ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The email was sent into the ether like a message in a bottle.
The subject line — “FWD: ATTENTION NEEDED” — seemed like something destined to languish in a spam folder. Chin Weerappuli had no reason to think his plan would work, but in a true entrepreneurial spirit, he tried anyway.
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“Coach Harbaugh,” the message read. “My name is Chin Weerappuli and I will be graduating from the Ross School of Business on April 28th. I was selected by my classmates as the Student Commencement Speaker for the event. My mother recently battled breast cancer and is still not comfortable in crowds and therefore is not able to attend the event in person. Thus, I wanted to extend an invite to you, Coach, as one of my idols and role models.”
Weerappuli, 34, has been a die-hard Michigan football fan for the past 15 years, first as an undergrad and later as a student in Michigan’s executive MBA program. Inviting Jim Harbaugh to be his guest of honor at the commencement ceremony last spring was a shot in the dark, but he figured it was worth a try.
Weerappuli had no idea how to reach Michigan’s football coach, so he did what anyone would do: He Googled it. “There was, like, a [email protected],” he said, and that was good enough for him. He pushed send and waited.
Against all odds, a response came back. The email reached Jack Harbaugh, Jim’s father, who offered to attend the ceremony with his wife, Jackie, on Jim’s behalf. Jim was out of town that weekend, but Jack offered to arrange a meeting between Jim and Weerappuli at Schembechler Hall.
If that was the end of things, Weerappuli would be just another guy in Ann Arbor with a funny Jim Harbaugh story. But actually, that meeting was just the beginning. While talking with Harbaugh that day, Weerappuli volunteered to use his connections at Michigan’s business school to expand name, image and likeness opportunities for the football program. That led to a follow-up meeting, which led to a job offer, which led to Weerappuli branching off at the end of January to work on a new NIL collective called Hail! Impact.
As Weerappuli talked about tapping the expertise of Michigan’s business school to enhance NIL, he could see Harbaugh’s eyes light up.
“Jim was completely sold within 15 minutes,” said Weerappuli, who spent 10 years as a software consultant in the healthcare industry. “He spits out his Diet Coke, spits out his chew, and is like, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s make some calls.’”
Hail! Impact, a nonprofit collective founded by Weerappuli and fellow Michigan MBA graduate Andy Johnson, is set to launch Saturday. The idea came out of Weerappuli’s four-month stint as an assistant to the head coach working on issues related to NIL.
After his initial meeting with Harbaugh, Weerappuli said he had conversations with athletic director Warde Manuel about joining the athletic department as an in-house NIL director. Michigan has yet to hire someone in the role, so Weerappuli joined the football staff as an NIL liaison of sorts.
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Weerappuli provided players and recruits with educational resources related to NIL. Michigan athletes had significant opportunities on the commercial side of NIL, but Weerappuli saw a need for a different kind of collective with a philanthropic mission.
Collectives, the third-party entities that allow donors to pool funds for NIL, can take the form of a not-for-profit collective, like Michigan’s Champions Circle, or a nonprofit organization, like TigerImpact at Clemson or Cohesion Foundation at Ohio State. Whereas LLC collectives work primarily with brands and businesses, nonprofit collectives partner with other nonprofits to pay athletes for participating in charitable events.
Hail! Impact registered as a nonprofit corporation in late February and is awaiting approval for its tax-exempt status. It plans to provide annual stipends of up to $40,000 for athletes who complete 24 hours of community service and take part in educational seminars related to branding, financial literacy and tax planning.
The collective’s initial goal is to raise $5 million to fund annual stipends for the Michigan football team, with hopes of expanding to other sports if funding targets are met.
“That’s a lot of money, no matter how you look at it,” said Johnson, a 2019 graduate of Michigan’s MBA program who collaborated with Michigan’s athletic department on the George Jewett Trophy, awarded to the winner of the Michigan-Northwestern football game, as executive vice president of a 3D printing company. “But in the scheme of donating at Michigan, it’s very achievable.”
The question of how to mobilize Michigan’s donor base around NIL has been discussed behind the scenes for months. A proposal floated last year called for an ambitious capital campaign to support NIL, but without buy-in from Michigan’s athletic department, the plan didn’t get off the ground. Weerappuli and Johnson incorporated aspects of that proposal into their plan, which calls for any contributions beyond the target goal of $5 million to be placed into an endowed fund.
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Weerappuli and Johnson said Manuel and Michigan’s athletic department have supported their ideas, but that support extends mostly to behind-the-scenes guidance. They don’t expect Michigan to divert fundraising resources toward the new collective, which means Hail! Impact will be on its own to hit its $5 million fundraising target.
“What hasn’t happened yet — and, frankly, we can’t expect it to in the near term — is for them to go beyond wishing us luck and giving us the thumbs-up,” Johnson said. “I don’t know that we’ll get to a point where they’re out in front of this for Hail! Impact or anyone else. That could be, but that would be a change from the status quo.”
Driven by Valiant Management Group, a NIL marketing agency founded by former Michigan fullback Jared Wangler, Michigan’s established stars have found success in the commercial arena. Adding a nonprofit component can raise the floor for the less established athletes, Weerappuli said, allowing them to earn a baseline stipend by participating in community service events before they can command lucrative endorsement deals.
The optimal approach to NIL — what Weerappuli described as the “golden triangle” — is to have a for-profit marketing agency, an LLC collective and a nonprofit foundation. Michigan has the first two through Valiant and Champions Circle. Weerappuli sees Hail! Impact as the third part of the triangle, catering to donors who don’t have a commercial interest in NIL but value the community impact and the tax write-off they get from donating to a charitable foundation.
Wangler said Champions Circle and Hail! Impact will work in concert, with Champions Circle focusing on the commercial space and Hail! Impact focused on the nonprofit space.
“We are excited to help them get off the ground and look forward to seeing this program grow and evolve,” Wangler wrote in a text message.
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Everything to know about NIL at Michigan, from collectives to recruiting impact
When meeting with recruits in his role with the football staff, Weerappuli found that most weren’t looking for outrageous guarantees or bags of cash. They wanted to know that their NIL earnings would be enough to buy a vehicle, rent an off-campus apartment and pay for their parents to attend their games. If established players were ahead of them on the depth chart, they wanted to know they wouldn’t have to wait two years for NIL opportunities, Weerappuli said.
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Setting aside outlier deals that have made headlines at other schools, Weerappuli said it was typical for players to report that NIL collectives were offering stipends between $20,000 and $40,000 per year. Hail! Impact aims to provide the same, with the added benefit of community engagement for the players.
Hail! Impact is working on partnerships with several area nonprofits, including the Humane Society of Huron Valley. As part of the arrangement, athletes will spend six hours each quarter working with animals at the shelter or taking part in the shelter’s youth activities, said Laura Crouch, the development and marketing specialist at the Humane Society.
“We and all the other nonprofits that Hail! NIL is working with rely so much on community support — the community believing in our mission and pitching in when they can,” Crouch said. “To have a high-profile partner like the U of M football athletes helping out really does make a difference.”
Getting Michigan’s donors to support NIL is a longer-term challenge, in part because paying players was a taboo subject among boosters for so long.
“I have friends who are very successful that don’t want to talk about it because they aren’t really sure that they even understand it,” Johnson said. “It’s like crypto to them.”
Raising $5 million is a heavy lift, and there’s no guarantee Weerappuli’s plan will work out the way he envisions. He has a high-profile supporter in Harbaugh, who wrote an endorsement letter for the collective’s website. But considering how it all started, with a random email sent out of the blue, Weerappuli figures he has already beaten the odds.
“A year ago, I was in healthcare software consulting and was just a Michigan fan,” Weerappuli said. “And now, you know, I talk to Coach on a regular basis. So it’s just one of those stories.”
(Top photo courtesy of Chin Weerappuli)
