All right, welcome back to the Buying Sandlot podcast. I am Kyle Scott, founder of Buying Sandlot. On today's episode, I speak with Brent Wall. He's the founder and CEO of Student Athlete Score. Brent is a former Division 1 athlete and a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits. Student Athlete Score wants to make it easier and more accessible for both athletes, brands and universities to really tap into NIL opportunities, understand the market, understand the companies that are out there and the players who have built loyal followings on social media and how brands can and interact with those players and their followers. They are expanding down below just the college level into the youth opportunity, given the countless ways that youth athletes can leverage their own personal brand to build an audience and have commercial success. So for my money, this is a really good, wide ranging interview, not only on Student Athlete Score, but some of the opportunities in NIL and where NIL is headed in youth sports. Before we get to the interview with Will, I want to take a second to plug our Buying Sandlot Youth Sports Business conference coming to Philly next spring, likely in the April timeframe. We're working on securing a venue and dates, but should have that information available by the middle to late October. And at that time we'll have opportunities for early registration, tickets, potentially sponsor packages. So keep an eye out on buying sandlot, buying sandlot.com and in our newsletters for that. Onto the interview with Brent. All right, Brent, welcome. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining.

Kyle, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

So why don't you give our audience a little bit of background about yourself and Student Athlete Score and we'll go from there.

Yeah, happy to. So Student Athlete Score is today. An AI data aggregation platform created this about a year and a half ago. I'm an ex D1 athlete, played basketball at Fairfield University out in Connecticut. And my professional career has never allowed me to combine sports and tech. Up until now. I've been in other industries and had some successful exits. But with Rev Share now here and at the time, seeing where NIL was and where it was heading and knowing that Rev Share was on the horizon, I just thought it was just a perfect time to figure out a way to, you know, play in this space and create a company, a software company that could be, you know, impactful. As we move into this new world.

Of Rev Share, talk about you're mostly college focus now, but we're going to talk quite a bit about how that trickles down to the high school and maybe even lower level in the youth space. But Talk a little bit about what it does now, the feature set and then how you think that can kind of be imparted to youth.

Right now we are working with over 20 plus university partners, athletic departments, also MMR partners, multimedia partners here at the collegiate level. And we are in essence web scraping all the athletic department websites, information on all the athlete profiles, their social media accounts, bringing that all into the platform. So we've got over a hundred thousand D1 athletes in the platform analyzing over 5 million posts. And what comes of that is as we analyze these posts for different interests that these athletes have, maybe a football player, Clemson is into fishing. And we can quickly with our AI, show you him, plus you know, 100 other athletes that have post about fish and whatnot. And then we have the ability with these athletes tagging in brands and so forth, creating over 100,000 brands in our system. So we're now organically starting to match athletes with brands that have, you know, similar interests. You know, maybe Bass Pro Shop and this athlete find each other and whatnot with the platform and they can engage and start to create deals.

So it seems like, by the way, love this idea. Nil in general is such a hot topic, certainly at the college level, but we're now seeing it a lot in, in terms of how it trickles down because you basically have just removed the floor of who can earn money from sports. It used to be college putting that floor. And if you were a high school athlete or an amateur athlete, there was really no opportunity. If you wanted to play in the ncaa, that floor is gone. Now it seems like you can serve a number of different constituents with your product. You mentioned the universities, athletes and brains. Where do you kind of focus the efforts on marketing the product? And how do you envision each one of those buckets? And, and if there's another bucket, let me know. But how do you envision each of those buckets using the product and the value they can get out of it?

Yeah, and I would say the fourth bucket is probably the agencies. However, what I'm finding with our product is I keep preaching that we're going after the 95 percenters. We're trying to not help Livy Dunn because she's with a high level agency and probably has 10 people around her every single day helping her source deals. But what about the 95% of the other athletes? And I know we're going to talk about the youth athletes and the high school athletes where a $500 deal or $100 deal is not ever going to be of interest to an agent. And so they're not going to utilize this product as much. However, I am talking with some of the powerhouse agencies where as they get a high schooler signed early or college players signed early that they then hope make it to the pros, they do want to make sure that they're sourcing deals for them. Even if they, as the agent aren't making much, they still want to keep them within their powerhouse agency brand. So that's on the agency level. And so then we have the universities, and so you have your nil directors, your associate ads, your GMs, your chief revenue officers. Now in this new era where they all need to separate them from the competition. And so that $20.5 million cap that is now out there for all these Power 4 universities, that makes them all equal. Okay, so how am I going to differentiate myself at Michigan compared to Alabama or Ohio State? Well, now we need to source deals for these athletes. And I know everybody keeps using the term nil. I actually like to use it as endorsement deals because in essence, these athletes are now true professional athletes, but they just happen to be on a university campus and they're doing endorsement deals like an NFL player or an NBA player, a major league baseball player.

Yeah, it's funny you say that, and I want you into player side in a sec, but it's funny you say that. I think nil kind of came out of what was being used in sort of the court case and the legal, you know, the name, image, likeness was more the legal term. But at the end of the day now college athletes and college teams and programs really need just to function the way a professional sports organization would. They used to rely before on, yes, ticket sales. Yes, they made some money, but that money typically went to fund other areas of the business. They didn't necessarily have to run like a program, pro shop. And you know, they were able to fundraise because it was under the guise of, you know, amateur athletics.

Right.

Now they're business.

Right.

And they need to do all the things the pro teams are doing. And I agree with you, it's salary and it's endorsement deals just like pro athletes. Talk about the athlete perspective. I'm a high school college player. Let's stick with college for a sec. I'm a college player. How can I use this to maybe identify. Is there a way to identify brands that are out there who I could potentially work with? And then I imagine brands are looking around and saying like, hey, which. Which athlete has X number of followers in this Area that maybe I can work with.

Yeah. And we've talked to a lot of athletes, and that's why we're really excited that we launched last month on the Apple App Store, our athlete app. And so we can talk more about that B2C opportunity. We're not there just yet. Right now, only athletes that are part of our university partners can get access to it. However, what we're trying to do with these athletes is help educate them on where their current nil brand is today and then where they can go. And again, yes, we love football players and basketball players on this platform, don't get me wrong. But we want to help the field hockey players, the soccer players, these folks that maybe could source $100 deals or $500 deals. And they're so overwhelmed right now, they don't know where to start, but they want to get into the space. They want to do nil deals. And so because they are a field hockey player or softball player, they're not getting the attention of the university athletic department, nil director, and the MMR partners teams. So it's kind of on them to go out there and source these deals. So what we do is we show them brands that maybe have an appetite, have already engaged with field hockey players, for instance, or soccer players or softball players. Maybe it's in the Big ten, maybe it's in the Mac, maybe it's in the sec. And then they have the ability now to get comfortable, like, oh, I remember playing against her, you know, last year. Oh, I didn't know she was doing a deal with that brand. I can reach out to that brand. I have 5000 followers. She only has 2500. So it's getting them the confidence and kind of the starting point of, okay, this isn't as overwhelming as I once thought it was because with student athlete score, they're now really, really helping me define exactly where I go and how I can source deals.

So in a way, in a way to me sounds a little bit like, man, I don't want to do it at this service.

Right.

But like almost like a dating app. Right, Right. Where you're pairing, like you're pairing brands with athletes and you're allowing them to have a profile and see some publicly available posts or images and who's worked with who or, you know, who's compatible with who. In so many words, is there a challenge there in getting to know about the deals that have happened? Right. If it happens on platform, if the connection is made, if it's self reported, how do you Guys go about identifying that Safeguard Soap has worked with, you know, 10 volleyball players or whatever. Are you just scouring social media and scraping it or can they actually self report some of this data to get things like metrics and dollars and stuff like that?

Yeah. So right now it's all public, publicly available data that we're scouring and sourcing and bringing into the platform and then overanalyzing it, layering in AI and proprietary software development to then show, okay, this athlete tagged in these brands on this post. This is the engagement that this post got. Here's the brands that were tagged in and so forth.

Yeah. So it seems to me like one of the challenges is being able to identify the deals that have already happened. Right. So were you guys today just scraping what's publicly available? Is there a way to, for someone to volunteer a deal? You know, so you guys have some proprietary info or is that something that's on the roadmap?

Yeah, no, that's definitely on the roadmap. Was just emailing with the CSC and NIL Go staff with Deloitte yesterday. They are overwhelmed right now, as we could all imagine, and not really interested in taking on any outside third party zooms right now as potential partners. However, I do feel like we could be a really, really big help for, you know, folks are having to report data and report deals and, you know, that's what's missing right now, I think, is everybody's craving, like, hey, if I'm that field hockey player at Ohio State or I'm the MMR partner, Learfield at Ohio State and I want to get a field hockey player a post and a deal, what the heck do I pay her? What do I charge the brand? Everybody's in the dark. And then, you know, is it under $600? So it flies through the Nil Go platform. Is it above? But like, let's make sure it's realistic so that they approve it and it's above. And so we're actually having a lot of conversations with different data partners as well. Just got off Zoom with IBM. You know, they're really interested in the space. So what partners can we pull in? Nielsen, We've talked with them, other, you know, broadcast partners. How can we bring in partners with what we have as a core and together collectively help the world, help these nil directors, help these universities, help these athletes. Know, like, hey, I can go get this deal at this rate and it's probably going to be 800 to $1,000. Right? And then that will incentivize Them to maybe build their personal brand even more because I feel like there's this whole athlete sponsorship influencer economy that's already started. But I mean this is a rapidly emerging market. You know, this is like a 30 plus billion dollar market opportunity. And I feel like we're at the intersection of like global sports sponsorships that's over $100 billion. We've got social media influencer economy that's over $32 billion. And nil is 2 billion today, but projected to 20 to 30 billion in the next decade. Athletes are no longer just players. And I actually have a high school freshman basketball player and a high school senior volleyball player. And I feel horrible because as I mentioned at the beginning, I played way back in the day and all I had to focus on was my abilities on the basketball court. Now they've got to focus on that. But then they also have to focus on building their personal brand because you know, I mean it's going to be, I mean they're just no longer players anymore. I mean they're basically going to be the fastest growing sponsorship assets out there and fans want to follow them more. I mean, think of Caitlin Clark, right? You and I know what UMBA team she plays for, but I don't know if all your listeners know what team she plays for, but they know Caitlin Clark. And so like these individual athletes are now becoming the true movement with marketing and these micro influencers becoming that. And so, you know, if you want to go downstream right now or later, but think of the high school quarterback at, you know, in XYZ town that everybody knows and the local pizzeria and the coffee shop and everywhere else is spending money on billboards or newspapers or whatever. But like they could do a deal with this high school quarterback right now and everybody in town knows him or everybody in the county knows him or her or the volleyball player, right? So I think there's, it's coming downstream extremely fast. And we're working with, you know, partners like MMR partners, multimedia, right. Partners like Playfly. And they just signed on matter day high school. And so it's, it's real at the high school level.

I've talked to some folks who feel like this long tail, I mean it is challenging obviously and something you guys are trying to tackle. I've talked to some folks who think it's so challenging that brands are just going to want to work with a consortium that is able to kind of onboard athletes for them. I guess I'm describing an agency here, but like, hey, I'm Comfortable working with such and such. You can go vet this person or almost turning it into like, like a contest. Like hey, here's a link, you know, for Taco Bell or whatever it is and whichever person could send more of their people from their accounts and then maybe you know, they get some kickbacks in terms of like free meals, stipends, free product for whatever it is. And then hey, like use that to surface one or two athletes who have like real economic value and then go to them and say, hey, we'll pay you. And they might be a little bit wary about quality control of that long tail. Right. So they're worried about getting into deals even if it's a hundred dollars. Right. You're paying somebody a hundred dollars and they go do and say something horrible and oh my God, they're a spokesperson for Taco Bell. As you know, as an example. How like do you think about that both at the collegiate and the high school level where the tail gets even longer? Like what is your pitch to brands or agencies? Like hey, no should work with individual athletes. Obviously the athletes want it cause they can get paid. How do you think about that dynamic?

Yeah, I mean I think with the data even we already have, but where we're heading we can show finally ROI on past deals and maybe not the exact dollar value, but we can show the amount of eyeballs, the attention, the engagement, the reach by combining these three athletes in the university IP and or you know, take a high school that is a prep school like IMG Academy and they combine one of their football team accounts with five of their football players and show a brand within our system. Like hey, this is what you could get by doing this deal at this dollar value versus going to spend on a billboard or spend on a TV commercial. So and that's just the data we have today. But where we're heading and where you were kind of hinting at is luckily we just built this in the last year and a half and we have so much AI infusion and we're right at the cutting edge of this movement with AI across our world that we are building a platform that has today's technology where I think a lot of players are in our space right now have built platforms that had 4 or 5, 6, 10 year old technology and they didn't have the ability to be where we are today. And so think of an AI agent for you know, if, if it's, you're on the brand side and I'm on the athlete side and you know, we want to do a Hundred dollar deal. And maybe you're the local pizzeria or something. Like, we want to make it so easy for the athlete that, you know, maybe you're in the system as the pizzeria and you're like, hey, I want to spend $500. I want to make 50,000 eyeballs. See this campaign, I want to source local athletes or micro influencers in this community. They go in our platform, you set your values, you've set what parameters you want. Maybe you don't want football players, maybe you want a female only campaign. And then our AI in the background is starting to source and find the athletes over here. And they're like, we've identified these five athletes and then we're reaching out and you already said you're spending 500 and maybe it's a hundred in athletes. So now there's this messaging and it's not, it's texting. Like we know that they all want text. And so maybe I'm Johnny, the AI agent for Betty Smith. And I'm like, hey Betty, like I got this deal for you at the local pizzeria. It's a hundred dollars. They need two posts. They need this. Do you want it? And I'm texting back as Betty, like, yeah, that would be great. And then, you know, AI chatbot text goes back to, you know, it's like, get it to a point where now I'm connecting you, Kyle, the pizzeria owner and Betty. And then you're like, hey, looks like we got a deal. 100 bucks, one post. When do you want to do it? Come over the pizzeria, if that makes sense. And then getting it like closer and closer and closer without any human interface.

Yeah, no, it's funny you mentioned that. So I used to like one of my prior lives tried to take on a kind of local ad network where we had a bunch of eyeballs in a market around sports in Philly. And we would go to advertisers and say, hey, we can bring, we could Bundle together these three websites, these three podcasts. We can get hit 200,000 eyeballs across them. Do you want to work with us? Because any one of us individually weren't big enough to go to like a mid sized regional advertiser, but together we were. And I found one of the complicating the difficult parts of that where the advertiser would say, okay, sure, we have $5,000 or $500, whatever it is. And then we would all be sitting there saying, well, how do we split this? Do we split it evenly. My audience is a little bit bigger than yours.

So do you.

Do you imagine it sounds like what you're describing is AI can take that lead and identify. Betty over here has 12,000 followers, Jill has 40,000. We're going to offer to split this $300 to Jill, $100 to Betty, $100 to three other. Is it kind of doing that on the fly? Yeah, because we lose that awkwardness of being like, hey, sorry, it should be easy.

I mean that I feel like we could almost do that today once we have this AI agent built out. Because Betty has 10,000 followers and Jill has 5,000 followers or 700,000 or, you know, 7,000 followers. So based on the engagement and the metrics and what they've done in the past, I mean, it should be simple enough to like auto split that up accordingly.

All right, so let's bring it down to the youth level. The concept makes a lot of sense. You have lots of college athletes who are large enough and with this long tail where there's these opportunities and colleges now have to think about how they can stand out. I think that's a great point. They can all spend money. Maybe some will be able to spend more money than others and spend up to that cap. And some of the smaller schools might not be able to, but the ones who can. How do you differentiate yourself? And you're able to source deals for people, so it makes total sense. How do you bring this down to the youth level? Talk about the differences between a high school and college athlete from the way you guys think about it and then also how you market it to that to both cohorts there, the athlete, the high school athlete and the brain that wants to reach a high school person versus a college person.

Yeah. So I think coming downstream, I like to call it downstream, down to the youth high school market for from collegiate, we've got two methods. Your prep schools like your IMGs, your mater days. I'm here in Michigan, Detroit Catholic Centrals, they have a brand that they could be very similar to the university athletic department where they sign on as our paying customer and then they give all of their athletes there on campus access to our student athlete app. But where I really see the big unlock is they million plus youth, as you know, way better than me, the parents. What could it look like for, you know, a five to ten dollars a month student athlete app, whether the parents are running it or the kids running it. The ability for them to log in with their social profiles on Instagram TikTok X see Their personal brand today, where it stands. And if I'm a swimmer in the state of Texas, I can now see how I'm ranking to the other swimming. Not with my times, my breaststroke, my, you know, whatever. But where is my personal brand going and where is it today and where do I need to get it? Because if I want to swim at Texas someday and I know who I'm up against, this is where I was saying earlier, it really stinks for these kids now where it's like if you, unless you're a five star or a four star and you can just live off your abilities on the field or on the court, if you and I are both equal swimmers and we both want to go to Texas and, or maybe that's a bad example, but you know, another school and I have 10,000 followers and you have 100,000 followers, there's a really good chance that that Coach at the D2 level, D3 level, low level, D1 level is like I'm taking Kyle because I know the amount of eyeballs and attention that Kyle is going to help bring to my program over me. And so that's going to be really, really impactful for my program for the next four years.

Super interesting talk about Olympic sports. Do you use swimming? There's been a lot of hand wringing lately after the house settlement and I think courts will make some decisions here, especially around Title nine. There's definitely an undercurrent right now, I would say of some of the people I've talked to. IMG is pushing for add more sports in college. Some people are aware that Olympic sports may run into some trouble. How do you like just personally how do you think about that? Because so much of the nil money and focus and direct payments are going to the major sports and people think Olympics are in trouble. How do you feel about that and how does sponsorship solve it and where are the gaps?

Well, I think again if we, if these athletes can recognize that they need to spend time on this side as well as in the pool, it can be extremely helpful. And as I kind of claim them as endorsement deals, that's where I think you can create a personal brand as a swimmer and really start to, you know, like Livy done in gymnastics. Right. Like you can really start to separate yourself and your personal brand and start to source deals. But we need in our company to make that AI agent so much easier so that they can start to do that without it becoming another part time job. Because right now it's just too overwhelming to, you know, put yourself out there. Where do I put myself out there? I don't have time to go back and forth. I'm not big enough to have my own agent, so I've got to do it myself. It's a struggle right now. And so. But that's where I'm really excited about where we're heading with what we're building.

Can this solve, you know, can this sort of thing solve some of the problems for Olympic athletes? It's a little bit easier for football.

And basketball, I do believe so, from, you know, bringing in those deals again, because there was Olympic swimmer that's down in Texas that we talked to months ago, and I could not believe it. He won medals in Paris and he doesn't have enough followers to have an agent. And I was blown away by that. Like, you just won medals at the Olympics and you're probably going to win a bunch of golds in a couple years in LA and you couldn't even source an agent. And I think it's. Again, he's overwhelmed. He told us he didn't know where to start and how to really build his personal brand and what should that even look like? And I mean, he's killing it in the pool. And so it's crazy to me that he didn't have an agent one. And then, you know, instead of 7,8000 followers, 100,000 followers after being in the Paris Olympics. So that's where I'm really excited about what we're building with AI and today's technology to really help, you know, merge that gap.

It's funny because there's some people, I mean, you could read any number of thought pieces where someone says that this is bad for college athletes. And certainly you'll see takes where this is nil. This sort of get paid me first social media culture is bad for high school athletes. And I think there are certainly reasonable points to be made about just general societal focus on social media and things like that. But it's funny because if you look, traditionally, those Olympic sports, for lack of a better description, generally were monetized that way. You know, it's only really the major sports. And there's more baseball, hockey, soccer, where there's professional leagues, maybe the money's a little bit more spread out at the pro level. But if you were a swimmer or a track and field star, you're generally not getting paid to be in the pool or on the track. You're getting paid to compete in nationals and international competitions and go to the Olympics and then the very small sliver of those wind up with endorsement deals. So all you're really doing is extending this kind of further down and getting people to think about it earlier, which maybe you could argue is better in some ways and gives you more opportunity that you're, you know, you get out of the pool, you don't make the Olympics and Now you've made $0 and you don't have pro prospects.

Yeah, no, it, look, this is tough as a parent of two high schoolers that are athletes and that aspire. Well, actually, my daughter will be playing collegiate volleyball next year and my son hopes to play collegiate basketball or football. It's. It's tough because as a parent, you're like, don't do it. Don't, you know, spend any time on this social media world. But then here I am professionally building a product that's right in the core of it. And I'm seeing it and I'm talking to everybody in the ecosystem daily about like, this is a must that you have to do if you're not a four or five star and you want to build that brand and make that money. Like you said, if you can't make it in the pool or on the track, the granola bar that you're eating before you race, the shoes that you choose to wear, the, you know, off the court outfit that you choose to wear, like, these are all opportunities with your following to source income for you. And we all have that short window of time where, you know, you have eyeballs on you, and then once you're older, like me, you know, that's gone. And so you have this like, window of opportunity and time to really make as much as you can make. And I think that's what these athletes need to understand. Some are all in, as you and I both know, and some are like, nope, not for me, like, I could care less. But then everybody around them is chirping and be like, yeah, but did you see so and so just get a 1.2 million dollar deal as a high school quarterback down in whatever state that was. It's like, you know, leave those chips on the table is really, really tough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, you said, you know, that it kind of passes you by based on age. But who's building this right, for office guys like us? Right. Like, you know, hey, here's the stand desk I'm using, you know.

Yeah, you're right. Right? Yeah. With your 100 followers. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

All right, so you've talked a lot about the B2B opportunity, particularly how you can work with agents in schools and, you know, get presumably higher subscription fees and they can make it available as a value add for their athletes and their clients. But you mentioned earlier the B2C component, right? Charging 5 and $10 per parent. And if I'm a parent, my kids are a little bit younger, nine and seven. I don't think they're there yet. But one of them becomes a great soccer player in high school, imagine what it would do for their psyche if some brand even wanted to give them $100 to. To drink their water or use their water bottle or something. So I imagine there are untold numbers of parents who, even for a small fee, even if it's a tiny amount of money, just from the cool factor alone, would be interested in doing this. But talk about like the B2C opportunity and how you think about approaching it, because that's a different marketing, that's a different way of marketing it. You can go to colleges and sell it to them. You can go to agents and sell it to them. Very difficult to go to moms and dads. So how do you think about kind of scaling through the existing Rails and platforms that are out there?

Yeah, no, for sure. And I don't think we'll be successful without some really strong partners and some of which you've already had previously on other podcasts that I've enjoyed listening to with Game Changer and Play on Sports and Max Preps and Pixelot and so, you know, Huddle and Baller tv. Like, we need to partner with those that have mass reach out of the gate. And so by doing so, prep hoops, you know, all these are coming to mind. They have the mass reach, they have the athlete bios already built out. They have the basketball stats or the football stats, they have the gpa, but no one has, like, how do you. How are you as a social influencer or where is your, you know, personal brand today? But it's being talked about and it's being sought after. As my understanding, all. All of these groups that I've been talking with and that you've interviewed, they're all having internal discussions around this. We're a little, little early, you know, for the masses, but we're. But the way it's moving so rapidly, I don't think we're that far away, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at this, that high schoolers across the board, the 8 million-plus out there, are going to want to know, how do I build my personal brand? Even if it's local. Even if it's sourcing gift cards or free coffee at, you know, the local coffee shop. Even though I don't get paid. These kids are so impressionable by who they aspire to be collegiately, professionally, where NIL is such a, such a hot sexy topic name or acronym where everybody high school and middle school wants to say, oh I got an nil deal. You know, even if it's like free gear or free coffee, like if you can say and go on your social profile, I got an nil deal. Like that's like amazing. I mean I was talking to a coach where sometimes these kids get off more about just doing, you know, their videos or their visit to the school and putting on the gear and it's the year before they commit and you know, they get to do all the posts with the gear of the college that they're playing for and they care more about that and getting it on their Instagram than actually getting the real scholarship and going to get school for free. I mean it's just crazy where this social media world is moving and so that B2C play. And I know you said your kids are young, but one of our advisors out in California has a son that's on a ridiculously competitive seven year old baseball team and like he wants and his teammates would love to get free gear through a so called NIL deal. You know, so like is there an opportunity with Dick's Sporting Goods and you know, game changer and the connection with us, the ability for. Maybe it's not a kid getting paid or maybe it's the whole team is getting new Rawlings mitts and there's a connection between all of that and driving these kids and the families back to Dick's to go buy the shoes and everything else. Like how do we connect all those dots in this economy? You know, like how is that going to work out? I think there's something there, but we haven't figured out the details yet.

I have a couple of big thoughts on this and I'm going to try to put it into like a 30 second question or comment for you to react to. But one in so many ways, especially that super long tail, the seven year old who wants equipment. You know, part of my brain goes to the fact that you get enough nil deals right now and enough free equipment is given out. Now you have no. It used to be pro player wears glove, right? I go and Francisco Lindor is on like every glove display at Dick's because I guess it's Rawlings or whatever. And as a Phillies fan, I refuse to buy anything. Francisco Lindor is on. But that's an aside. But you walk in Dick's, you see Francisco Lindor, he gets free gear. Aaron Judge gets free gear, right? And then hundreds of thousands of kids go out and buy that glove or that shoes. And that's the product. You start like the free gear starts moving down the line. All of a sudden nobody's left to buy it because everybody's getting it for free. Free, Right. So there, there's almost a balance there. You take it too far to the extreme and they're cutting into their actual customer base who would otherwise pay for it. Yeah, that's just an observation. My other, my bigger thought here, and I, I want you to react to this, is there's been a lot made a lot of high level big thinkers who've talked about like the, the concept of the network state, right, where you don't need, if you look at society as a whole, right, you have people on the right and left and they may live in the same neighborhood, you may live right next to someone or right above someone in an apartment. But you have an entirely different social algorithm. The content you consume, the political content, the sports content, the entertainment content, everything you consume is different. And for all intents and purposes, you may have been a lot more similar 20 years ago if you lived above someone, you shop at the same stores, you see the same things, you see the same billboards, hear the same radio ads. Now you may live eight feet above someone, but you're getting entirely different experiences and you're able to kind of create this network through the Internet of like minded individuals. Is there a world, so bear with me on that thought. Is there a world in which players don't have to go to their local community team or even their local high school team and certainly the college team? And you look at like the Savannah banana model, the Pottstown scout model, which I think is so cool. They're bringing together all these creatives who are talented at baseball, but they have personality. Is there a world in which more of that happens where it's like you don't need to play for the local town team, but you can find like the most interesting followed 12 year olds and call it a 30 or 60 minute driving radius who can come together and form their own travel team, their own club team, without a facility, without a town, without a school organizing it and it's backed by a sponsor. So if I'm Dunkin Donuts, I go in to Boston Right. I don't need to go find the local middle school or the local club or the local travel team. I could just find the 12 best baseball players. I'm going to create the Dunkin Donuts baseball team to go play up and down Cape Cod.

I don't know.

I know that's a long thought. There's like lots of like high level citations in there. But that kind of sounds like where a lot of this is going. Like you don't need the structure of the local team.

No. And I think you're right. And everybody wins. And the families that have a talented kid that's able to play on such a team, they don't want to pay for stuff. The coach you can, you know, afford now to hire like the best coach in the area. Because we always hear about that with moms or dads volunteering as coaches and that being a struggle to know, like what is their true motive and agenda or just you can't afford a good coach. So all the parents are upset. Like, that's really, really interesting. And then you get the brand and then they get all these eyeballs and attention and you bring all these athletes and all their social accounts together and there's this movement of all 12 of you or all 15 of you. You're posting this on these days to be a part of this team. And everybody's social grows together. That. That's really, really compelling and interesting.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like if you're. I'll stay with the Boston example. You're Dunkin Donuts, right? You go out and hire Cam Neely. I used to play for the Bruins. I don't know what he's doing these days. Right. You pay him some amount of money to go coach a U12 team and you bring together the best kids who are all within driving distance, but they don't. And now they get free Duncan. Duncan's the team sponsor. I mean, you can kind of disintermediate lots of established structures and before that obviously would have ran afoul of lots of ncaa.

Yeah.

NCAA rules. Now it's like, well, who cares? Like you play for Dunkin donuts at age 12 instead of, I don't know, Farmingham's local rink or whatever it is.

Well, and if that were to catch momentum and take off, are these kids no longer even playing at their high school? I mean, as we keep hearing about the super League collegiately that's about to get formed with the top football programs across the country, and they're Going to leave the ncaa. Supposedly there could be a lower level movement in the youth high school market where these kids are getting paid and gosh, is it scary to say all this as we're talking this through, but you're starting to make money early much earlier. But I mean, I guess if you go over to Europe and you think about the soccer farm league and that whole system, like maybe we're a hybrid creation of that and that's what we're moving into.

Yeah, yeah. When we play for a team, you're ultimately playing under a flag. Right. So it's, it's the school flag, it's the town flag, it's, it's the, you know, the team flag. But now you open up this world where you could play under a sponsors flag and.

Yeah, yeah.

And the sponsors have, have a financial incentive to maybe put more money into it. They get the exposure. It's free marketing. Interesting, interesting to think about you guys. You know, I mean you guys are kind of there to, so bring it back to what you guys are doing as we put a pin in this but really walk through the feature set. I think maybe in the beginning we kind of got like, you know, off track a little bit. But talk about today, what someone can go in and do, you know, specifically what could they see on both the brand and the player level and then like what's in your immediate roadmap? What are sort of the features that you, you view as key to not only the growth but that people, potential customers are going to want.

Yeah. So I mean I think right now, you know, we're helping universities, brands, you know, track sell, manage athlete driven campaigns. You know, we're providing alignment for, you know, driven matchmaking as I was talking about earlier with AI agent or with the AI interest bubbles and so forth so we can show ROI reporting. I mean up until now I call this past four years or whatever that was of that nil era before rev share on July 1st. That was like, like just, it was cool. It was fun. Brands are throwing money at athletes and universities and there's zero data behind how any success of any of these campaigns were. Where now it's all data driven and folks are like, okay, that era is over with. If I'm going to throw money into this space versus a $10,000 commercial or you know, print ad or something like that, I need to see metrics behind the roi. And that's what we're providing at a detailed level that I think is going to be really, really helpful to get brands and you know, chief marketing officers comfortable or maybe even local pizzerias saying hey, I usually put 500 bucks into the school program or whatever that may be. You know, instead I'm going to take that 500 bucks and try it into this nil deal with these five or 10 athletes and student athlete scores in the middle of that, making it extremely easy for both. And then if you think about at scale scale across the entire country, if we're in the middle of helping all those be sourced and done and we're taking a tiny little spiff there that gets really, really interesting and compelling and then I think where we're heading towards, you know, at least from the collegiate level and but maybe it's you know, going to come downstream as well and be helpful. There is like contract management, you know, AI driven valuations, you know, ultimately like trying to look at how do we help with that AI agent model, really make this thing hum and be mass scale for like I was saying earlier, the 95 percenters, you know, the 95 percenters of the brands, the athletes, the schools. That being said, we are with Power4Univerships today which are of the top 5 percenters. We are still talking to some brands of the top 5 percenters, like talking to Powerade the other day and their nil director or their nil team finding great value on this system and what it could source and their ability to see how are they doing compared to another sports energy drink that's out there and what athletes are engaging with that sports energy drink that aren't engaging with theirs and how do we, you know, bring them over to our side and so forth. So this is where we are today and where we're becoming extremely helpful with all the stakeholders today.

I have to imagine there's a, there's some arbitrage opportunity. Opportunity here in a good way. Sometimes that term is loaded and maybe has the wrong connotation. But if you're a brand, these longer tail of athletes and 95 percenters as you call them, they're not getting, not getting any money today or very little. Right. This is all very new brand comes along, identifies that their following of 30,000 people centered around their town and interest group is more valuable than they realize and they're able to offer them $500, a couple thousand dollars.

Right.

That might cost tens of thousands of dollars if they went to a more sophisticated business with that following. No one really loses their brand gets upside value that maybe they couldn't get by working with a, I don't know, a radio station or A website or a blog or something. Athlete gets paid, nobody loses. Do you see this kind of like outsized opportunity for brands in the short term? And then over time, through tools like yours, athletes get a little smarter and more data about how these things can and should be valued. And, you know, you bring things closer to the center.

Yeah, for sure. And so you kind of tapped on that with the brand. So say I'm, I'm here in Ann Arbor. So say I'm working with Michigan. Actually, we do work with Michigan, but I'm trying to find athletes that have a strong following in the city of Chicago because that's what I'm looking for for this campaign with this brand that just wants to focus on the city of Chicago in that metro area. Well, you may originally think, oh, I'm going to go to the football team, the basketball team, but these guys are calling for $10,000 a post. But then you start to go through our system and you realize that this field hockey player, softball player, baseball player, hockey player, combine, these four could do this campaign for $2,000 and you could get as big of a reach, if not a wider reach. And that's your Chicago metroland targeted area of Michigan fans that love the brand. Okay, you didn't get the football player that's the starting quarterback, but you just saved $50,000 and you still got the same eyeballs in Chicago with the Michigan IP to look at this opportunity with this brand.

Yeah, super interesting. I mean, I think a lot of this probably happened outside of sports over the last decade with Instagram. Right. With beauty, I don't know, beauty influencers and fashion and things like that. You know, identified counts, had massive followings and were relatively inexpensive to work with with outsized pull through because they have more, you know, more sway over people than a magazine ad which cost $30,000.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. It's just getting people comfortable now in this space with this movement of nil or endorsement deals outside of professional athletes, seeing the ROI and like, hey, this is real, this makes sense. Our brand should be considering this. I was just talking with someone who runs, you know, another city run organization and they're now thinking about doing deals with nil athletes that aren't the football, aren't the basketball to create awareness of this community and their love for the attention that the university gets and these athletes get. And hey, instead of doing this, this and this, let's try something with these athletes that aren't household names. But we know that by them wearing the gear and the logo and riding bikes around this town, that, that is what this town wants to see and engage with and follow. And so it's really, really interesting times.

I'm just waiting for the world where, you know, they coach my son's teams. And you always get the thing when you coach, hey, you want to sponsor you or your business want to sponsor the team for 250 bucks or whatever. Yeah. It feels so antiquated. But now I'm like, huh, do I want to sponsor the team or do I want to sponsor like that 12 year old who strikes everybody out? Right.

That's right.

Right. What's by the way, if you're a business and I know there's probably people who think this gets a little dystopian and as a parent, like there's a part of me that does feel that way, to be honest. But if I'm running a local business and the pitcher is wearing, I don't know, my shoes or my headband or whatever, and he's the only one like in some ways that stands out more than the whole team wearing it. And then all of his friends want to be like him or her.

That's right.

And wear that.

Well, we were on a thread earlier and I wanted to come back to this. I'm glad you brought that up. Which is I don't think the whole team would get the gear. But think about like you said, the star pitcher on that team or the star pitcher in this little seven year old league happens to get a deal or two because we with our technology are able to identify, hey, there's this athlete out there. Dad's maybe running his Instagram account, he's getting all these looks and then all the gears on that kid. Guess what every other kid in that league is wanting to do? Run over to Dick's and go buy blah blah blah blah, because so and so has it. So it's not really, you know, maybe outfitting the entire team, but it's outfitting certain individual athletes with that 12 year old, you know, organization, whatever. But it's scary, but that's where we're heading. I truly, truly believe it. And I think it's coming faster than we think.

Yeah, I touched on something. I did this post about Potts Down Scout like right out of the gate about six months ago. And one of the things touched on was like, you know, it used to be that I just take, you know, the big athlete. I'm in Philly Joe lmb. Right. Whatever he did was cool. Right. And it still is. But if you can get on a smaller level, the star player at the high school wearing a certain pair of sneakers, like, yeah, that's not going to influence millions of Sixers fans, but it's going to influence like 2,000 kids in that area to go buy that product. Because it's more relatable in some ways to see the cool kid at your school.

Yeah.

The cool guy in your town, like feels like a celebrity and lives in a different world. But the, the 12 year old pitcher who just happens to be the best is like might be your buddy.

Right.

And that is way more influential than what somebody's wearing on tv in lots of ways.

Yeah. So if you can create that mass movement with those micro influencers across the United States and combine that with, you know, their sport achievements, that's where I see this going. And I think you do as well. It's scary. Crazy, exciting and scary as a parent, but really exciting is what we're building here at Student athlete score.

Yeah. Last one for you. You have followers or an obvious metric? I know a lot of the social platforms are getting away from, you know, how much it matters.

Right.

The algorithms are taking over that TikTok style. If the piece of content is good, we'll show it to as many people as there that are willing to view it. Do you guys have other ways to value accounts or reach through engagement and, or referrals or anything like that that over time you're looking at as you can present the brands and say, hey, this kid's got like eight followers. But every video he posts on TikTok is a banger. Right. 20,000 views, high engagement, high metrics. What sort of other details can you guys glean from, from publicly available social data?

Yeah, so pretty much everything that you just said we have. We can show historicals, we can show bumps in their Instagram, their following, their engagement, their reach. We can show in most of our posts that they've ever made. We can show just posts with brand mentions. We can, you know, show a certain category of posts so we can go really, really deep on the data and make it extremely easy for whoever, however they're thinking about using that athlete and the data that they're seeing. Or maybe they're comparing 10 athletes and they're trying to figure out which one or which three to pick. We have all of that built in here in so many different ways that you can massage and manipulate the data to help. But yeah. So like how have they been tracking, you know, over time with their social accounts? What specific, you know, engagement reach Audience virality on every single post that they put out there, whether a brand's mentioned in it or not. I mean, if I just mentioned I caught a big fish today and I go on my Instagram account and post that with no mention of a brand, we're still capturing what were the eyeball attention and the engagement and the reach and the audience and the virality of that post.

Brent, I appreciate you joining. Why don't you tell our audience where they can find you, how they could find out more about student athlete score. Plug plug away, as I like to say.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it much. Pretty active on LinkedIn, so if you just type in Brent Wall, you'll find me amongst the others. But look for student athlete score Brentwal there. Happy to engage with you on that end. The company studentathletescore.com is our website, if you want to check us out there at. At one point, we were really, really focused on growing our social media accounts, as we should be. But since we've been to date a B2B player, we're just more focused on showing off, you know, what we have internally within our system. And so we're not, as a student athlete, is focused on building their brand on the social side. We want to build the brand through B2B partners. So. But again, if you want to visit us on Instagram, we're out there as well.

It's@studentathletescore.com right on the web.

Yes.

And yeah, no, by the way, I totally sympathetic to that. I'm running like a media brand here, but our audience is B2B and everyone's like, oh, you should do an Instagram account. Like, honestly, we get more bang for the buck from LinkedIn and our newsletters. But yeah, every day I was just talking to someone, I was like, every day, like, I just want to be consistent with social. So we'll get there.

That's the tough part, right? Like, you got to stay on it if you want to introduce that.

Yeah, yeah, Lane. All right, listen, Brent, appreciate your time. Thanks for joining and we'll look forward to hearing more from you guys soon.

Kyle, thanks so much.