How Kentucky basketball positioned itself to be a leader in the new world of NIL

Just 34 minutes after the clock struck midnight on July 1 — ushering the college sports world into a new and unpredictable era — one of the University of Kentucky’s most beloved athletes tweeted out a message to his tens of thousands of followers.

“Excited to team up with @theplayerstrunk to come out with my own custom merch. Stay tuned throughout the year for more!!!”

The tweet came from Dontaie Allen — a fan favorite on the UK men’s basketball team — and it featured a graphic with shirts bearing the likeness of the Wildcats guard, decked out in a blue uniform, wearing his familiar No. 11, with his name emblazoned across the front.

Allen, who posted the same message on his Instagram account, directed his social media following to a link to a specialized page on the online apparel company The Players Trunk’s website. There, fans could buy a T-shirt for $29.99, a sweatshirt for $59.99.

After years of debate, anticipation and hand wringing, the name, image and likeness era in college athletics had arrived.

Allen’s deal with The Players Trunk was the first announced by a UK men’s basketball player, and among the first revealed by any player nationwide.

“They hit me up and talked to me about some things — about how they wanted to get my shirts out there, get my merch out there,” he told the Herald-Leader. “I thought the deal was good, and I wanted my fans and the people who support me to be able to wear some things of me.

“I felt like the deal made sense. And I went from there.”

In the past, of course, this sort of dealmaking between athletes and business entities would have been against the NCAA’s amateurism rules. Such financial agreements would have rendered Allen ineligible to play college basketball.

The reforms to those NCAA rules this summer — following years of public pressure and, finally, state legislation and the threat of federal intervention — made it possible for players to profit off their name, image and likeness and retain their eligibility to compete in college sports.

For Allen, the T-shirt deal came together relatively quickly.

The seeds of the idea were planted well ahead of time.

Preparing Kentucky basketball

On June 10, exactly three weeks before the NIL era was unleashed on college sports, the UK men’s basketball team was nearing the end of a statewide tour of youth basketball camps that had the Wildcats criss-crossing the commonwealth.

The trips — this was the eighth in 10 days — had surely grown monotonous, but this one was a little bit different. Instead of a bus ride, the players boarded a train that took them from Lexington to Simpsonville, catching a bus there that took them to that day’s camp at North Oldham High School.

On the roundtrip train ride, there were team-bonding opportunities — a big focus this summer on a squad with yet another large group of newcomers — and there was also a presentation.

That presentation, led by the team’s sports information director, Eric Lindsey, focused on how UK’s players could build their brands through social media. It outlined the opportunities they could have as Kentucky basketball players, and it included ways the staff could help them reach their goals.

This talk wasn’t exactly new — Lindsey said it’s been given to the team for the past several years — but, with the NIL era fast approaching, this iteration was certainly different.

“From a 30,000-foot view of what we talked about — it’s how to be prepared for the moment,” he said. “How to brand yourself. How to do social media right. And the opportunity that they have at Kentucky — where, in our opinion, there’s no bigger stage, there’s no broader spotlight. We just talked about to them — first of all, how we can help them.”

The presentation, which also included input from UK’s Deb Moore and TJ Beisner, clearly resonated. The players were locked in, and — once the team officials were done talking — there were further questions from several Cats.

After the talk, Lindsey said he went to the front of the train, sat down for lunch, and checked his phone. There, he saw that some of the Kentucky players had already started creating new social media accounts and publicizing existing ones.

Allen was one of them, taking to Twitter to point followers to his Instagram account while also creating a Facebook fan page.

“It was literally right after the meeting,” he acknowledged.

One of his takeaways from that presentation was, basically, to show Kentucky fans his true self. Many UK fans had already closely followed Allen’s career — from in-state star at Pendleton County High School to Kentucky Mr. Basketball to a key part of the Wildcats’ team this past season — but that was all on-the-court stuff.

“If you have certain interests — if you’re into fashion, if you’re into gaming, into watching movies, just different stuff, off-the-court wise — they said you should definitely market yourself for that,” Allen said. “And it would be good for you to show BBN that, show all your fans that.”

Allen, who is going into his third year as a Kentucky Wildcat, confirmed that the team had sat through similar talks in years past. But, again, this one hit different. This time around, the abstract of simply building a social media following had turned into the tangible financial gain that could result from such an endeavor.

The building blocks for UK’s basketball players to profit off NIL had already been laid. Now, the time had come to, possibly, cash in.

“Even before NIL was thought of, we’ve been having these talks about marketing ourselves and putting good stuff out there,” Allen said. “So even that alone — I feel like that prepares you in itself. Just not putting bad things out there. Putting good stuff about yourself. Putting true things about yourself. That definitely prepared us.”

The INFLCR app

A key component for Kentucky players to navigate this new NIL world came about before any of them set foot on UK’s campus.

In late 2016 — seeing the changing landscape within college sports — entrepreneur Jim Cavale began toying with an approach to break into the business side of that world that would center on empowering student-athletes to build a bigger brand for themselves.

At the time, Cavale saw that most of the guidance surrounding college players and social media was negative. There were a lot of don’ts — cautionary tales of what not to do on Twitter and Facebook, warnings that putting yourself out there too much could lead to bad things for student-athletes.

Cavale wanted to focus on the dos, not the don’ts.

He had been watching developments like the O’Bannon case — the antitrust class action lawsuit filed against the NCAA — and figured changes to NIL rules were a matter of when, not if. And, in the meantime, Cavale saw a swiftly growing social media landscape with intriguing possibilities but little positive guidance or reinforcement.

“Student-athletes were going to have more and more empowerment,” he said. “But they didn’t know what to do with it.”

Cavale started meeting with contacts in the college sports community. One of those was DeWayne Peevy, who, like Cavale, had once played baseball at the University of Montevallo.

Peevy — now the athletics director at DePaul — was a top official in the UK athletics department who worked closely with the men’s basketball team and had been a confidante of John Calipari since the UK coach arrived in Lexington in 2009.

After a series of meetings, the UK men’s basketball team became the first college entity to sign a contract with Cavale. At the time, he didn’t have a product, just a prototype. After UK signed, he hired his first two engineers, and they got to work. The business venture turned into INFLCR (pronounced “influencer”) and it ultimately launched in 2017 with four clients: UK basketball, and the football programs at Auburn, UAB and Troy University.

INFLCR is now a leading company in the college sports business space, with more than 1,100 clients across the athletics landscape.

Cavale, recalling the first time Calipari introduced him to the UK basketball team, said the coach told his players that each one of them had come to Kentucky to train like a pro, practice like a pro, play like a pro, be responsible off the court like a pro.

“Now, we want to build our brand like a pro,” Calipari said at the time.

“And in 2017 — for a high-profile coach to say that — was unique,” Cavale told the Herald-Leader. “And that’s why we started slow. Not everybody was championing that message. We needed some flagship teams to really champion that message with us, and use our product and teach us what else we needed to build so we could build the very best technology to help kids build their brand like a pro. And he got it from day one.”

In those first few years, the INFLCR setup worked as a communication conduit between Kentucky’s players, their fans and the program itself. Through the company’s app, UK officials could upload photos, videos and additional content from games, practices and other team activities, and each individual player would have immediate access to that content, which could be used in their own social media posts.

It also allowed crossover exposure for team social media accounts and those of the individual players. Cavale used the example of a TV network and its local affiliates to explain the relationship between the UK program — “a national channel” — and its players.

“The reality is, all of their student-athletes — or even their alums — are like affiliate channels,” he said. “And so, while Kentucky men’s basketball is like NBC, their point guard is NBC Detroit. And their shooting guard is NBC Atlanta. And their center is NBC L.A. So it’s the same type of model. So the opportunity to tap into the followings that those student-athletes — and pro athletes, once they go pro and they’re now alums — that they have garnered over the years; to tap into those followings, that’s huge for Kentucky.”

And, obviously, adding the Kentucky basketball brand to their own personal following is huge for these young players, from a marketing standpoint.

Putting the team and the players under the umbrella of one app also allowed UK’s program to monitor everyone’s social media output in one place, an advantage when working toward a positive and unified public message.

In addition to giving players access to quality content to share with their fans, Cavale wanted to show college athletes just how powerful their social media presence and message could be. The players, of course, could see their follower counts, but they also needed to understand how valuable that following could become.

They were given metrics on what types of posts did well, an understanding on how sharing and giving fans a look at unique aspects of a player’s life — on and off the court — could lead to larger followings and empower players to become their own “media channels,” as Cavale put it.

“Which, no matter what you do after college sports is over, it will help you set the stage for what’s next,” he said.

Breaking into the NIL era

The INFLCR app and its capabilities evolved over time, and July 1 brought its biggest transformation.

In the past year, there’s been an increased effort to educate players on the regulatory side of name, image and likeness, giving them an understanding of what is and what isn’t allowed under the NIL reforms.

An important added feature of the app allows players to enter into what is basically a digital marketplace with businesses that are looking for college athletes to endorse their product.

One partner in that space is Icon Source, an outfit that essentially plays matchmaker for those players and their prospective business partners.

The company was already well-established as an endorsement outlet for professional athletes, with more than 2,000 players and 250 agents from the pro realm on its platform.

Drew Butler, a former All-America punter at Georgia who spent five years in the NFL, had been closely following the NIL debate over the past couple of years, and he saw the opportunity for college athletes to use Icon Source’s platform in a similar way, After bringing him on as a consultant late last year, the company put him in charge of its college division.

Butler had studied the NIL proposals and realized that universities and athletics departments would be able to do quite a bit to help their players navigate the upcoming changes. They could educate them on the rules, advise them from a marketing standpoint, walk them through the compliance process to make sure they didn’t run afoul of any NCAA or university-specific restrictions. They could even partner with companies like INFLCR to get those players quality content to build their personal brands.

They could do just about everything.

“Except help them get paid,” Butler said. “And that’s the hardest part.”

And that’s where Icon Source comes in.

Butler likened the way the company works to the house-hunting site Zillow.com or the dating site Match.com. With Icon Source, athletes and brand representatives can both create free profiles with information about themselves and what kind of endorsement partner they’re looking to connect with.

From there, athletes and brands can both search the database of possibilities for a match.

If a company wants to partner with a specific athlete, an athlete from a specific area or sport, or an athlete with specific likes and interests, all of that is searchable within the database.

Once a deal gets made, Icon Source handles all of the behind-the-scenes work and takes a 10 percent cut. They have safeguards in place to make sure payment is received by an athlete, and that the brand they’re dealing with won’t jeopardize their NCAA eligibility in any way. The information from each deal also goes straight to the compliance department at the player’s school for a final OK.

In the spring, Icon Source will provide each athlete a 1099 tax form with information from every one of their business agreements over the course of the year. The goal, Butler says, is to make things as easy as possible for the student-athlete.

He also stressed the importance of athletic departments educating their players on the process.

“This is a huge learning curve. It’s the biggest shift in collegiate athletics in over 100 years,” Butler said. “I think it is extremely important that the universities expend all necessary resources to educate these student-athletes. I think it’s up to them to tell these student-athletes how to go about this. The rights and wrongs. The rules and regulations. The dos and don’ts.”

Looking ahead

The UK men’s basketball program was on the ground floor of one major aspect of NIL reform — years before it actually happened — but no one has all the answers in this evolving and uncertain landscape.

Lindsey said UK has had an NIL working group — led by executive associate AD Rachel Baker, who has a long record in compliance — and there have been ongoing conversations and planning, especially in regard to educating players on the process.

“We’re still figuring it out. And it’s going to be a process,” Lindsey said. “But I think everybody in the country is dealing with that.”

Some simply began that process from a more enviable position.

With so many NBA players going through Calipari’s program over the past decade, UK men’s basketball had already adopted many of the extras that other schools are now scrambling to put in place. There have been regular presentations from financial advisers, talks on how to manage careers from a business perspective, meetings with people like Cavale to help players think about building their brands.

In the past, a lot of that knowledge was for future use, when those Wildcats, they all hoped, made it to the NBA. Now, the possibilities of the future have turned into opportunities in the present.

“This is all new stuff for them. And it’s maybe a little scary for them at first — as 18- and 19-year-old kids,” Lindsey said. “But if this is the landscape that they want to enter into — if they want to take advantage of this opportunity — there is some responsibility on their part. They’re going to have to think like businessmen a little bit.”

Clearly, it didn’t take long for some of them to start.

Allen, who filed two trademarks July 1 — “A11en” and “Dontaie Allen” — with the intent to market sports apparel and his own basketball camps, cheerfully said that the T-shirt sales were going well, adding that he hoped to see some being worn by fans in Rupp Arena this coming season. Several of his teammates have also put together early NIL opportunities for themselves.

Cavale thought back to that first meeting with Calipari and his UK team at the time, four years ago, when many coaches and administrators still didn’t want to embrace social media and even more looked at brand-building as an unnecessary endeavor. He said he didn’t know if his idea would have gotten off the ground if Calipari didn’t buy into it in the early going.

“And now brand-building and social media for student-athletes is a line item in every school’s budget. And that’s the importance of this. The schools that are ahead — whether it’s their head coach or their athletic director — have a top-down understanding of all of this. The schools that are behind are the ones that are just now realizing that, ‘Oh my God, we don’t have this.’ “They’re in that situation because, top down, there’s not involvement. There’s been committees put together and other people it’s been delegated to, but the leaders of those programs don’t understand this. And the leaders of these programs have to understand this, for them to win.”

Note: This is the first in a series of stories related to name, image and likeness reforms and the effect on the Kentucky men’s basketball program. The second part of the series will focus on NIL and UK recruiting.