Gaining extra yards with Sun Devil Athletics In the fall of 2018, the ASU athletic department set out to expand its Championship Life program to incorporate additional entrepreneurial-focused programs and opportunities around the university and local business community. The Global Sport Institute, already armed with expertise on the educational and professional needs of athletes as well as a network of partners, stepped up to the plate to provide assistance. Previously, Sun Devil Athletics had organized a speaker series for student-athletes, but the missing piece was connecting the students to the necessary resources when it came to innovation and entrepreneurship. The process of integrating the Global Sport Institute with the various athletic programs wasn’t immediate. But once the experience became more personalized for student-athletes, the program began to gain momentum. As name, image and likeness legislation came down the pike and recognizable faces like ASU alumnus Jake Plummer became involved, the uptake became much quicker across SDA. When in-person classes returned in 2021, different athletic programs across ASU reached out to the institute’s associate director of innovation programs, Jeff Kunowski, to set up individual mentoring sessions. This type of one-onone entrepreneurship coaching is the type of alignment not often seen between the athletic and academic sides of a university. For the Sun Devil athletic department, it’s something that will eventually be used in recruiting messages in addition to how it’s used to educate the current student-athletes. Beyond the applied, student component, the latest Sun Devil Athletics partnership called the Global Sport Venture Challenge offers a structured pathway for the athletic department to investigate new products pitched to them, in addition to creating opportunities for student-athletes to uncover outward channels for their products and ideas.
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“The venture piece has always been connected, but we quickly learned that not everyone has the desire to launch a venture while they’re an athlete and still a student,” said Kunowski, who is cross-appointed with the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute. As a result, the relationship between SDA and the Global Sport Institute expanded to include outside ideas that could be used to improve and inform different athletic programs. Venture challenge winners Phlex, Organic Robotics Corporation and Nextiles will be utilized respectively by the ASU football, baseball and triathlon programs in the coming months. At the same time, every program at ASU is staring down the barrel of a new economic landscape in college sports in which athletes are able to earn money from name, image, and likeness agreements. While these interactions must be carefully handled through the SDA compliance group, the resources and track record of the Global Sport Institute, along with a keen understanding of the expansive opportunities that name, image, and likeness legislation could bring, provided a means for continued opportunities for student-athletes to develop a business around their personal brands and ideas. “With the added engagement on NIL conversations, it’s exciting, because more and more now, innovation is something that student-athletes are really seeing as a tangible way for them to leverage their brand,” Kunowski said. With NIL taking center stage in the world of college sports this fall, the Global Sport Institute and J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute have given Sun Devil Athletics a leg up by providing our student-athletes with access to people and partnerships that few universities can offer.
