The NCAA announced on Thursday that it had chosen sports program business Teamworks to manage a central store of deliberate NIL reporting data that will be made available to its Division I members and athletes after several shuffles and starts.
The NCAA stated in a press release that Teamworks would provide a “mobile-friendly, web-based solution” to gather data about all NIL payments of at least$ 600, and then compile the anonymized data into a registry by August 1.
The news comes almost four years after the NCAA released its initial Request for Proposal for a third-party database administrator, and five years after a working team at the NCAA proposed the idea. The RFP process had essentially been inert by 2022, but it was revived earlier this year as a result of the NCAA Division I Council’s approval of new NIL customer safety measures.

The first group of winners to move the NIL registry—which included INFLCR, Learfield’s CLC and Opendorse—were formerly told to expect a selection by November 2020, before a series of delays. In response to Teamworks ‘ request to be a winner, INFLCR later withdrew because of the “ethical perils” of trying to work with individual university athletic departments as well as the third party executive.
Who else was being considered, and what was included in the Teamworks deal’s economic conditions, an NCAA director said. Blake Lawrence, the CEO of Opendorse, and a Learfield rep confirmed that their businesses were still in the working. A joint bid by Student Athlete NIL ( SANIL ) and Advance NIL was also a finalist, according to SANIL CEO Jason Belzer.
The COMPASS system will continue to play a crucial role in facilitating student-athletes ‘ NIL opportunities at the global level and provide a significant tracking tool for our business and university lovers, according to Cory Moss, Learfield’s president of product management and marketing.
Previous NCAA executive Oliver Luck and Elon University associate professor Bill Squadron, both longtime activities and advertising executives, established the nonprofit NIL Education and Information Center in September 2020. The program, which was intended to be a partnership between the media program at Elon and Arizona State, was presented to the NCAA as a natural system that could manage its NIL registration without having any ties to college sports. ( Despite the fact that Luck is currently the CEO of NIL Consulting and has held several paid advisory positions for schools and conferences )
In May 2021, Big East commissioner Val Ackerman, a co-chair of the NCAA’s NIL working group, stated that it was crucial for the NIL registry administrator to be seen as” a separate and apart from anybody who’s looking to profit in this space.”
It’d be difficult to argue that Teamworks fits that bill: The SaaS company, by its own count, partners with 6, 000 sports clients, including 232 college sports institutions that pay thousands—and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars—to use its platform. For example, Purdue paid Teamworks$ 72, 000 for its services last year, according to a copy of their agreement obtained through a public records request.

” The company already has a broad presence beyond NIL within the NCAA membership, and we will capitalize on that presence to help student- athletes better navigate and make informed decisions in the NIL environment”, said Dave Schnase, the NCAA’s vice president of academic and membership affairs, in a statement.
Teamworks founder and CEO Zach Maurides, a former Duke football player, framed the deal in altruistic terms.
” With this partnership, we are able to provide every NCAA student- athlete and their families with the education and tools they need to navigate their NIL journeys successfully”, Maurides said in a statement.
The association’s relationship with Teamworks dates at least to 2015, when the association signed a contract with Maurides ‘ company to provide the D-I men’s basketball championship’s collaboration software.
By publication time, neither Maurides nor a Teamworks representative had responded to a query about why it no longer harbored the conflict-of-interest concerns that INFLCR had raised three years earlier. In the fifth paragraph of this story, information about the bidding companies has been updated.