Zach OstermanIndianapolis Star
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BORDEN – Based on his social media activity, Washington State transfer and reigning Pac-12 freshman of the year Myles Rice arrived in Bloomington over the weekend.
Rice posted pictures to Instagram suggesting he’d reached move-in time with his new program, including a shot of his locker situated between returning Big Ten co-freshman of the year Mackenzie Mgbako, and incoming freshman Bryson Tucker. It felt significant, one of the cornerstones of Mike Woodson’s spring roster rebuild arriving at the start of a crucial summer for IU’s fourth-year coach.
And by Wednesday, Rice was already at work.
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Is an NIL event work? Is that a philosophical discussion college athletics even has time for anymore, given the rate at which the landscape is shifting? Some folks already think NIL is coming out of date, with news this month of a landmark revenue-sharing agreement that will allow colleges to begin paying athletes directly.
Yet few physical events — at least for IU athletics — signify these times better than the conversion of this annual dinner from a department fundraiser to an NIL-heavy event.
IU’s annual booster event, here at Huber’s Orchard and Winery in the southern Indiana foothills outside Louisville, has been a staple of the Hoosiers’ summer calendar for decades.
Indiana used to stage events like these all over the state — Fort Wayne, Muncie, Evansville, Indianapolis, South Bend — but that practice fell away. Huber remains.
A natural breakwater between the last athletics season and the next one, this dinner often falls in the dead zone where few, if any, IU sports are still playing. Currently, baseball still hoists the flag for the 2023-24 athletic year, but already fall-sports athletes are beginning to repopulate Indiana’s facilities and prepare for next season.
Both the turning-the-page nature of this event (and also, admittedly, the money involved) traditionally brought both the football and men’s basketball coaches down to Borden for a night of schmoozing, press commitments and plates of fried chicken.
Not just from a dollars-and-cents perspective but also because of the sheer tonnage of networking that can be done, there have been few dates on IU’s fundraising calendar more important than the event typically referred to by its host location.
For the past two years, the department has turned that date over to its name, image and likeness efforts.
“It’s definitely a beneficial event,” Tyler Harris, executive director of Hoosiers For Good and Hoosiers Connect, told IndyStar. “This one has a long tradition, and so we don’t change much. People come in droves.”
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Those two collectives are probably better described as separate arms of the same entity. Hoosiers For Good/Hoosiers Connect is the most robust IU-specific effort in the NIL space, and since NCAA rules allowed departments to declare and work more closely with official collectives, the department has pulled HFG in close.
It was Athletic Director Scott Dolson’s idea to convert this from an athletics event to an NIL fundraiser, one of the earliest he presented to IU’s collective in the infancy of their official partnership. This marks the second year running the Hoosiers’ annual Huber swing benefitted Hoosiers For Good/Hoosiers Connect, with attendance rising from roughly 600 people in 2023 to about 850 this time around.
There’s a hard-money element to the success of the night. But more important is the chance for the collective to put itself in front of fans, explain its mission and earn the kind of trust that makes people want to support its efforts more meaningfully in the future.
“It’s introduced us to so many people that love and support IU that we never knew about before,” Harris said. “I give Scott a ton of credit. He’s always thinking ahead, and that’s one of the first things he did for us, move this to an NIL event.”
The symbolism matters as much here as the practice. Indiana’s Huber trip is as much an annual guarantee as basketball’s opening night, and more important than any tailgate or foreign tour could ever be. And without a second thought, the department turned it over to NIL efforts.
That’s what brought Rice to Borden on Wednesday. One of nine athletes in attendance, he joined new teammate Anthony Leal (among others) in meeting with fans, participating in a question-and-answer session and generally representing his brand-new program just days into his IU career.
NIL partnerships were the order of the evening here. Soon enough, revenue sharing will introduce whole new layers to the athlete-department relationship. The nature of college athletics is shifting, and the roles old institutions serve with it.
Other athletes in attendance Wednesday included women’s basketball players Sydney Parrish and Julianna LaMendola, and football players Mike Katic, Justice Ellison, Mikail Kamara, Carter Smith and Jacob Mangum-Farrar. Nine athletes, five of them arriving to Indiana as transfers, all carrying the torch of a whole new world in college athletics.
Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.
