How Scott Brickman helps Iowa with ‘important piece’ of puzzle as first in-house NIL GM

IOWA CITY — There was “not a chance” that Scott Brickman could have predicted his career would go the way it has gone.

Most of his professional career has been as a baseball coach — spanning from the community college and summer collegiate levels to the Division I level at Northern Iowa and later Iowa.

When Brickman made the move from the dugout to athletics fundraising in 2017, name, image and likeness “wasn’t even on the radar,” he said on The Gazette’s Hawk Off the Press podcast earlier this month.

Now, since last December, NIL is at the heart of what Brickman does as Iowa Athletics’ first in-house NIL general manager via a partnership with Altius Sports Partners.

Brickman’s role gives Iowa “one point person” for the many different facets of the athletic department that are involved to varying extents in NIL, deputy athletics director Matt Henderson told The Gazette.

“Our development team, our multimedia rights and sponsorships, the collective — all of those areas that have NIL,” Henderson told The Gazette. “Trademark and licensing, I forgot about that side of it, too.”

In other words, the general manager role provides “boots on the ground for the athlete, the coaches, the staff, etc.,” Brickman said.

NIL education has been a major part of what Brickman has done as Iowa’s Altius-affiliated general manager, especially with how quickly the rules for NIL have been changing.

The “NIL 101 education” he gave to some teams in February serves as an example of how “you’re constantly spinning your wheels trying to catch up on, again, not monthly, not weekly, but almost a daily news cycle of NIL.”

“Some of that stuff that I presented two to three months ago was already outdated,” Brickman said. “So having to circle back now with that team at the appropriate time and updated them and, ‘Oh, by the way, what I shared with you three or four months ago, isn’t even valid anymore.’”

He also will sometimes have “drop-ins” from coaches who have questions about NIL.

“Coach comes in, they heard something on the road recruiting,” Brickman said. “This school, or this men’s basketball department has X amount or they’re offering this. We talk about roster management. We might talk about what can a budget look like going forward for NIL.”

Just like how NIL is changing constantly, Brickman’s “priorities within Iowa for my position have changed in four or five months” since he took the Altius job.

“It’s turned into more of a (revenue) generation position where we’re working with Learfield, working with Hawkeye Sports Properties,” Brickman said. “They get the corporate sponsors. ... Let’s see if we can have two different partnerships — one for the corporate sponsor and then also have one for the NIL. So those are the things that I think we’ve really just started to work into.”

As the job evolves, the same attributes that helped Brickman excel as a coach, administrator and collective employee now are helping him as Iowa’s first NIL general manager.

“He’s able to take a situation and really quickly listen and learn about what’s going on in that situation and then come out of that with some potential solutions,” Henderson said.

‘Important piece of the puzzle’

Altius Sports Partners works with several athletic departments across the country, including fellow Big Ten institutions Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Northwestern, Rutgers, USC and Wisconsin.

But few schools have made the commitment that Iowa has made to create a full-time general manager position. Brickman is one of 18 Altius general managers across the country.

“We were looking at our needs on the NIL for our department, for our student-athletes and coaches and came to the conclusion that having an individual whose sole focus was on NIL was an important piece of our puzzle,” Henderson said.

As Iowa sought applicants for the general manager position, Brickman “rose to the top,” Henderson said.

Getting into the NIL industry

Brickman’s first foray into the NIL space came with Iowa’s Swarm Collective as its chief operating officer. He was one of two paid employees when the collective launched in the summer of 2022 along with (unpaid) founder and CEO Brad Heinrichs.

“Starting the NIL program as I did from afar in Florida, being a former student-athlete and never really having done any fundraising for anything, I needed somebody with fundraising experience,” Heinrichs said. “And preferably somebody who knows the Iowa fan base really well.”

As Heinrichs searched for someone to be his chief operating officer, it “became clear that Scott would be a really good fit.”

“I came up to Iowa City and met with Scott and immediately realized that he had some kind of enthusiasm for this and was a bit of a risk-taker, at least to some level,” Heinrichs said. “So he decided to make the plunge.”

That plunge entailed leaving something stable — athletics fundraising, which has existed and will surely continue to exist for a long time — for something with an uncertain future.

“There was certainly some risk to that because you’re going into a startup,” Brickman said. “Startups are never risk-averse. … I love challenges and trying to put everything together to make it work at the most efficient level you possibly can.”

Brickman was “ready for a new challenge,” and this opportunity “was certainly it.”

“It certainly wasn’t as simple as I think Brad, Jayne (Oswald) and I thought it was going to be,” Brickman said.

When the Altius position was created more than a year into Brickman’s tenure with Swarm, Heinrichs said he left “on good terms” and without any hostility or animosity.

“It was more about him realizing at the time that ultimately the NIL function is going to be inside of Iowa Athletics and not outside of Iowa Athletics,” Heinrichs said. “That position became available, and he wanted to be a part of it long term.”

As Heinrichs alluded to, the future of NIL collectives is unclear. Collectives have been the primary vehicle for player compensation under the current set of rules, but the House vs. NCAA settlement will pave the way for schools to directly pay players.

Brickman knows, however, one cannot “get too far ahead of yourself” amid the constantly-changing world of NIL.

“I wake up every day knowing I need to expect the unexpected because that’s just the reality of college athletics right now,” Brickman said.

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

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