Penn State Athletics: Q&A with Success with Honor Executive Director Kerry Small

For better or worse, Name, Image and Likeness —effectively the ability for student-athletes to earn money without risking their eligibility — became a transformative aspect of college athletics the moment it was law of the land. For every school, especially large ones like Penn State, the challenge has become learning and developing best practices to help their student-athletes, and prospective student-athletes succeed.

While Penn State boasts a handful of affiliated NIL collectives — although they have no official ties to the university — Success With Honor is perhaps the most centralized of them all.

While the inner workings of NIL collectives are not a topic of daily discussion, as Penn State men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry left Penn State (reportedly in no small part because Penn State’s NIL efforts in basketball were making the program nearly uncompetitive in that space among its peers), it was a striking reminder that Penn State has some distance left to go in the NIL space.

StateCollege.com spoke with newly minted Success With Honor (SWH) Executive Director Kerry Small earlier this week to discuss a handful of things about NIL and where Penn State stands in its efforts moving forward.

StateCollege.com: Micah Shrewsberry leaving is the result of a lot of things, some of them controllable and some of them not. How much was that a wakeup call?

Kerry Small: Coach Shrewsberry’s comments in December [Shrewsberry reportedly told donors and Penn State representatives during a phone call in December that the program was woefully behind its Big Ten counterparts in NIL] were a catalyst for Success With Honor to renew its focus on fundraising and meet Coach Shrewsberry’s request. We reorganized Success With Honor around having Penn Staters running the collective. By approaching NIL in a way that resonates with the Penn State fan base, the main goal then becomes getting the word out and telling the stories that matter and explaining how to support the student-athletes.

There are competitive reason why it makes sense not to be completely transparent with all of the numbers, but NIL ventures to the regular fan might feel like a GoFundMe where the money is supportive of a cause in a sort of nebulous way. I’m sure if you’ve got big money donors behind closed doors there’s a lot more detail, but how do you think you can bridge the gap between what SWH does and maybe regular fans who want to contribute but don’t have a real good sense of what happens after they give money?

Part of our strategy moving forward is that we are engaging with the folks at every level. That’s not only the big donors, not just businesses, but the people who are on the message boards, the people that are on social media, the people that are our subscribers. We’re trying to make sure that they understand what it is that they’re supporting…

On the business side, we’re going to reach out to all types of businesses small and large. When we connect with the typical fan, that $50 a month person, those people are critical for our success, not just because their money comes in, and the way we explain how it’s spent. We’re giving that back through social media, we’re giving that back through newsletters, and we’re sharing it in media interviews like this, where we talk about events like the Lehigh Valley Network Sports Medicine and Performance where we have 15 football players go, they interact with 125 kids from the Allentown area who worked for the weekend, for a day, excuse me. And what happened is, after the clinic, they went and did a tour of campus. These kids were exposed to Penn State, they were exposed to these college athletes in a way that wouldn’t have happened had we not had NIL and it’s impactful for the kids. Maybe some of these kids are going to want to come to Penn State. Maybe they’ll want to be playing football for Penn State. It’s also great for the athletes, because many of them were moved. I talked to them before and after. And it was a great experience all around that we need to be able to not only replicate, but then tell that story back so the donors see that that’s where their money goes in supporting these athletes that are impacting the community in a positive way and helping themselves. And it could be a camp but it could also be a State College Food Bank, it could be a shelter, all these sorts of charities that are now able to be supported by their dollars that go into the 501c3. It isn’t as direct, as you know, the business side where you see how the athlete is representing your brand. But as we tell these stories again and again, they’re the reason that can happen. And they’re the reason how we get the word out, you know, between the media and social media. It’s all for the person who supports the program and believes in it. So we have to give them those stories that they can they can embrace.

Penn State has always taken the stance — publicly — that it isn’t going to go into bidding wars over players. The NIL collectives seem to be on the same page with that. What is the argument against SWH being part of that landscape? 

NIL is part of the landscape, but I have yet to meet a coach who wants it or believes it should be the primary part. The bigger focus is the culture that exists within the team, the coaches relationship with the players, the fans, the alumni network — those are all arguably much more important. They’ve been around a long time. NIL is part of the landscape … we don’t need to get in bidding wars. If you’re going after players whose primary motive is to get the most money that often doesn’t work out … so our focus is in supporting the athletes … We believe that being a Penn Stater is a transformational experience, not a transactional. The coaches echo that sentiment, so NIL is important, but it shouldn’t be the most important attribute. The coaches believe they can still build winning teams by focusing on those other intangibles in conjunction with being supported by NIL.

Penn State has always faced the issue of “every dollar you spend on sport X is a dollar you don’t spend on football.” For better or worse that’s just the nature of how the business is run. How do you strike a balance there because it stands to reason that, let’s say Akron decides that its men’s soccer program is worth NIL efforts, and Penn State starts, over time, to lose players to Akron either in the portal or in recruiting. There’s not an endless amount of money to spend, but it does seem like if you only focus on the top moneymakers by the time you get back around to the rest you run the risk of having have lost some depth of quality.

I think there’s some misunderstanding out there. Football and basketball are priorities in that order. We allow for supporting all 31 sports but most of our efforts are in service of those two, for the very reason you just stated. The example I’ll give is, if you had someone who graduated from Penn State, or who was a big fan of fencing, their ability to support the sport they’re passionate about is simply all we’re enabling to happen. We created on our website a way for you to support whatever sport of your choosing, and you can do that automatically and the money stays in that sport.

Our marketing and our efforts are primarily around football and basketball, because those are the areas where the resources are most needed for these athletes. And so the ability to get the fencing dollar and support fencing is less money that has to come from football. We’re not taking anything away because people support where they want to support. We actively encourage football and basketball. There are alumni and fans of other sports who aren’t interested in that necessarily, but they are interested in supporting another sport so the ability to have these 31 collectives with separate pathways doesn’t diminish the commitment to football. The bigger issue that we have is that we haven’t educated our fan base. If we get to the point where we’ve explained this to everyone, we’ll have more money than we need, but one of the biggest challenges is we haven’t educated people. And that’s why having discussions and putting it out there … and then every time we do something, whether it’s through the 501c3 or the business, we have to highlight that to our fans, so they can see how they can get involved.

The reality is NIL is not going away in the next six months. And so what we have to do is we have to educate our massive fan base. You know, one of the strengths of being of being a Penn Stater is we have such a large and well connected alumni, but NIL is so misunderstood.

Even if it makes sense to keep a lot of NIL figures private, there is the inherent imbalance in the information flow because if a coach or player says “Penn State’s NIL efforts aren’t good.” everyone sort of has to take them at their word. Are there any efforts now or in the future to give people even a broad sense of how it’s going with some degree of transparency? Is that even possible?

There’s a few challenges with that. Number one is the coaches don’t want those numbers out there and the players don’t want them out there. It’s not something that anyone wants. And so we’re kind of hamstrung and the downside is any time a player leaves or a coach leaves or a player decides not to come here, there will be people who will assume it’s NIL. And you know, we’ll never know and since very few schools disclose the numbers for the reasons we stated, it’s always going to be a challenge. I wish I could be more transparent. I can tell you that we gave out over $2 million last year, primarily to just a couple sports. We funded 350 total athletes in every sport. But the majority went to just a couple sports … we respect the wishes of the coaches not to talk about that. They don’t want to be a distraction and the athletes, that’s something that is a private agreement between either the business and them or between Success With Honor. We respect that. So it’s an unfortunate situation that any time someone has a bad outcome, they transfer or whatever, it’s going to be blamed on NIL, or it may very well, but there’s nothing I can figure out to do that still respects the desires of people that were involved.

As an example, Drew Allar has CAA representing him in some capacity. Is there any challenge interfacing with higher profile student-athletes who may have taken their business relationships to something other than SWH?

We want to engage with all the football players, for example. We want to be able to get them as many opportunities as possible. And a marquee player is going to be able to demand more in the marketplace naturally. And so what we do is we try to try to work with the agents to make sure he’s as involved as possible … [around these players] we have agents, we have family members, we have people that influence the athletes decision making process, and we have to work with them on a case-by-case basis. I will say the majority of athletes that we have contracts for are thrilled to be participating in NIL. They’re eager to get out there and support charities or have commercial opportunities … I think that in the case of people that do have agents or who have family members that are advising, you know, we just we just work with them, because we want them to be part of this. And it’s worked out really well.

Athletic departments and NIL collectives are inherently chasing down the big donors or businesses, but when it comes to the size of State College there’s only so much the immediate market has to offer and Penn State isn’t usually on the forefront of the sporting mind in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. Most every Big Ten school has much much larger populations within arm’s reach. At some point that has to matter, right?

My personal belief is that if we get the messaging out there on how businesses can engage — a lot of our best clients are going to be small and midsized businesses. And yes, you’re not going to have Dr Pepper coming in and doing a campaign with any of our athletes yet. And maybe we don’t have a major employer who’s going to to fund it but we have lots of midsize employers. We also have privately held companies who can have flexibility in their marketing budgets. So there is an advantage that way. But there’s no getting around it that we’re not in an urban center. That makes the individual donors all the more important. And actually, that’s another example of why the Penn State network is so critical for NIL success. We have a very large amount of Penn Staters who are passionate about their football and their other sports. You have this attention to basketball, which was really encouraging. And so you can have people support them through the 501c3.

And you can also have have donors who can can really support it at a higher level. And so we’re trying to connect with people at all levels. Whether it’s through the subscriber that does $10 a month or $25 a month, or the person that can do a larger donation for football [or basketball]. That to me is really where we’re seeing a lot more interest in that. And yes, we don’t have the commercial base here locally but we do have this phenomenally connected Penn State group that just has to learn about this. Those Penn Staters who’ve had a great experience, and they want the same for this generation, that’s here now. We can we can lean more on the individual donations, while we’re finding small and midsized businesses, really. We also have found partners who are who are opening the doors to large businesses. And so we’re exploring creative options to connect with those larger, national and regional companies that that aren’t necessarily in our backyard.

On a similar note Penn State is supportive of SWH, but at the same time it has to raise its own funding for things like facility upgrades that SWH doesn’t have a hand in. In some respects there’s only so much fundraising money to go around, and despite pulling the same rope in the same direction, you’re in some respects competing for the same donors or sources. How do you balance that?

So Penn State is well established. Everyone knows them. They’ve connected in the past with donors, and there are specific needs, whether it’s an academics or an athletics. The way I understand it, they support the causes they care about. And so many of those people are going to support the facilities that need to be done through general funds or specific donations. If a coach has a need for, let’s say, a stadium renovation, then they’ll be focused on that more.

And so what I would say is we’re educating people on this new way to support student-athletes more directly. Not everyone cares about that. Some people are more interested in some of the other issues. And that’s fine. And so what we try to do is just education. We don’t have a massive sales team. We don’t have a development office that is able to talk to so many people directly. And so we’re relying on people to read abut us or to see the social media posts and what we’re doing … NIL is important now, I think that everyone agrees. And so that’s our hope but we aren’t able to and nor are we interested in, like, pushing NIL above all on someone who that’s not their thing. Everyone gives for different reasons. And so we believe there’s enough donors out there that can support NIL and it’s not going to damage the university. It’s a matter of fact, I would say that the more we bring Penn State to the radar, the more likely that donations will come in. Rising tide lifts all boats.

Back to the basics a little bit, but let’s say that I am a student-athlete that has an opportunity to find success in the NIL space. Where does SWH come into play and how does SWH funding impact the intersection between student-athlete and opportunity?

Let’s say you put $100,000 into basketball. What happens then is we have 13 players. And what we’ll do is we’ll try to find opportunities through the nonprofit to support the charities, maybe it’s a shelter, and we have them go and do something, maybe with the food bank. That money can be spread around among those athletes fairly evenly or evenly. And you as a donor are supporting that food bank [through subsequent exposure.] And when it goes out on their media and social media, it goes out to increase their membership, and donations. That’s what your donation is doing. And when that athlete is being retweeted in their hometown, and when they’re recognized as a Penn State athlete, and their newspaper and their high school puts it out there, that’s your money. That’s where the money goes. It’s really supporting that charity and the good works in a really unique, new and powerful way.

Maybe more bluntly, if I want to give Player X and Player Y money and I don’t really care about the rest of it, is there anything keeping me from doing that?

So the only way you could do this is through the commercial side. If you want to pay specific athletes you must go through successfully on our commercial side. The way that works is if you would have a contract, they would have to do something based at market value. That’s why businesses use commercial a lot. If you wanted them to promote your brand, we’ve seen people have branded cars that they drive. And the individuals can do that or businesses … if you want to give money to a specific athlete it’s through Success With Honor Commercial. If you want to give it to teams to support our teams, that is through the Success With Honor Foundation [501c3].

Penn State has long been a place where name and reputation was supposed to be enough. In an NIL landscape there’s a significant shift in approach happening that might be challenging to get people to buy into. What’s your sell to the traditionalist?

I grew up in State College. I was a Penn State fan. I went to Penn State, graduated from Penn State and love this university. I’m able to come at this from an honest perspective where I can tell people that when I was first looking at NIL, I thought NIL and the transfer portal was the end of college athletics. That was my initial thought. And then I got to think about what, as a Penn Stater, with those values with the idea that being part of the team, and part of this experience should be transformational, not transactional… How can I make it into a Penn State sort of experience?

And so what I did over the last year as a volunteer is speak to people and when I tell them upfront that I didn’t like it at first, but once I realized how we could impact people’s lives in the positive, that changes their minds in most cases … We want to believe that Penn State is different. And that we can do it our way. And I think this is the way to do it, the resistance to bags of cash, which is the initial thought that everyone has. That sits particularly poorly with Penn Staters, and that’s why our entire model is different than any other, because we designed it from scratch to reflect the values that we think Penn Staters care about based on on years of experience and hundreds of conversations … I think that in order to be successful, we have to reflect the culture that exists here.