Local mid-majors try to survive NIL recruiting landscape
Long Island University head coach Rod Strickland and assistant coach Maurice Hicks know the culture and landscape of New York City basketball as well as anyone.
Both are skilled at Xs and Os, and are adept recruiters—yet the Sharks are 3-14 heading into tonight’s game versus Stonehill College at the Steinberg Wellness Center in Brooklyn, in part due to a seismic shift in the college order of doing business.
Recruiting and securing impact-making players is the lifeblood of winning college programs. The advent of the NIL (name, image and likeness) era of collegiate athletics, in which student-athletes are monetizing their personal brands, make it nearly impossible for smaller colleges and universities to compete with well-resourced institutions for not only the most talented high school athletes, but those in the transfer portal seeking more advantageous opportunities.
It is why the Saint Peter’s men’s team’s run to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight in 2022 was one of the most unlikely stories in the history of college basketball.
NIL collectives—independent organizations that are primarily funded by wealthy alumni of colleges or rich supporters who own businesses that, in many cases, have relationships with respective schools—raise tens, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars that are used to fundamentally pay student-athletes. Over the past two-plus years, after NCAA NIL rules went into effect on July 1, 2021, the system has become one of the, if not the most, essential recruiting enticements of highly sought after athletes.
But it has extended beyond the top-tier talent. Now, virtually every high school and college student-athlete with multiple college offers is seeking to leverage NIL opportunities. Last summer, one Division I college assistant at a low-major college told this writer off the record that many prospects whose ceilings are low-to mid-major schools in conferences such as the Northeast Conference (NEC), of which LIU is a member, and the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), featuring local schools Iona and Manhattan, expect NIL deals.
It is a component and microcosm of American capitalism in which the rich get richer and prosper, while the poor fight feverishly to compete, and—more essentially—to survive.
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