Hayden Beswetherick & Noah Walker | GNP contributors
Editor’s note: The NCAA’s Division I Council recently changed the NIL rules to allow schools to “increase [their] NIL-related support for student-athletes.” But “prohibitions against pay-for-play and schools compensating student-athletes for use of their NIL remain in place.” [https://tinyurl.com/ypm8jctm]
Hank Hinton was quick to answer a reporter’s question about how the local NIL collective decides which ECU student-athletes to put on contract.
“We are talking to the administration over at East Carolina,” he said. “We’re talking to coaches.”
Hinton is a managing partner at Inner Banks Media, a Greenville-based radio station he started with his father, Henry. He is also a board member of Team Boneyard, the local ECU NIL collective.
ECU’s Athletics department had a quick answer as well when asked if it is OK for Team Boneyard to talk to the university and coaching staff about contracts for players.
“We will speak with Mr. Hank Hinton and ECU Administration,” said Alex Keddie, an associate athletics director who oversees compliance with NCAA rules and regulations.
Later, when asked how the conversation with Hinton and administration went, she said, “We [ECU] have answered all of your requested questions for your school project.”
ECU is a microcosm of college athletics in the new era of student-athletes earning money on their name, image and likeness. Nationally, NIL has been likened to a Wild West where rules are open to interpretation. The Greenville News Project spent the past few months investigating how NIL works locally.
Rising tide of NIL
On June 30, 2021, the National Collegiate Athletic Association issued an interim policy allowing collegiate athletes to receive money in exchange for the use of the athlete’s name, image and likeness.
This interim policy was issued by the NCAA after pressure from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ruled that the NCAA cannot limit educational-related benefits from student athletes. This decision loosened the grip around athletes’ necks.
The NCAA was also under pressure from states. From Sept. 30, 2019, to June 30, 2021, governors in 27 states signed into law the right of collegiate athletes to get paid for the use of their name, image and likeness.
After the interim policy was issued, NIL collectives started to pop up around the nation. They are set up as either corporations or non-profits, and they help facilitate brand deals for student-athletes and their name, image and likeness.
Texas A&M has the 12th Man+ Fund, The University of Oregon has Division Street, and The University of Tennessee has the Spyre Sports Group.
ECU has Team Boneyard, which was set up in the footsteps of the Power Five schools.
Inside the ‘Team’
Navigating the NIL waters is challenging, even for the Pirates of East Carolina University.
The people behind Team Boneyard “are donors of the Pirate Club and know the head coaches personally, so we do talk directly to coaches, but we also have contact with the chief of staff for both programs and a lot of the details are discussed with someone other than head coaches,” Hinton said in an email to clarify his earlier description of how the collective worked.
Asked whether collectives are allowed to have such chats, Keddie referred reporters to the NCAA guidelines.
The guidelines allow “communication between an NIL entity and institution” about NIL deals for currently enrolled student-athletes. But schools are not allowed to “provide direct or indirect financial support or institutional assets” to an NIL collective. And NIL deals based on “pay to play” factors are not allowed.
Team Boneyard is set up under a limited liability corporation, and it works with Parents for Public Schools of Pitt County, which is a non-profit organization aimed at building community around public schools.
Donors who give to the collective directly cannot claim a tax deduction for their charity. Team Boneyard is not a tax-exempt nonprofit. But the parent group is. Donors who want to take a tax deduction can pass their donations through the parents groups.
The collective was set up in the summer of 2022, Hinton originally thought it would only pay only certain student-athletes. But it has Team Boneyard became bigger than that. “We [Team Boneyard] ended up paying 55 to 60 football players last year,” he said.
Team Boneyard pays an employee at Inner Banks Media to cover the administrative tasks for the collective. Hinton added, “We’ve got someone, a student at East Carolina, who’s been doing our social media.”
The two staff members are paid through donations to the collective. Its four board are volunteers, and they do not get paid. The board members have the final say about where the NIL money goes and how much student-athletes are paid.
Lighter work than sports
Student-athletes on contract with Team Boneyard are required to go to elementary and middle schools in Pitt County to talk with the students.
“I hung out with a bunch of 6th graders,” said Jake Garcia, transfer quarterback from the University of Missouri. He said he talked with them for about an hour and did the same with another class.
For that NIL, Garica’s Team Boneyard contract forbids him from going onto the college athletics transfer portal to shop himself around to other schools.
There’s more. Hinton gave GNP a copy of the contract template, and it says that if an athlete, “publicly or privately announces their intention to enter the transfer portal, and/or leaves the ECU football program, this agreement is terminated immediately, and [they] will no longer receive [NIL] payments.”
To that point, the NCAA guidelines say that “an NIL agreement between a SA [student-athlete] and a booster/NIL entity may not be guaranteed or promised contingent on initial or continuing enrollment at a particular institution.”
ECU student-athletes also can earn NIL money from deals outside of Team Boneyard. That is what the university’s baseball players do. They have an NIL deal with Shimmer Boutique in Greenville. The players are compensated for their name on shirts it sells.
“T-shirt opportunities, right, you you've seen some of the Shimmer Boutique great stuff just different shirts that the guys have that are on sale,” said Jeff Palumbo, an ECU associate head coach and recruiting coordinator.
Garcia said that in the past he has had a deal with Fashion Nova, a fashion retailer, and Leaf Trading Cards, a sports card manufacturing company.
View from coaches
The transfer portal is also something that has been brought up in conjunction with NIL. Players can use the portal to leave a lower tiered football program and go to a Power Five school that has more boosters and opportunities for more NIL money.
“We’ve now created a situation where we want to have it in between,” Palumbo said about athletes getting paid as professionals in a new system with a seeming lack of regulations. “We want them to have their cake and they get to eat it too, so [the players] can do whatever they want.”
He added, “I was a bigger fan of the situation where if you decide you want to transfer, you had to had to sit a year.”
Palumbo said he favors changing the transfer portal back to its original state, which required players who transferred schools to sit out a year. It would bring back some continuity that college athletics is currently lacking, he said.
After GNP's interview with Palumbo the NCAA changed the rules, and student-athlete are now eligible to play immediately after a transfer if they were in good standing at the school they just left.
Scott Gasper, director of player personnel for ECU football, also noted that a problem with NIL is that universities are using it as a recruiting tool when that is not what it was designed for.
He said the biggest problem right now is poaching—typically when a larger school will tell a Pirate athlete, “I know what ECU can give you, but I can give you 10,000 bucks.”
Actually, the NCAA’s rules prohibit that. An NIL “shall not engage in any [form of contact] with, or make an offer to or provide any benefits a prospect [or] current student-athlete at another four-year institution” expect when one or more of three conditions are met.
The conditions are that the student-athlete signs a National Letter of Intent with a program, participates in “summer athletics activities or regular squad practice,” or enrolls classes at a school and attends them.
Palumbo suggested that with the NIL, Power Five conference teams that can afford to become professional entities should split off from the rest. That way collegiate sports can return to what it once was.
“I just don't think it’s feasible for division I athletics as a whole to be a professional entity,” he said. “But in my opinion, they need to choose one or the other.”
Beswetherick and Walker produced this story for the course, In-depth Reporting Capstone, at the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
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