Other than the thousands of baseball cards still in his possession from childhood, Jay Sharman doesn’t consider himself a collector. “But I have a collector’s mentality,” says the 53-year-old CEO of CollectU, a firm he founded in 2025 to market artifacts salvaged from stadium renovations and athletics department storage closets. That mentality comes in handy when Sharman visits a venue about to be leveled and points to the upcycling potential of myriad items — from facade rocks and bricks to seats, signage and synthetic turf — that might otherwise be discarded, their memories and potential profit margins forever buried in landfills. AB senior editor Paul Steinbach spoke to Sharman days after he attended the Oct. 2 grand opening of the state-of-the-art stadium at his alma mater, Northwestern University, where his completely unplanned career in reclamation began with the 2024 demolition of 98-year-old Ryan Field.
Why did you launch CollectU?
I just saw a giant opportunity in the marketplace. I am a die-hard Northwestern fan. I went to Northwestern. My previous job was running a media content company, and we were the Big Ten Conference’s marketing partner on the Big Ten Network. So, in addition to being a fan and having gone to a Big Ten school, it was my day job to be on top of all things college athletics. After nearly 25 years, that company shuttered, I was kind of in between what I was going to do next, and the origin story is pretty amazing, actually. I happened to be friends with the Ryan family, who’s very famous right now in college sports for Ryan Field and the big grand opening. In January of 2024, there’s a lot of transition going on at Northwestern — athletics director, president. It was kind of a turbulent time in the wake of Fitz [head football coach Pat Fitzgerald] being fired. I lived in the Chicago area at the time, and I reached out to my friend, the son of Pat Ryan — Rob — and said, “Hey, let me make sure that you and your family get what you need from the stadium. Send me your list.” And they had some seats and signage and a couple of random things. So, I got connected to the head of the construction project and went over there in late January. And I walked into the stadium in late January of ’24, and it looked like a gameday. And I turned to the head of construction, who I think thought I was a somebody because I was there on behalf of the Ryans, and I said, “Are you going to do anything with this stuff?” And he said, “What stuff?” I said, “Everything, like literally everything in the stadium.” And he said, “No, it’s getting bulldozed in 72 hours.” And I said, “Can I take it?” And he’s like, “I guess, but you got to be out of here in 72 hours.” I had just moved, so I called the guy who had moved me and said, “Bring a box truck. Bring some friends.” I spent the next 72 hours — literally with my own bare hands — pulling seats and signs. There’s a picture I have that I use in presentations. I was on the field shoveling grass in the end zone, and it’s a moment I remember, because, obviously, what are you going to do with this stuff? I can’t sell it out of the back of my truck. I used to run a blog for Northwestern just as a fan and am pretty connected there. I called the head of Northwestern’s NIL, a guy named Jacob Schmidt — he’s now at Michigan State, and I said, “Listen, Jacob, I got a deal for you. You don’t know me well. I’m pulling stuff out of the stadium. How about I’ll do all the work, I’ll pull everything out of here, we’ll prep it, I’ll market it, I’ll sell it. You be the front door, sell it through the NIL collective,” which at the time was called True NU, “and we’ll do a revenue share. You don’t write me a check. I’ll just take a cut.” He’s like, “Done.”
What happened from there?
Fast forward four months, and we had sold out all of our inventory. From April of 2024 to August, we sold about $300,000 worth of stuff.
How did you handle distribution?
I got paired up at the time with a guy who was a Northwestern alum and season-ticket holder who had a warehouse for a different business he ran, and we were very unsophisticated. We just sat there. Come pick it up. Or, we’ll ship it. He could ship stuff. Dozens and dozens of people came to pick up a section sign, and they paid $1,500 for it. And they wouldn’t leave. They would just want to tell the story — “My grandfather had season tickets” — and just share the emotional connection to the tangible piece. I was like, “Wow!” I always felt that way, but I didn’t realize there were that many people who felt that way. That’s when I knew I was onto something.
Did others see the potential?
I had a couple of companies that were interested in hiring me to build this out on behalf of them. They made some introductions, I went and got the deals, and then the next thing they are like, “We can’t hire you. Something came up.” And I was like, okay, I have to go do this on my own. The first six months of 2025, I funded it out of my own checking account. It was total bootstrap, and yet we were getting contracts left and right. We’ve built a pretty sophisticated operation now, and very quickly.
How did you know — starting from scratch as you did — what price to put on things?
We auctioned them to start out. Then we could see the demand. It’s a highly complicated business model. As you can imagine, an end zone seat or an upper deck section sign is probably less valuable than a 50-yard line lower bowl, just based on the economics of who sits in the seats. It was interesting.
How many items did you extract from Ryan Field?
It’s between 500 and 750 items, and we sold out of everything. Northwestern is currently a client. They hired us, CollectU, back in August, and we just relaunched the campaign because, unbeknownst to me — I thought I had gotten everything — as the demolition was happening, once I got kicked out of there, there was a whole bunch of other signs and other memorabilia that they pulled out themselves with the construction partner and kept in the closet, and so they turned around and we just launched an entire campaign.
With a client list that now includes Tennessee, Connecticut, Northeastern, Penn State and Boise State, how did grow so quickly?
One of the big turning points is I brought on an investor in May of ’25. I remember sitting in a room, and it was like a firing squad — 10 to 12 people all day long, 10 hours, person after person coming in, poking holes, and just trying to stress test stuff. And probably the smartest thing I did is fill my pickup truck with — at the time Penn State, Northwestern, Tennessee — a number of different items small and large. You know, you get into these academic conversations — people looking at spreadsheets. It makes them feel good because they feel like there’s some kind of certainty. I was like, “Listen, we have no idea how many clients we’re going to have. We have no idea how much we’re going to sell. We don’t even know what the assets are. But you’re not going to invest in me unless there’s a number there.” So, I walked around the room and I said, “Here’s what I can tell you.” And I remember I had a Section 127 sign and a Section 105 sign from Northwestern. “Same exact material, same exact dimensions. “The only thing different is the number on this, and more importantly, where it hung in the stadium. There is a $750 difference in what people paid for these two signs. This one went for $1,500. This one went for $750.” And they were like, “Somebody paid $750?” And then I walked around and said, “We’ll take foundation material from Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, clean it, seal it and turn it into a collectible.” And I said, “I can tell you we sold 150 these rocks in two hours at Tennessee at $150.” I go, “This is what I know. We took this crummy seat from Penn State’s presidential suite, put it on this beautiful base, and that’s a collectible. We have documentation and photos and videos of where this came from. We tell the story, and this went for $1,500.”
You have the provenance.
The provenance is huge.
What are other examples of variable pricing?
The best example is UConn. We will take a locker and sell the locker, but if Braylon Mullins sat in it as opposed to somebody at the end of the bench, the value is different. But then what we did is we took men’s and women’s lockers, cut them up, and we have an exclusive with a guy who creates rings. He injects the material of the UConn men’s and women’s basketball lockers into the ring, or the blue turf at Boise State into a ring. We sell tons of these rings. They’re $300, because you’re wearing a piece of the actual place. Or we’ll take game-used jerseys that can’t be used because of the portal and turn them into bucket hats and duffel bags and accessories. It’s really a memorabilia play.
What’s the hottest-selling item?
The appetite for wayfinding signs is insatiable. We have sold thousands of signs. UConn is redoing Gampel Pavilion, and the head of facilities there was almost “aw-shucksing” me. He’s like, “We don’t really have anything. We’re just redoing the locker rooms and the hallways.” And I’m walking down the hallways, and every door is UConn-branded — conference room, men’s locker room. I’m like, “That’s going to go for $1,000. That’s going to go for $300.” The same bathroom signs you can get at Home Depot for 10 bucks, they go for hundreds of dollars because of where they reside in an arena. If it’s across from the men’s locker room in a hallway, that could go for $250, just because of where it is. People want a piece of the stadium. I’ll tell anyone in your business, the number one thing I would do is put branding on the signs, and somebody down the road will be very happy. When we see wayfinding signs that are just generic, as opposed to spending the $3 or whatever it is to put a logo on it, we’re talking thousands of signs times hundreds of incremental dollars per sign. You’re getting into seven figures pretty quickly. You could have a janitor sign that says UConn on it. Wayfinding signs to people in your business is like white noise. You walk around and don’t even know it’s there. To somebody else, it’s like, “Oh, my God! Look at that!”
Are there items the marketplace just doesn’t support?
Actually, I think the dirty little secret is that seats don’t sell well. I think the perception of everyone is like, “Oh, my God, we’re going to sell 10,000 seats.” You have to think about the practicality of a husband and wife at home, and where’s that seat going? It’s much easier to buy something that hangs on a wall as opposed to something that takes up nine square feet in a basement.
Is there an item category that has just bottomed out to the point you don’t even want to deal with it?
I think seats are getting there — modern plastic, unbranded stadium seats. They’re really cumbersome to pull out, and you have to spend hundreds of dollars per unit to make it safe and usable. But there’s still a market for seats. Don’t get me wrong. If it’s Fenway and Wrigley and you had the old seats, yes, but most of these stadiums have been upgrading seats, and it’s not millions of dollars worth of seats. That’s the biggest misperception.
So you’ve talked athletics administrators into selling things that they just thought had absolutely no resale value whatsoever?
Every day. That’s my business. I signed a deal with Penn State the day before Penn State’s was doing a four-year, $700 million stadium renovation. I signed the deal on a Friday, and on a Saturday morning in January of ’25, they were demolishing the iconic sheet metal press box. I told the head of the entire project, who was awesome, “Listen, whatever you do, don’t let that sheet metal leave. I’ll be there on Monday.” Well, sure enough, I show up on Monday and there’s no sheet metal. It’s all gone. At Penn State they had a place called State Surplus. It’s kind of like a thrift shop, and we had to go there for another reason — they were holding some seats and stuff for us — and I walk in there, and the guy comes up and he goes, “Dude, what did you do with the sheet metal? Our phone’s ringing off the hook for how Penn State fans can get the white press box.” I was like, “I told you, I’m not nuts. Fans are nuts.” There’s a giant mound of rubble. So, he takes me, hard hat and all, I’m wearing PPE, and I get two 55-gallon barrels full of this white sheet metal. We cut it up, and we put it into a shadow box with a picture of the press box and a story of the history of the press box. We sell it for $300. It’s literally a piece of white sheet metal screwed onto a shadow box. It’s beautiful piece, and we’re only making 500 of these, so you can do the math on the gross revenue.
What’s your margin on something like that? You had to pay for the box. You had to pay for someone to put that together. What are you pocketing?
It’s well over a 50% margin on that.
What does Penn State get?
Our model is we take on all financial risk, so our partners don’t ever write a check. We take on all the responsibility, we recoup ourselves and then do a revenue share.
Why focus on the collegiate space initially?
One, I’m very connected. Number two, I know the mindset of collegiate CFOs and how they think. We had Northwestern as an example. And there has an industrial-revolution-level change of the mindset of colleges. Because of the competition for NIL dollars, they will go under any seat cushion for any available money in ways they’ve never done before. So, it sounds niche because of the name CollectU, but we didn’t mean to be so literal that we only work with universities. Colleges, and they will tell you this, are notorious for slow decision-making — bureaucratic, risk averse — especially state institutions. And there’s something really compelling about prioritization when a proverbial wrecking ball is sitting in the parking lot, and you’re saying, “There’s millions of dollars of revenue, and once that thing hits, it’s gone.” So, yeah, it was it was kind of comfort zone for me. The former commissioner of the Big Ten, Jim Delaney, is my senior advisor. He holds world class regard in the space, as well.
Affinity for college brands, especially among alumni, is huge.
It’s insane. We’re in conversations with several institutions right now to do non-athletics buildings. Now, it doesn’t always work, but if you have the right historic building at a university, there’s affinity towards it. At the end of the day, the business model is predicated on thousands of transactions a year, not hundreds of thousands. And you can’t tell me there aren’t 2,000 to 4,000 alumni at a smaller institution. I’ll give you a perfect example. Northeastern’s Matthews Arena was the oldest functioning collegiate arena in the country — original home of the Boston Celtics and the Boston Bruins, 116-year-old building, 4,800 seats. Northeastern is known as a hockey school. I’m 53 years old. I grew up in New England. Northeastern was a commuter school with a good co-op program. Now, it competes with Michigan as a top 30 institution in the U.S. There’s so much alumni pride there. Matthews Arena has a brick facade, and we did a presale. Part of this whole thing is scarcity, too. I would love to take everything to avoid the dump. People ask me who our number one competitor is, and I say the landfill. And you can imagine, I think we had four to six semi-trucks full of Matthews Arena things that we took out. Demo crews are our biggest fans, because they’re basically increasing their margin. They’ve already got a contract in place well before we come. We pulled out every locker. We pulled out hundreds of seats. We stripped every section sign, everything that came off a wall. We presold 1,000 bricks. We said we’re going to sell 1,000 of this famous facade and main entrance. They came with a plaque and we sold them for $150. Sold out in eight days at $150 bucks a unit. Furthermore, and this is crazy, we auctioned off brick number one, the very first brick taken out. It sold for $3,000. The difference between brick number one and brick number two was on the plate it said, “Brick No. 1 out of 1,000,” and it was the first one pulled out. The second one was $150. People look at these as treasured items. There is a massive sports collecting boom going on right now. The business was supposed to be $30 billion in the U.S. in 2023, and it’s projected to grow over $300 billion. It’s actually becoming an investment class, no different than wine, where people are literally looking at sports memorabilia as investments.
It just seems like in 2026 that there’s this thirst for nostalgia and ownership, and it’s no stronger than in collegiate athletics.
That’s a tough thing to measure. I don’t have the data to back up, but anecdotally, I agree. This is my own Jay Sharman theory on it, but I think there’s a COVID demarcation of loss of community. People don’t go into work anymore. They work remotely. Where’s the one place that people convene? I heard this all week long about Northwestern, before the game and after the game — that the new Ryan Field, that entire project, was built as a town-gown. Build a community. Pull Evanston in. It’s not a football stadium. It’s a football stadium on seven days. It’s a concert venue. It’s an art festival. It’s completely designed to integrate the community. There are very few places in our American society where we convene and feel as one with our team.
What’s the demographic of today’s collector?
Not surprisingly, our demographic — the majority of people who are buying — are over 40. And to be fair, 99% of our audience are not collectors. They are fans who appreciate history and nostalgia. I just lived it as an alum. I mean, it was a tear-jerking experience to be in this state-of-the-art new building. Our old stadium, which we were so prideful of, oh my gosh, it was kind of a dump. But we were there before it was trendy to come to Ryan Field. We were there through those really lean years.
What’s your biggest challenge as a company?
This service offering is essentially white glove demolition before raw demolition gets in there. The number one fear that we have on every single project is the person who’s been assigned at the university or the pro team to be in charge of the project says, “Okay, my head of construction is freaking out. How are you not going to slow them down?” And in most cases, there’ll be like a window. What we usually get when it comes to asset removal is, “Okay, you have five days,” or “You have seven days,” because there’s that setup time for the construction team to kind of get in there and just get all the safety measures in place and all the things they need to do before they actually start digging the dirt, and so that’s been our biggest challenge.
Is Jay Sharman on every job site, or do you delegate?
With rare exception, I’m there, but we have a staff. I have a VP of operations who runs all of this. I personally love it, so I’m also there. My favorite thing to do is to go on the site survey with the construction managers and the teams. I’ll give you an example why. We went to Boise State. We went on a three-hour tour with the head of facilities and Boise State execs, and in hour three, the very last thing we did, we went into a closet. I love closets. It’s amazing what colleges keep in their closets. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff in closets. Arizona’s not doing any renovations. We just signed them as a client. They’re like, “Listen, this is a little weird. We don’t have any renovations. Will you come clean our closets?” We filled up a half a semi-truck with probably half a million dollars worth of merchandise out of their closets.
Before we return to Boise, what was in the Arizona closets?
They had a new naming rights partner, so it was a ton of stadium signage. Final Four banners. Steve Kerr’s retired number banner. Beautiful artwork with mantras that hung in the locker room.
Why aren’t the banners in the rafters?
Instead of banners there, they have large signage.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve found?
The best all-time find, as I was saying, Boise State, we’re in a closet originally designed to be a racquetball space within the stadium. They turned it into a storage room, and they had all their marketing stuff, like T-shirt cannons and T-shirts for football games, sitting on this blue carpet. I’m like, “What’s this?” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s the only piece we know of from the 1986 original Boise State blue turf.” I was like, “Guys, this is the most valuable turf on the entire planet.” And it was sitting there. We’ve turned it into collectibles. We’ve turned into rings. It’s pretty cool to make a mini replica field of Boise State with the blue turf embedded in the mini field — the actual blue turf under the acrylic. The ’86 blue turf literally put Boise State on the map and transformed the university. It represents an entire culture of a university, not just sports.
Nebraska is selling Memorial Stadium urinals for $3,000 per unit through Rare Goods. Just how much competition — other than landfills — is there within this space?
We actually lost out on the Nebraska deal, as Rare Goods is Nebraska-based and had a preexisting relationship. For what it’s worth, we recently sold multiple urinals for UConn, including to Barstool Sports, who went on and on about it. They also purchased blue turf from us, and Pardon My Take’s set is outfitted in BSU blue turf, thanks to us. There are an increasing number of competitors coming into the space, but none that are as comprehensive as we are — at least in our assessment. The good news, as you zoom out on sports venues, is that there is a never-ending arms race, and therefore more than enough business to go around.
Do you collect?
I’m very selective. I’m more of a fan. I’m much more the person who is our buyer. I want that sign for that section because I sat there and I want to hang it on my wall because it gives me pleasure to look at it.
Did you keep something for yourself from Ryan Field?
I kept a section sign for myself. I didn’t go crazy.
