Donate to John Purdue Club or Boilermaker Alliance? Or Both? AD Mike Bobinski discusses

Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski is familiar with the question: Should people donate to the John Purdue Club? Or the Boilermaker Alliance?

It’s a conundrum faced by some alums and friends of Purdue with the spawning of the Boilermaker Alliance in 2022.

“I think we just have to be completely transparent with what our priorities are,” said Bobinski. “Going forward, there will always be new and emerging priorities that we’ll have here in athletics, or across the university. New things will come up as things that are important at this moment in time. That’s what NIL is right now. It is an emergent priority.”

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The Boilermaker Alliance promotes itself as a “nonprofit that uses the name-image-likeness of Purdue University student-athletes to help them make a difference through charitable giving.” The Boilermaker Alliance is operated independently from the university.

“It’s here,” said Bobinski of the world of name, image and likeness. “It is now amongst the things that we would encourage people that want to support our athletic program to consider.

“Our existing priorities haven’t gone anywhere. We still want to fund scholarships. We need to fund annual operations, we need to do capital projects that matter and have an impact on our program. But we also need to be competitive in the NIL space. There will be folks that will resonate with them and they’ll want to maybe not do other things but to really do that because it’s direct support to student-athletes and that means something to some people.”

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The John Purdue Club website says the organization is “responsible for raising the funds necessary to cover the tuition, room and board, books and academic support costs of Purdue’s more than 500 student-athletes.”

“Others will want to continue to do scholarship and/or capital projects and/or JPC annual memberships,” said Bobinski. “Those are all legitimate, personal decisions that people get to make.”

Like it or not, NIL is important to many student-athlete, and prospective student-athletes. That’s why it’s important for schools to have strong organizations that support NIL efforts.

“We want to present the name, image and likeness as an opportunity that at this moment in time matters to us and has an impact on the trajectory of our program going forward,” said Bobinski. “So, we’re not going to ignore it nor look at it as a threat to what we’re doing. It’s in addition to what we’re already doing.”