As NIL landscape changes, THE Foundation helping Ohio State with player retention
There’s a growing priority in the relationship between college sports programs and collectives.
From the advent of new rules allowing college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness rights, a primary focus quickly moved to the forefront: in order to recruit top-level talent, schools needed to be able to help those incoming players make money upon their arrivals. That still remains true today, both in recruiting high school players and the transfer portal, but another need has emerged.
It’s not just about landing high-level players. Now it’s about retaining them when the season ends and other schools come calling. After hosting a recent fundraising event for THE Foundation, co-founder and board member Brian Schottenstein said that has made the job of the collectives that support Ohio State’s players more critical than ever.
“It’s gotten really expensive, not only for what incoming players expect to get once they get enrolled and then retaining student-athletes once they perform well,” he said. “To be able to compete, for basketball you probably need to have a couple million dollars a year to be able to have an intact roster. In football it’s probably $7-8 million a year.”
THE Foundation unofficially kicked off basketball season with a Nov. 7 fundraising event held on Lane Avenue across the street from Ohio State’s campus. Coach Chris Holtmann participated in a quick question-and-answer session moderated by Ron Stokes, president of the collective’s board as well as a former team captain, in front of a crowd that paid $500 a ticket to attend. Inside a private club called The Scarlet Room owned by Bill Lewis, general manager of basketball and a board member with the collective, nearly the entire 2023-24 roster and coaching staff mingled with donors, ate a catered meal and posed for photos.
The cost of admission, plus money raised from auctions that included an all-inclusive road game trip with the men’s basketball team (three winners bid $6,000 each) and dinner for four people with Holtmann at his house (two winners bid $5,000 each), raised roughly $100,000 for THE Foundation to distribute to the players.
THE Foundation remains a non-profit organization. All donations are tax-deductible, and players participate in charity work. The 1870 Society is the first for-profit collective partnering with Ohio State student-athletes and has primarily worked with members of the football program.
Schottenstein said the non-profit designation is something that’s important to him.
“I want the teams to be able to stay competitive but I also like the student-athletes giving back to the community through our charities,” he said. “It’s also easier to raise money because any individual who donates to us gets a tax deduction where they wouldn’t get that if we were for-profit. We’re not taking any fees or commissions or anything. I don’t know why anybody would really want to give to a for-profit business because they’re doing it for that reason, to make a profit.”
Ohio State has another non-profit collective, Cohesion Foundation, that has partnered with athletes from more than a dozen different athletic programs while THE Foundation has stuck to working with football and men’s basketball. Between the two sports, he said, roughly $10 million a year is required to meet the needs of the rosters.
For each men’s basketball home game, THE Foundation is running a 50/50 raffle with proceeds going toward the players. There is a monthly sponsorship option where donors receive a different prize with each recurring donation. The collective’s foundation offers a variety of experiences available for certain donation levels.
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“I honestly think we have one of the top NIL programs in the country,” Schottenstein said when asked specifically about basketball. “I don’t feel like we’ve had an issue with any of our student-athletes not being happy with what their compensation has been through NIL. I think that shows. We have guys that are staying here.”
The one outlier is when the NBA becomes a realistic option for a player.
“I don’t think any NIL program can compete with NBA money, but I think we’ve done a good job of retaining players two, three, four years at Ohio State and they’ve been very happy with the NIL program in place here,” he said.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Player retention among top goals for THE Foundation and Ohio State
