Tennessee Tech Athletics has officially partnered with The Golden Eagle Collective.
The Golden Eagles named their new initiative the official Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) collective for the university’s athletic programs. It aims to empower student-athletes across all sports by facilitating NIL opportunities while strengthening community ties. Tennessee Tech Athletic Director Mark Wilson said this deal provides a new way for all students to benefit from their name, age, and likeness.
“Some of our alumni have recently started a collective and we have partnered with that collective as the official collective of Tennessee Tech Athletics.” Wilson said. “If a business wants to partner with a student-athlete for publicity for their business or alumni just want to support the name, age, and likeness of our student-athletes using that to benefit nonprofits in the community or whatever agreements the collective is putting together. then they can do that.”
Wilson said alumni and friends of Tennessee Tech contributed to making the collective and the ensuing agreement possible. The collective also launched a new website under the Tennessee Tech umbrella.
“Student-athletes have been able to benefit from their name, image, and likeness and Tennessee Tech student-athletes have done that.” Wilson said. “They have been responsible for securing their own agreements, but there have been companies, local companies, regional companies, national companies, that wanted ways to partner as well as some of our alumni wanted some ways to be able to support student-athletes and the use of their name, image, and likeness.”
Wilson said the covnerstaion began in earnest about a year ago.
“In anything, you have to grow. Organizations have to grow, process have to grow, you have to grow to be better,” Wilson said. “And I think we realize the rules that student-athletes could not get anything other than their normal scholarship and I think as the stakes have risen, certainly in the Autonomy Four conferences with the amount of revenue that’s being generated by schools like Tennessee, Ohio State, UCLA, Texas, we’ve looked at all the processes to make sure student-athletes were treated fairly.”
Wilson said he does not see a direct correlation between student-athletes and the new deal being used on the field. He said Judah Akers, a former baseball player at the University of Belmont, is an example of the changes in college athletics in the last several years. Akers could not profit from his success as part of his band Judah and the Lion while he was in college.
“Schools like Tennessee Tech, we needed to clean up just to make it better for our student-athletes to actually help local businesses, help themselves with their [NIL,] and help other community organizations,” Wilson said.
