NACDA Convention Webinar – NIL – How Can Technology Make Your Athletics Department More Efficient

Recently at the 2021 NACDA Convention Spry CEO, Lyle Adams, led a conversation with several industry experts on how technology can make Athletic Departments more efficient.  Throughout the engaging conversation, Mark Stanton, University of Richmond Athletics Compliance Coordinator; Scott Williams, Oral Roberts University, Senior Associate Athletic Director and Keith Embray, Penn State University, Assistant AD, Student-Athlete Welfare and Development; fielded questions from Adams and were able to explain how different uses for technology are applied within their Athletic Department.  Spry Product Manager, Grady Gu, was also a part of the panel.  As a tech industry expert, she provided thoughtful responses highlighting key elements of NIL preparation that institutions may not be addressing. Grady also discussed educating stakeholders across all institution departments on the importance of technology, specifically when it comes to NIL and new processes.

We don’t want to give anything away, but below are a few additional topics that were discussed

• We often hear the phrase, work smarter, not harder.  Can you talk about how you believe technology can make this a reality within the NIL space?
• As a compliance staff, one of your primary obligations is to protect the institution and address potential areas of risk.  Do you believe athletic departments are more vulnerable to potential violations and enforcement action if they aren’t employing technology to manage NIL?
• When it comes to technology, it’s often the case that people don’t know what they don’t know.  As a product manager, what are some ways you believe technology can assist athletic departments that they may not be aware of?

The panel was able to answer a few questions that were asked by webinar attendees via the online chat room.  Below are the questions and answers.

Do you have any solutions/software suggestions for disseminating forms to student-athletes?  We have been trying to use Docusign to complete the task, but it appears not to be the best software to use for sending documents to 300 students.

A: For Athletic Departments, sending out the forms is easy, but tracking these forms are hard. They will need a dashboard that integrates with the student-athletes roster with granular filters so they can send out forms just by bulk selecting SAs. From an SA’s perspective, being able to fill out the form on their mobile phone is extremely important. SAs don’t really check emails these days and not many of them of Docusign app installed; having a compliance solution that supports excellent mobile experience and push notification will help drive this process.

What about those of us that don’t have D1 budgets? How do we pay for services like this?

Spry has a VERY flexible pricing structure and can help with that. We have solutions for just about any budget.

You can check out the entire webinar here.