NC State NIL collective Q&A, part one

by: Ethan McDowell07/15/22ethanmmcdowell

College football is changing before our eyes in rapid fashion. Between recent conference realignment news and the constantly-shifting name-image-likeness landscape, the future of NC State athletics looks completely different than it did just a couple of years ago.

But change is not necessarily a bad thing. For Pack of Wolves, NC State’s NIL collective, it’s an overwhelmingly good change for the Wolfpack’s student athletes. The collective has already signed 19 athletes and plans to expand rapidly in the coming years.

During the Pack of Wolves event yesterday at Raleigh’s Drive Shack, The Wolfpacker caught up with collective executive board member Haze Lancaster, who answered a variety of NIL-related questions and shared the organization’s vision for the future of NIL at NC State.

The Wolfpacker’s Q&A with Haze Lancaster

At what point did [you all ] realize that you wanted to form Pack of Wolves and [that] this is the direction you wanted to take NIL at NC State?

Lancaster: “We had a meeting on campus in late February that was put together between athletics, the Wolfpack Club and a group of about 10 or 15 boosters. And by that time, everybody kind of had an idea of what collectives might look like. There were several collectives that had been formed at the time. A couple of different structures, a couple of different types, but I think we left that meeting with saying, ‘Okay, this is, this is the rules that we know of today, and we know that NC State needs to form a collective to be competitive, and that’s something that we need to do.’

“Especially at that time, and probably still today with the rules in North Carolina, the university and the Wolfpack Club can only be so directly involved in the collective. They can’t really be involved in the dollars that are spent. It can’t be state dollars. It’s got to be all private dollars. At the time, it was really kind of put on the group of boosters to go out and build this and put it together. And this space is moving so fast, and so we had to move as quickly as we could.

“It has been a collective effort of a lot of people, a lot of our board, a lot of our student athletes. We obviously have gotten some support from the Wolfpack Club and university. We are using consultants, and we’ve put together a model that we think can be very successful at NC State, which combines student athletes, corporate sponsors, individual sponsors.

“We have kind of all three. We have kind of a fan club, we have the business sponsorship portion and then we also have essentially our stockholders, the founders of the 1887 Club, which are essentially the folks who are providing the equity and the capital for the collective to get started. So it really takes an effort from all of those people coming together, and then you’ve got to build a model of sustainability moving forward because this is not just a one time thing. You’ve got to support the student athletes you have today, and you’ve got to support student athletes that are coming in next year and the year after that, and we have a mission to support all of our student athletes.

“There are some collectives that are football-specific, basketball-specific, we really want this collective to be for every sport at NC State, men, women, and you’ve seen that with the student athletes that we’ve signed up to this point. We have a good representation of men and women and several sports, and we’re going to look to continue that, and we’re going to look to expand upon that. We’ve got football season coming up. A lot of energy, a lot of excitement about football, and so you’re going to see us very active in adding more football players, supporting football, and some more exciting events coming down the road that are similar to what we’ve done so far.”

So when you’re trying to get athletes involved, what’s the process for that? How does an athlete get involved with Pack of Wolves?

Lancaster: “There’s very specific rules about the contact you can have with a current student athlete or a prospective student athlete. All of our contact is with current student athletes, so, once they’re enrolled at NC State, we can begin to have a relationship with them. We can engage with them just like any private business can about, ‘Hey, do you want to join the Pack of Wolves.’ And if you do, there’s certain things that, as an ambassador of Pack of Wolves, you have to do. A lot of what these student athletes are doing is helping us promote the Pack of Wolves, so this event is really just a big promotion event for the Pack of Wolves collective and how it works and how we can support these student athletes.

“A lot of it is reaching out on social media, reaching out directly. The university can provide us, that’s one thing the university can do, is , once a student athlete comes to the school, they can facilitate information back and forth between us and them. They can give us their numbers, so we’re able to get information from the school about, ‘Okay, we want to talk to your student athletes,’ so they can give us information on how to contact them, and we, just like any business, we reach out and say, ‘Hey, we would like you to join the Pack of Wolves. This is what we’d like for you to do. This is what we are prepared to pay you. ‘

“And so that’s kind of how it works, just like any individual business can do the same thing. As long as you’re abiding by those core sets of rules by the NCAA, there’s got to be quid pro quo, right? There’s got to be, you know, if we’re going to pay them to do something, they’ve got to do it, right, there’s got to be legitimate exchange of goods and services.

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“A lot of what all these student athletes are doing tonight is, part of why they’re here is, in a lot of their contracts they have some personal appearance requirements where they have to come to events like this and support the Pack of Wolves. And you’ll see a lot of these student athletes will be sending out tweets and social media posts on Twitter and Instagram. They’ll be doing different business sponsorships with certain businesses, and a lot of that is facilitated through us and them and the contracts that we drafted.”

So far, what has the reception been like from the athletes?

Lancaster: “It’s been great. We want to sign more. We have some athletes who are reaching out to us that want to join, and we just have to be patient and make sure that we continue to align the dollars that we’re generating with the amount of athletes that we can support. We have to maintain some fiscal responsibility with the dollars that we’re bringing in. As we continue to grow the pie bigger, we’ll continue to add more players, more sports. Now that we’re going to have a lot more support and direction from the university and the Wolfpack Club, it’s going to allow us, I think, to be a little more active in adding more student athletes.”

What is that support going to look like?

Lancaster: “All universities have a different way they look at what’s going on in the NIL space. There’s not a lot of rules, it’s very grey space. It’s a very uncomfortable space for the university. They like a lot more black and white, especially with the NCAA. So NC State has been a little bit cautious, but I think now they’ve seen how other schools are doing it, how other coaches are supporting NIL at their school. And so our school has just more recently been a lot more active with support, with how the coaches are allowed to support us.

“So I think you’ll see, in the next few weeks, you’ll see a lot more direct support from coaches and athletics, and tweeting and social media, talking more directly about what we’re doing. You’ve seen, in the SEC and other schools, you’ve seen coaches come out and say ‘Hey, we need $20 million.’ You’re not going to see our coaches do that, but you’re seeing other schools do that, but you’re going to see our coaches be a little more direct about, ‘Hey, this is good for NC State. We need an active NIL platform. We need to help the collective. We need our fans to support our collective.’ And so that’s going to help us grow the collective. You’re going to see a lot more coordination between our coaches and what we’re doing within the rules moving forward.”

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