College NIL. Finally.

As a student athlete myself, I am excited for the NIL rule changes to positively impact student athletes. In 2016 when we were helping hundreds of Olympians get sponsorship deals, I remember thinking how unfair it was that college Olympians were not able to take advantage – this article talks about athletes like Katie Ledecky and Missy Franklin potentially losing out on millions of dollars because they chose to go to college. Every year watching March Madness or the College Playoffs, and the massive fanfare, it would break my heart to think that approximately 1% of NCAA men's basketball players and 2% of NCAA football players are drafted by NBA or NFL teams (link). This tournament could be the prime of these athlete's lives, yet they are not allowed to make any money from it -- imagine not being able to earn a living during the time that you are working hardest and at your most successful!

Thus, when the first articles came out in 2019 about NIL rules changing, I was ready – we had the platform, the know-how, the team, the brands, and the desire to be part of the change.

However, over the past 18 months, we have been talking to various stakeholders and my desire to get in on the NIL space kept diminishing. As an entrepreneur, I’d say I’m pretty logical, action-oriented and (un)fortunately impatient. The NIL conversations seemed to be the opposite of all of this.

-          I didn’t understand why there could not be an open marketplace, of course with guardrails, but free market nontheless.

-          I didn’t understand the talk of one solution - how could they think having one solution to cater to almost half a million students – of different sports, gender, interests, abilities, socio-economic backgrounds, geographies – could work.

-          I didn’t understand why the conversation was only around education e.g. wealth management, taxation, building social media channels, avoiding breaking laws, BUT not around a conversation on how deals were actually going to get done.

Over the many conversations, what became evident to me was that very few of these stakeholders had actually sold sponsorship. As someone who loves, lives and breathes the selling and buying of sponsorship, let me tell you, it’s not that the NIL switch will flick and suddenly the dollars will pour in. We have 8000 athletes on OpenSponsorship, 70% of the NFL + NBA, thousands of Olympians, hundreds of golfers, tennis players and action sport athletes. Getting them deals is hard work. My team works tirelessly everyday to build product, test marketing channels, sell to brands, support account management and show ROI to make this happen. Sponsorship is a full-time job, it’s not a cute add on to an existing platform that does multiple other things – brands need a lot of time and attention. To make these deals happen, you need to be all-in on sponsorship (luckily our name shows we are!).

When INFLCR and ourselves started talking, thanks to the connection via Josh Delander who has been a friend of ours for many years, and Neeta Sreekanth who I instantly liked as a fellow (rare) south-asian female in sports, this partnership finally made sense to me. They were the guys selling to schools, dealing with compliance and all the other services needed, and we could do what we do best which is match brands to the student athletes. I am really excited for this partnership, with good people, who like us want to the best at what they do. Read more about the partnership - here - and reach out if you have ways that we can bring more brand dollars and equity to the very deserved student athletes.