Basepath Helping Collectives and Brands Facilitate Millions for Student Athletes

Since the NCAA’s recent NIL guidance—which essentially gave third-party organizations the power to do things universities and athletic departments cannot—there has been significant growth in these third-party organizations and the work they are doing. From collectives to sports marketing agencies, brands and sponsors, these organizations will have a significant part to play in NIL for the foreseeable future.

At the center of this third-party landscape is one company whose goal and intent has been on serving these types of organizations from the outset of NIL: Basepath. Basepath is a software solutions company that provides operations solutions to NIL organizations, initially managing the back-office operations like contract facilitation, task tracking, payment processing, 1099 & W-9 fulfillment. The goal of Basepath operations software is to simplify the complex backend and take the operational burden off organizations to help get more money in the hands of student athletes.

During this journey, Basepath was able to create the industry’s first Collective Consortium, which I cofounded with them. Meeting monthly, the Collective Consortium, which connects over 50 organizations representing D1 institutions, administrators and founders have been able to come together to share best practices, common frustrations, and ideas for the future of NIL.

“We made the choice early on to focus on the operations and on the organizations that are facilitating the transactions that we know to be tedious and complex,” said Thomas Thomas Jr., CEO of Basepath “We’ve done a lot of work managing student-athlete contracts and money out, and it only made sense for us to help these organizations with the money in, as well. We’ve created a brand new membership & subscription management platform that allows our partner organizations to manage their end-to-end value chains within one system.”

The new Membership Management Platform ensures collectives can efficiently and effectively drive funding for their organizations. With this new platform, Basepath works with each organization to create membership experiences for fans and donors, design custom dashboards to track and manage members and subscribers, in addition to facilitating the fulfillment of benefits and obligations for those members.

“Basepath has been everything we could have asked for.” said Marc Spiegal, founder of 502Circle (Louisville). “They are incredibly responsive and really understand that being nimble and not being afraid to evolve really fits the NIL space at the present time. While supporting our growth, their focus on helping student-athletes is a main priority. Platforms need to understand the needs and wants of their users, and Basepath does just this.”

Additionally, Basepath has launched an improved Operations & Campaign Management Platform.

When brands and organizations want to do NIL deals, it can get complex fast—from managing large amounts of athletes, payments, taxes, and everything in between. Basepath’s Operations & Campaign Management software is designed to specifically help manage large amounts of athletes and multi-athlete campaign deals, helping to drive growth for their organizations.

“Basepath has allowed us to connect with product appropriate athletes and communicate with them more efficiently,” said Jason Butts of Ultra Ankle, an Official Sponsor of Team USA Volleyball. “We’ve seen improved task fulfillment and they manage all of the back end for us including personally reaching out to individual athletes and Collectives. I’d recommend them to any brand or organization looking to get more out of your athlete campaigns.”

Over the past months Basepath has been able to partner with a number of exciting organizations leveraging various aspects of their tech. Some of those partners include:

• 502Circle (Louisville Collective)
• Anchor Collective (Vanderbilt Collective)
• Bruin Fan Alliance (UCLA Collective)
• Cal Legends (California Collective)
• Cherry Tennis (Brand/Sponsor)
• Dinkytown Athletes (Minnesota Collective)
• Hard Shell Collective (Maryland Lacrosse Collective)
• Hometown Heroes (Agency)
• KatFund (Sam Houston State Collective)
• Paladin Strategies (Female-Focused NIL Collective)
• Podium Athletes (Agency)
• Prodigy Fitness (Brand/Sponsor)
• Stadium & Main (Michigan Collective)
• Ultra Ankle (Brand/Sponsor)
• We Will Collective (Iowa State Collective)
• Wildcat NIL (Kansas State Collective)

“Basepath has been a true partner for us,” said Derek Burns, co-founder of Dinkytown Athletes (Minnesota). “From membership and subscription management to athlete communications and payments, Basepath has enabled us to grow and expand far more efficiently than we would’ve ever been able to do without them.”

“We were able to onboard our entire football team in 5 minutes with Basepath, said Jason Burns, founder of Anchor Collective (Vanderbilt). “They have enabled us to manage our athletes, members, and donors seamlessly.”

“Basepath is our operations solution for all the collectives that we manage. They take care of everything from payments and task management to contracts and taxes,” said Patrick Werksma, COO of Playbooked. Playbooked and Basepath have partnered together to manage a number of collectives, including Bruin Fan Alliance, Cal Legends, Stadium & Main and more.

“We have been extremely happy with our relationship with Basepath,” said Brent Blum, Executive Director of We Will Collective (Iowa State). “They catered their first-class products to our needs, while also keeping costs very competitive, so we are able to dedicate as many resources as possible to our student athletes.”

Basepath’s partners have taken proactive steps to deliver unique value to their athletes, and as the NIL industry continues to grow and evolve, the bottom line is that Basepath will help collectives, sponsors, and organizations grow.

If you would like to learn more or see a demo, please visit Basepath’s website here.

If you manage or are thinking about starting a collective and would like to be involved in the Collective Consortium, please submit your information here to receive an invitation.