Top 5 Challenges that Athletic Departments are Facing with Name, Image, Likeness Education

The name, image, and likeness landscape (NIL)  has been changing rapidly. One of the topics that school athletic departments care about the most is education. How can a school provide its student-athletes with the most valuable and informative NIL education content so that they can thrive in this new industry? After all, a good NIL education program will benefit the existing student-athletes and build a good school reputation for future recruitment. After talking with multiple stakeholders in the industry, Spry has summarized the below five challenges that most schools face in terms of NIL education and how Spry’s educational platform can help tackle these problems. 

1. Keeping GenZ student-athletes focused is challenging.

GenZ’s attention span is only 8 seconds, making it the shortest among all generations. This means when it comes to education, every second counts. In addition, GenZ also lives in the information explosion era. Managing information has become more difficult than ever. To keep the content digestible and appealing for the student-athletes, Spry is working with leading education partners to provide a wide variety of media content to mimic how student-athletes engage with daily mobile activities. The centralized platform has also made it easier for admins to publish engaging and diverse content by integrating with different video platforms, a friendly mobile presentation experience, and a customizable readings builder. 

2. Student-athletes have busy schedules. 

From strength training to team practice, along with attending classes to finishing homework, student-athletes have intimidating schedules! Providing high-quality NIL education while not adding extra burdens to student-athletes becomes one of the most important objectives when creating this platform. Spry offers both desktop and mobile platforms for student-athletes to take their NIL courses anytime and anywhere. Whether it’s on the way to school or having lunch in the study hall, student-athletes can access the NIL courses on Spry with just one click. Short content and customized modules also make it easier to pause and resume anytime based on their schedules. 

3. Most school admins don’t have the bandwidth to handhold the student-athletes on NIL education.

Many schools’ athletic departments have limited human resources. Staff usually have to manage compliance, career development, volunteering opportunities, administrative work, and even inventory simultaneously, which makes it impossible for them to handhold the student-athletes on NIL education. With modern technology that automates the education process, Spry saves AD staff time and energy by providing automatic quiz grading, educational reports generation, and sending periodic reminders to student-athletes. In other words, Spry is here to ensure the admins are not overwhelmed by the new legislation while giving the student-athletes the best NIL education opportunities. 

4. Institutions have different NIL educational resource needs. 

Some school administrators want to write their NIL content to target their student-athletes, while other schools want to hire external educators such as law school professors, business school graduate students, or even social media influencers on college sports to diversify the content. As a result, Spry not only provides a comprehensive internal educational platform for the school admins to publish content but also has an external educator platform for the admins to hire existing educators on the platform or even invite their own resources to write compelling NIL content for their student-athletes. School admins will be able to screen educators, approve content before publishing, target specific student-athletes and see the content’s performance in real-time on Spry. 

5. It’s challenging to make NIL education practical and adaptive to state laws. 

Many education platforms offer online NIL educational content. They even publish blog posts frequently. However, different states have different educational legislations on NIL. It is difficult to tie the generic educational content with the actual NIL situation at your school in your state. Unlike other platforms, Spry does not only provide a user-friendly platform to publish content but also sets educational requirements automatically by referring to state laws. Additionally, school admins will be able to slice and dice the real-time NIL metrics and target the student-athletes with the most relevant NIL educational content by using the filters on Spry.  For example, if the admins notice that most of the women’s soccer team members are having NIL opportunities on social media, they can send more digital personal branding content to the student-athletes’ accounts to help them gain the most significant possible advantage from the NIL opportunities. 

Spry is committed to creating a helpful tool for school admins to navigate this NIL landscape. If you have any questions or would like to see our product in action, please reach out to us HERE. We look forward to a more in-depth conversation!