UConn course empowers student athletes in NIL ventures

One of the University of Connecticut’s most valuable coaching programs for athletes doesn’t have much to do with sports.

Dozens of UConn’s Division I student athletes — including men’s basketball champions Donovan Clingan, Hassan Diarra and Adama Sanogo — have been studying business development under the tutelage of David Noble, director of the Peter J. Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

Noble developed a course around the time, in 2021, that the National Collegiate Athletic Association reversed its rules prohibiting student athletes from earning money from endorsements and other uses of their name, image or likeness . The class is tailored to athletes (but open to anyone) looking to develop their personal brand into a business.

The NCAA’s rule change “provided the urgency” for this type of instruction, Noble said. “It became not just David Noble talking about how important this is. It was Danny Hurley and others, right?”

UConn isn’t the only D1 school that’s added personal branding courses with its athletes in mind. Duke University’s “Building Global Audiences” class is a deep dive into social media marketing . Indiana University offers instruction in “ NIL Media Branding .”

Noble said he thinks of his class at UConn like a laboratory. It’s graded “Pass-Fail” and the coursework varies depending on who is taking the class and what kinds of ventures they want to pursue. Students are able to try things out — and fail, potentially many times over — while maintaining control over their ideas and receiving constructive feedback from their peers.

“This is an experiential sandbox,” Noble said, where “failing is a necessary part of learning what to do and how to do it.” Through that kind of “iterative approach,” he said, “we work with them on the application of different subject matter to their actual businesses, which happens to be the business of them : their name, their image, their likeness.”

The class, offered through UConn’s business school, often works with Werth Institute’s “ Championship Labs ” staff of videographers and producers, who help student entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. Championship Labs hosts a range of creators-in-residence and entrepreneurs — including several alumni — who offer practical lessons in building a brand, investing, creating content and other topics. Instructors help students one-on-one with everything from writing pitch emails to honing their brand and launching their own social media campaigns.

And they use the students’ own experiences as fodder for class discussions. During morning sessions following a big game and post-game television interviews, Clingan would debrief about the experience with classmates.

Representatives for Clingan didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Those kinds of sessions help all students in the class — not just the star athletes — “to be better equipped to be in the spotlight,” said Tara Watrous, the institute’s head of entrepreneurial transformation and an instructor in the class. “They’re still super young, and to a certain degree, it’s the first time they’re thinking about some of these things.”

Watrous said some students — athletes and nonathletes — come into the class with specific ideas they want to launch or build on, from short-form video series to merchandise. Others aren’t quite sure yet.

Sanogo started a fundraising initiative, AdamaNation, to encourage participation in basketball and help cover education costs for children in his home country of Mali. Diarra, known for the headbands he wears on the court, developed a signature line of apparel called “ Headband Hass .”

“It’s really inspiring to see the transformation of even just a year working with us, how much better they become, the confidence that they build, and their ability to articulate what they’re doing,” Watrous said.

Aside from launching his own branded merchandise, Diarra experimented with social media collaboration, partnering with another apparel brand called Find the Good on a series of social videos . Find the Good founder Jack Tarca, a 2022 UConn alum, serves as an entrepreneur-in-residence with the Werth Institute and frequently works with student athletes as they’re building portfolios.

“With Hassan, it was like, ‘We can use our platform to help you share your story,’” Tarca said. It was a way to “help show a little bit more of his personality. He’s a pretty funny guy, he’s pretty interesting, and we want him to have that perception online, on social media just as much as he has it when he’s in the locker room or when he’s on campus.”

Diarra didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

Tarca said before the NIL rules changed, the year before he graduated, opportunities like these just weren’t on most students’ minds.

“There was no incentive for an athlete to start creating, to try and build any sort of personal brand because it was so much farther down the line,” he said. “Now there’s an incentive to start learning these skills, to start practicing, for the athletes to get curious about the whole world of becoming and developing their personal brand.”

Using the platform

It’s not just household-name athletes who’ve put their Championship Labs experience to use in business and charity pursuits.

Rachael Woodruff, a distance runner on UConn’s cross country and track teams, wasn’t particularly interested in social media and hadn’t thought much about NIL deals when she first learned of Championship Labs at a student athlete assembly her junior year. A nutrition and exercise science major, she’d been more focused on traditional lab work.

Woodruff met with the lab’s staff that year and came up with a plan to raise money for her high school food pantry in Saranac, N.Y., by logging 100 training miles. They helped her develop a logo for the fundraiser, “Miles to Meals,” and set up a website. Then Woodruff promoted it on her social channels and she was off and running. Ultimately, Miles to Meals raised $2,500.

“It’s not like I got a brand deal or was making any money off of it, but just to be able to use my platform to be able to give back was a really cool opportunity,” she said.

That led Woodruff to register for Noble’s class in fall of 2023, where she started expanding her portfolio. She made social videos for Find the Good, and signed a $500 NIL deal with education technology company Chegg promoting Student Mental Health Week earlier this year.

Representatives for Chegg didn’t respond to an email requesting comment.

“A lot of the basketball players were in my class and obviously they have much bigger platforms than I do, but just to see what they do with their platforms and how they navigate the NIL space… It was cool to learn through them, and just experiment,” she said.

Stanley Cross, a defensive back on UConn’s football team, said he got a lot out of the class, too — particularly discussions around “how to be able to gain money just from being ourselves.” Cross also inked an NIL deal with Chegg earlier this year to promote Student Mental Health Week, alongside Woodruff.

He said Noble and the guest instructors got him to really consider what his post-football career might look like. “It helps you kind of find yourself,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, every sport comes to an end no matter if you go pro or not. So what can you use to help yourself? We’d have those discussions.”

Cross already earned his bachelor’s in communications at UConn, but he’s returning this fall to complete a second degree in sociology and play another season on the football team. From there, he said, “Lord willing,” he’d like to play professional ball.

“But I have other ideas that I would love to do,” he said. “So we’ll see.”

Woodruff is working this summer as an intern for Hammer & Axe Training, making social videos showcasing the group’s coaching expertise. And this fall, she’s enrolled in a graduate program in sports management at UConn. Both professional pursuits she said she might not have considered if she hadn’t taken the entrepreneurship class.

The partnerships and deals she landed were worth more to her than the dollar figure, Woodruff said.

“There’s not as much value in a brand deal with a cross country athlete versus, like, Paige Bueckers, obviously,” she said. “I just think understanding how you can use social media as a tool and in a job, like my internship … it’s something I have found that I really enjoy doing.”

Fostering agency and support

Students said the Championship Labs initiative and courses helped them understand the value of a personal brand and how to be intentional and take ownership over what they put out into the world. It gives student athletes and influencers agency.

It also provides a supportive professional network.

For athletes — as with entrepreneurs — the work can get lonely, Noble said. With wider recognition comes wider criticism, especially in online platforms. And as one’s name or brand grows it can be difficult not to get bogged down by the negativity.

“At some level, the student making these choices is rejecting the status quo and the standard and the norm and the expectations of others, and they’re pursuing something that they feel is the right pathway for them,” Noble said. But in doing so, “you lose the protection of everybody else.” It’s like the difference between singing in a choir and performing solo, he said.

Entrepreneur-in-residence Tarca said the Werth Institute provides a community and a “positive feedback loop” for young people as they strike out on their own. “Everybody’s doing something a little bit different, but we all kind of come together and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing something different, too,’” he said. “And I think we find kind of a family, a weird-shaped family in all of that.”

Gaining that kind of confidence in school can help athletes or would-be influencers feel more comfortable in television interviews or high-pressure conversations they may have with agents, brands and team owners later on.

Noble said students who’ve taken the class often come back, even if they haven’t re-enrolled. “We have students that aren’t in the courses show up, we have other colleagues that come,” he said. “Because it’s never the same.”

Current and former students, alumni, other athletes and community members want to hear the speakers and learn about the students’ projects, Noble said. Some even volunteer time and money to help students with their ideas.

“I guess that’s the ultimate test of whether you’re getting value out of something, right?” he said. “It’s definitely a unique thing.”