NAIA athletes had head start on NIL, but few took advantage

Tucker La Belle was sitting in Clarke University’s athletics offices in Dubuque last October, joking with a friend about becoming the first collegiate athlete to profit off their name, image and likeness.

Then his phone rang. True Temper Sports was on the other end.

“I was completely awe-struck. My jaw dropped,” said La Belle, a lacrosse athlete at Clarke. “I’m pointing at the phone. I’m waving at it. My buddy’s like, ‘What’s going on over there?’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, it worked.’”

“It” was an NIL deal.

While NCAA athletes had to wait another nine months to pursue deals to profit off NIL, athletes like La Belle at the NAIA level had a head start.

The NAIA, which has more than 200 member schools and operates separately from the larger and more recognizable NCAA, has allowed athletes to chase NIL opportunities since October, with some athletes quicker to take advantage than others.

“We got to be pioneers in the name, image and likeness movement,” La Belle said.

Jim Carr, NAIA president and chief executive officer, said the league began to realize the previous NIL restrictions were “somewhat archaic” about five or six years ago.

“There just continued to be something that didn’t feel right about restricting student-athletes and the kinds of things they could do,” Carr said.

He said the limit on what athletes could do compared to their classmates was particularly a driving factor.

“A trumpet player that plays in whatever band or entity they might have on campus can go out on weekends and give trumpet lessons and they don’t have to report it,” Carr said. “They don’t have to worry about any of those kinds of things.”

Initially, the NAIA relaxed other rules surrounding benefits for athletes, Carr said. That included axing one rule that didn’t allow host families to bake cookies for a team.

Then NIL laws in states like California added urgency to legalizing NIL, which Carr considered as “kind of our last restriction on athletes” surrounding outside benefits.

The NAIA legalized athletes’ NIL rights on Oct. 6, 2020, preempting the NCAA by almost nine months.

That timing wasn’t necessarily focused on swooning NCAA Division I athletes, though.

Carr said athletes making $10,000 off autographs is “just not a reality” at the NAIA level.

“Most of our students aren’t getting full scholarships to begin with,” Carr said. “It’s pretty clear that schools aren’t in this arms race already because they’re not all rushing to not only give a full scholarship, but now add cost of attendance like the NCAA is doing.”

But the head start gave La Belle an edge.

“It was great that it happened early,” La Belle said. “We’re on the edge of something that’s going to grow a lot bigger.”

He said the lack of major men’s lacrosse programs in the area elevates his platform, too.

None of the four NCAA Division I programs in Iowa have a men’s lacrosse program, and there is only one Division I program in any of the six surrounding states.

He receives payment through free lacrosse gear.

“If I break a shaft or I break a stick, they send it the next day, and I have another one for the next game,” La Belle said. “The amount of gear I’ve gotten for free is insane.”

La Belle has gotten more gear from his partnership with True Temper than his friends playing at Division I Ohio State have gotten at a Nike school.

“I jokingly send them videos of when I get stuff and they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” La Belle said.

Chloe Mitchell, a volleyball player at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich., built a following on TikTok during her senior year of high school posting videos about her she-shed.

Then a couple months after La Belle landed his lacrosse ambassador gig, she leveraged her social media following to create Playbooked, a company dedicated to “connecting college athletes to fans and brands,” according to the company website.

Athletes at other NAIA schools have not been as quick to pursue NIL opportunities, though.

Curt Long, Clarke’s athletics director, only had two other athletes request information about NIL.

“I don’t think that we’re going to have the huge demand that the (Division I schools) have,” Long said.

He spoke at the NAIA convention about NIL, but he didn’t “have a lot to talk about because there’s not a whole lot there yet” aside from La Belle’s experiences.

Graceland University in Lamoni has only had one athlete ink an NIL deal, athletics director Brody McKillip told The Gazette. The men’s basketball player has a contract to promote a bottled water company in Florida, where he grew up.

“It’s still relatively new to us,” McKillip said. “As we get further along, I’m sure we’ll have a few more athletes have the opportunity to use their name, image and likeness, which is a good thing.”

Paul Gavin, the athletics director at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, said some incoming recruits have asked about NIL, but he hasn’t seen any athletes do what La Belle has done.

“I haven’t had one athlete come to me with anything concrete,” Gavin said.

Gavin asked the athlete leadership group on campus to discuss NIL at its first meeting of the 2021-22 academic year so he can learn “what they want to learn and what they hope to gain out of it.”

Gavin was initially skeptical of NIL but now “100 percent” supports it.

“For somebody who’s been in athletics my entire life and believes in the true spirit of amateurism, it’s really new territory,” Gavin said. “But it’s here to stay, and we’re going to wrap our arms around it and try to make the best of it.”

The lack of full scholarships means “most of them will have to work other jobs to help foot the bill to get through education,” Gavin said. Now NIL is becoming another avenue to make money.

Long is asking any athlete who signs an NIL deal to give him a copy of the contract as a precaution to avoid any bad “surprises.”

“Once a contract is agreed to, you need to read the fine lines because that business or that sponsor can use that likeness as much as that contract allows,” Long said.

Each school still can implement any NIL rules for its athletes, Carr said.

The elimination of leaguewide NIL restrictions, though, could reduce accidental NAIA rule violations from athletes pursuing off-the-field opportunities.

“If we’re honest about it, some (athletes) were already doing that and our schools didn’t know about it,” Carr said.

About nine months into the NAIA’s NIL era, La Belle received another exciting call. He will partner with Rowdy Energy, which is “changing the idea of energy drinks from polluted, bang-energy kind of stuff to green-tea based.”

“I did the same thing (reaching out to the company), and now I’m starting on with them,” La Belle said. “So I’ll have a deal with a beverage company as well as the gear company.”

Had someone told him either of those calls would happen when he moved from Ohio to Dubuque to attend Clarke, “I would have probably laughed and thought that’s crazy.”

“But I would have followed it up with, ‘I really hope that could happen one day,’” La Belle said.

Comments: (319) 398-8394; john.steppe@thegazette.com