
“Come and help me please,” his grandmother, Lorna Barnes, recalled the then-16-year-old sobbing in March 2023.
Two months earlier, his mother had whisked Bell, a nationally ranked wide receiver, off to a new school in Los Angeles, where they were living in a mansion previously occupied by the rapper Soulja Boy and leased with the help of a sportscaster whose son played quarterback.
It was just the first stop on Bell’s odyssey through the youth sports black market. Paying students to play sports is against state interscholastic rules. But in the nation’s football hotbeds, a secret economy in athletically gifted teens has thrived for years—and the recent arrival in most states of legal Name, Image and Likeness compensation for high-school athletes has only made it hotter.
Bell’s mother, who abused drugs, shopped him from school to school, demanding up to $72,000 a year, according to court filings, public records and interviews with relatives and others who knew the family. He also joined a club team that paid thousands of dollars a weekend.