Why college basketball programs may turn to general managers to oversee rosters, NIL

In the months after Jon Scheyer was named Duke’s coach-in-waiting — after the longtime assistant found out, in June 2021, that he’d be succeeding Mike Krzyzewski at the end of the 2021-22 season — he and athletic director Nina King began meeting regularly.

One topic came up quickly, and often: the idea of a general manager for the program.

“Our air traffic controller,” King remembers Scheyer calling this proposed position. “Obviously Duke men’s basketball is an elite program, so how do we maintain that elite status? What’s our differentiator?”

King had an open mind; after all, the reason she was named Duke’s AD in May 2021 — less than a month before the Krzyzewski and Scheyer news was announced — was because of her willingness to adjust in the face of college athletics’ most transformational period. She understood that just because something had worked historically, even at a place with Duke’s prestige and resources, it wasn’t guaranteed to continue to do so moving forward. While Krzyzewski’s team-building philosophy evolved over his 42 seasons as head coach, he never had to deal with two aspects of roster construction Scheyer now would: additional eligibility stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the passage of the NCAA’s one-time transfer rule, which created a veritable free agency free-for-all at the college level. Scheyer was also going to have to develop a plan for name, image, and likeness (NIL), which ran counter to the “amateur” model the NCAA had long perpetuated.

Big changes. Colossal ones. The kind that requires outside-the-box solutions and — as Scheyer was proposing — potentially even never-before-seen positions.

Those conversations led to Duke hiring college’s basketball’s first general manager last May: Rachel Baker, formerly with Nike and the NBA. King said that as soon as the school sent out its press release about Baker, texts and calls started pouring in from her AD counterparts around the country.

“It was at a time where NIL was so new,” King recalls, “and everyone was like, what, really? We need to have a whole person dedicated to this?”

Well, yeah. The fact that other schools — like DePaul and Howard — have created similar positions only validates that thinking. Several other power conference schools have turned to third-party companies to handle GM-type duties. Whether those people are in-house or external, whatever their specific title may be, one commonality has appeared: If you want to be an elite college hoops program moving forward in the modern era, you must have a general manager (or someone comparable) on staff.

“When you’re recruiting (in today’s college athletics landscape), the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 thing they care about is NIL,” Baker tells The Athletic. “They don’t care as much about facilities, or player development, or our coaching style; if you can put together a competitive NIL opportunity — and that starts with resources to help you guide and navigate the landscape — then I think you can compete with any school in the country.”

For all of Scheyer’s recruiting prowess — his first full recruiting class this season was No. 1 in the nation — Baker admits she wasn’t his easiest sell.

Baker had never worked for a team before. In various roles at Nike, she became a fixture on the grassroots circuit, focused on finding “the kind of talent that can try to compete with the LeBrons and the MJs of the world” from a marketing perspective. There, she learned the value of personal branding, building relationships, and how to develop product campaigns that aligned with an athlete’s authentic self. Then in her last role before joining the Blue Devils, she worked for Pendulum Holdings, a growth investment company that dealt with athletes and entertainers, in addition to investing in Black-owned businesses.

“What I learned there is real-deal evaluation and thinking long-term, strategically,” Baker says. “So really looking at what makes a good business, consumer habits and how that translates into products and services that’ll be successful.”

It’s not a college basketball background, but that’s actually a key reason Scheyer hired her. “Rachel coming from outside the lens of college basketball has actually been a pretty special thing for us,” Scheyer says. “She just has a different perspective when it comes to our guys and what they’re going through.” In fact, that different perspective — gained through her various stops and roles — is what has enabled Baker to assimilate so quickly.

For example: At Nike, she had to understand what up-and-coming basketball players — read: those with the talent and personality to play at a place like Duke or Kentucky — valued most; how else was she supposed to build relationships with them, and then build marketing campaigns off their interests? Now she still has to, but for a different purpose: So Scheyer and his staff can provide those offerings to current players and prospective recruits.

“It’s looking at, OK, what can we figure out, based on your personality and your tendencies and your aspirations, that can make you individually as successful as possible?” Baker says, “and that’s different for all of them.”

Baker had years on the grassroots circuit to build those relationships, at various camps and meals. At Duke, that process has to be fast-tracked and condensed into one summer. So before this season, Baker and Duke creative director Dave Bradley sat down with each of the team’s players for an hour — from junior point guard Jeremy Roach to the walk-ons — to learn about their off-court personalities. Bradley had a list of questions he’s used in past years, but Baker had also saved two lists of questions from her previous jobs — one from her time helping rebrand the WNBA’s stars, and another that Nike asked its NBA rookies upon signing — that were designed to excavate a player’s off-court passions and interests.

(One example? She found out that Harvard transfer Kale Catchings had two overwhelming obsessions: “The Bachelor,” and… couponing. “I don’t know if this is bad, but he has like 20 different email addresses that he’ll use for 15 percent off on different companies,” Baker says, laughing. “He’s a master saver.”)

But that gets back to the larger point, about why Scheyer wanted a GM in the first place: to help handle NIL. And once Baker understood who Duke’s players were, and what they cared about, she could become the resource for them that Scheyer imagined.

That’s a twofold task. The first — which Baker says she worked on more over the summer, and will prioritize this coming offseason — is developing program-wide NIL policies, informed by staying up-to-date on current NCAA regulations, state and federal legislation, and NIL news nationwide. “Working with the athletic department on what we can and can’t do from a compliance perspective,” Baker explains. “The NCAA changes the rules all the time, so it’s making sure we stay both as competitive as we can from what we can offer, but also within any NCAA guidelines and restrictions.”

The second piece of Baker’s NIL value comes from working more directly with Duke’s players. Per NCAA rules, she cannot consummate deals — certified agents can assist with that, if players choose to have them — but she can provide guidance: say, which companies would (or wouldn’t) be a good fit for a certain player, or specific contractual details that might take advantage of a player. Much of that knowledge comes from her time with Pendulum.

But because of Baker’s personal relationship with Duke’s team, sometimes that guidance comes from a different place. For instance …

“Two of our guys have the exact same contract with a company. One of them, it’s literally pulling teeth trying to get him to record and share and post these videos; the other one, it’s nothing at all,” Baker explains. “So it’s a matter of figuring out, this $5,000 deal may make a lot of sense for you — but this stresses you out so much, is it really worth it? Because I need you to go play basketball.”

Along those same lines, while NIL is increasingly a focus of incoming recruits, it isn’t for everyone. During some recruiting visits, for example, including for at least one player who ultimately committed to Duke, she and Scheyer finished their NIL presentation for the player and his family… only to hear a response most outside observers might be surprised at:

Do I have to?

“We don’t force this NIL stuff down anyone’s throat,” Baker adds. “There’s this perception of how student-athletes are exclusively engaging with NIL, but some people just want to be student-athletes — and we support them the same way. So it’s not one-size-fits-all.”

Baker isn’t the only person dealing with these challenges.

At DePaul, Litisha Hall — one of Baker’s former Nike colleagues — was hired alongside coach Tony Stubblefield in the summer of 2021, as the men’s basketball program’s director of community, corporate, and professional relations. At the time, Illinois state law prohibited her from working closely with NIL. But when state law changed, so did Hall’s title; in the summer of 2022, athletic director DeWayne Peevy promoted her to general manager. Understandably, those changing state laws (on top of the NCAA’s) are one of the more difficult parts of Hall’s job.

“It’s always like, what can I do this month?” Hall says. “Let me go and talk to my compliance officer to see if anything’s changed, before I go to this networking event.”

Hall’s background, like Baker’s, is diverse; she worked alongside a trio of Nike’s most-famous marketers — including Nico Harrison, current Dallas Mavericks GM and former vice president of North American basketball operations — for almost two decades, after a previous life as a career counselor. Those different roles taught Hall a variable skillset, which she now uses to navigate DePaul’s specific advantages and challenges. One key for Hall, for example, is the school’s geographic proximity to the Chicagoland area, which is ripe with businesses that might be interested — now that Illinois law allows them to — in partnering with Stubblefield’s players.

Hall’s presence is probably even more valuable because of those changing conditions at the state level. Businesses don’t necessarily keep up with those various restrictions, but Hall does, and can educate them on what’s now possible.

“Our coaches are here to teach basketball. They’re not there to network in the community and talk to businesses, right?” Hall says. “I’ve been doing it: going out there, talking to businesses and telling them about NIL, what student-athletes can do now — and that it’s not a bad thing anymore. You can actually partner with a student-athlete; they can be your brand ambassadors, they can come into your Christmas party and sign autographs, and you can pay them.”

Clearly, investing in Hall is an investment in DePaul men’s basketball. So, the bigger question: Why there, of all places, for a program that hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since joining the Big East in 2005-06?

It goes back to being at the forefront of change — something Peevy understands intimately, from his time as Kentucky’s deputy AD overseeing men’s basketball under John Calipari (and someone Kentucky parents unofficially knew as the program’s “general manager”).

“Everything being left up to the coach is not ideal. You want him vetting your team, making decisions about the team and the staff,” Peevy says. “What you’ve done for the last 20 years doesn’t matter right now. What you’ve learned in the last 20 years doesn’t matter right now. What you’ve always done, or how you want to do things, or what every staff you’ve been a part of has done, they’re obsolete. Now you need other people: to be innovative and think ahead and have a sense, a pulse, of what the world is doing right now — and stay ahead of it, not following. That’s the challenge we all have.”

And that’s true even outside of power-conference teams. Take Howard University, which hired Daniel Marks from the Milwaukee Bucks last summer to become the team’s Chief Program Strategist. Marks’ title is different, partly because Howard — which only employs head coach Kenny Blakeney, an associate head coach, two assistants, and Marks on its men’s basketball staff — incorporates more-conventional basketball operations responsibilities under Marks’ umbrella. But he too counts NIL as a major piece of his job, including getting Howard’s players set on the Opendorse marketplace.

“NIL,” Marks says, “is something we talk about and we think about every single day.”

.@HUMensBB Names Daniel G. Marks First-Ever Chief Program Strategist #BleedBlue #MEACMBB https://t.co/4NpVpS6gyM

— Howard Athletics (@HUBisonSports) September 1, 2022

Like DePaul, Howard’s proximity to a major metropolitan area (Washington, D.C.) is a positive for NIL efforts. But Howard, an HBCU that plays in the MEAC, operates at a different level of resources than a Duke or DePaul. “We don’t have what a lot of high-major schools have in terms of capability to hire a number of people, so I kind of touch every aspect of it,” Marks says. “It’s both granular and big-picture. At Howard, you can’t have someone who just focuses on one or another, because we just don’t have the manpower.”

That said, fewer institutional resources doesn’t preclude Howard’s players from having NIL success. In fact, Marks hits at a larger point that Baker and Hall both agree with: Casual fans might be surprised at who does the best NIL-wise — because it isn’t always a team’s top scorer, or the guy with the highest recruiting ranking. When those players have terrific personalities, sure. (Think, the Zion Williamsons of the world.) Otherwise, though? There’s no reason backups with burgeoning personal brands can’t do well for themselves.

“You have to present yourself in a way that brands want to partner with you,” Marks says. “Just because NIL exists doesn’t mean you’re going to get deals.”

That component — educating players on the importance of sharing their off-court lives and hobbies — is the commonality across all levels of the sport.

“What I do realize is that most student-athletes aren’t even sure how to brand themselves,” Hall says, “so I try to bring it out of them, and have them think about things like, who are you? Who or what do you want to represent? What gets you going?”

While Baker, Hall, and Marks all work directly with the men’s basketball teams at their schools, there is another broader option schools can turn to for general manager work:

GMs for hire, so to speak.

That’s exactly what Altius Sports Partners — an NIL consulting firm founded to counsel schools at an athletic department-wide level — has created: a GM Program. When it became apparent that schools could use more hands-on guidance, and a day-to-day presence on campus, Altius expanded its offerings. The company currently consults with 33 universities on broad NIL policy — 29 of which are at the power-conference level — and has 10 of those schools signed onto the GM Program, including LSU, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Northwestern and Cincinnati.

“In that first iteration, it’s from a distance — and as you can imagine, it’s hard to develop trust and relationships,” says Andrew Donovan, Altius’ executive vice president of collegiate partnerships, who formerly was Tennessee’s senior associate AD for regulatory affairs. “So the idea becomes, now we’ve got somebody local on campus that can understand the campus vision, the campus philosophy, can get to know the players in the arena, and can develop true, meaningful relationships with those athletes.”

What kind of people is Altius looks for in prospective GMs? Like Baker, Hall, and Marks, folks with diverse backgrounds and skill sets. Ideally, Altius could find people with corporate sponsorship experience — at the collegiate or pro level — as well as a familiarity with a certain campus and its surrounding area. Donovan is more realistic. “In some ways, we’re trying to find unicorns, because this is so new,” he says. “And, there are certain instances where schools have an idea of what they want, but they’re also looking at us going, what do we need?”

There are a few differences between what someone like Baker does, versus what an installed Altius GM does. For starters, Baker is a Duke employee; Altius’ general managers, despite being on campus, are Altius employees. But that also comes with a huge benefit: access to Altius’ national network of experts, many of whom have substantial collegiate athletics or sports marketing or administrative experience. (Oliver Luck, the former West Virginia AD and ex-commissioner of the XFL, as an example, is Altius’ chairman.) That especially comes in handy given the difficulty of finding someone with the complete package of skills required to sort through NIL; if a certain campus GM, for instance, comes from an athletic administration background, then someone else within Altius’ network — like Donovan — can offer complementary support in their area of expertise.

Additionally, Baker, Hall, and Marks work specifically with the men’s basketball programs at their respective schools. An Altius GM, on the other hand, works for the entire athletic department, and all campus athletes — although Donovan acknowledges that depending on the school, certain players and teams command more attention. (Along those same lines, certain schools have more or less risk tolerance in creating their overall NIL policies, although that is also dictated by each state’s individual laws.)

The overall goal, though, remains the same, be it for a basketball-specific GM or one from Altius’ program: Establishing the best NIL practices possible, which put athletes in the best position to succeed. Donovan likens Altius’ GMs to the hub of a bicycle wheel, and all the offshooting spokes around it.

“The GM is the center hub, and those spokes are connecting to licensing, and sponsorships and MMR, and campus legal, university leadership, compliance, etc.,” Donovan says. “Having that central point of contact has really allowed schools to create some consistency of communication, and tell their athletes and coaches, their administrators, their donors, their local businesses, this is where you start when you have a question related to NIL — and then allowing that person to disperse and pull people in as necessary.”

One last thing about this general manager-type role, whatever each school formally calls it:

Given the newness of the position, what we’re talking about today is only Version 1.0 of what’s possible.

“I could see it evolving even more,” Peevy says. While NIL remains a top priority in the present, the purview for these roles absolutely could expand in the future — perhaps, even, by absorbing more basketball-related responsibilities, or by serving as a quasi-administrator. Much of that will depend on NCAA restrictions on various staff members, but anything from roster management — recruiting organization, transfer portal planning and player retention, all of which is also tied to NIL — to analytics oversight, to scheduling, is on the table. “You take the sport admin role, you add these pieces to it, and it becomes one primary role,” Peevy adds, “with a much higher-level individual, from an experience standpoint, that can do all of that.”

But as these positions continue cropping up on campuses nationwide, one thing is abundantly clear:

In a landscape that shifts as quickly as sand, having a dedicated person to stabilize the ground underneath a program — to keep up with NIL in all its iterations, as it evolves in real-time — has never been more valuable.

Or, frankly, necessary.

“This is a new world, and there needs to be someone there to navigate that. Coaches are here to teach basketball, to win games, to create champions,” Hall says. “They can’t do it all. So you have roles like this, which Rachel and I are in — and we’re trying to navigate it, and we’re trying to create the future. And hopefully with our guidance, there will be more roles like this — because we’re the pioneers.”

(Photo of Rachel Baker and Jon Scheyer: Courtesy Duke Athletics)