Division III NIL Heats Up
By Les Morris
March 7th, 2024 - As college basketball teams vote to unionize (there is no truth to the rumor that cheerleaders are now going to spell out “A F L… C I O” not “A C T… I O N”), and federal judges rule that collectives can make specific NIL offers to recruits, it would be easy to miss the uptick in D III schools becoming more aggressive in terms of their NIL posture.
Yet it’s happening.
Last month Carthage College announced a partnership with NIL industry stalwart Opendorse to promote Firebirds athletes’ full access to the company’s suite of education and marketing products including the use of a personalized profile that can be promoted on social media channels.
Marissa Cassidy oversees growing Opendorse’s small school presence, and she said there are now 14 participating D III schools, half of whom have come into the fold within the past year.
“The last several months we’ve seen an increase in energy, support and buy-in especially at this level,” Cassidy said. “There have been many more conversations and interest of late.”
The usual talking points regarding empowering student-athletes were in play in the Carthage press release announcing the tie-up but athletic director Ryan Kane addressed the practical realities in a phone interview.
“It’s very thin in winning recruiting battles,” he said, “but this (the Opendorse collaboration) is one that could break a tie or make us a little more appealing than one of our competitors.”
Indeed, Carthage is the first member of its nine-school conference, the College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin, to take the plunge. Kane said that all 750 student-athletes at Carthage had signed up for an Opendorse account.
Carthage is located on a picturesque campus on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kenosha is the fourth-largest city in Wisconsin and is located roughly in the middle between Chicago and Milwaukee. Those geographic attributes should help the school’s athletes attract NIL interest.
Kane himself intends on being aggressive in promoting NIL opportunities for Carthage’s athletes. He says, “I have interest in getting in front of the Chamber of Commerce and other local businesses and telling them, ‘If you want to penetrate the 18 to 22-year-old marketplace, what better way than to reach their peers on campus?’”
Entire conferences are also coming on board. In January, the 10 schools that make up the Ohio Athletic Conference joined the Opendorse platform. Commissioner Sarah Otey is hoping the conference’s student-athletes realize their value from the Opendorse marketplace and educational opportunities.
“Early on,” she recounted, “we had a lot of circumstances where student-athletes would come to their athletic departments with NIL opportunities, and they were agreeing to it because it was an NIL opportunity and I think they were undervaluing themselves.”
This week the first NIL education session will be held for the conference’s coaches and staff. Otey said she is requiring one coach and one administrator at each member school to be points of contact for the program.
At the end of the day, it’s hard to imagine many D III teams voting to unionize as Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team has done. But everyone has the ability to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness and the smaller institutions are capitalizing on that, which was the whole idea in the first place.
