Oregon Accelerator Uses Student-Led Approach to Partner Athletes with Local Businesses, National Brands

The obvious beneficiaries of name, image and likeness deals are the student-athletes who profit from partnerships with local businesses and national brands, but at the University of Oregon, students from the journalism and business schools are also capitalizing on NIL.

Oregon Accelerator is a student-led organization that provides creative, strategic, and actionable insights and resources to harness NIL potential for athletes while creating experiential learning opportunities for students.

“We have a roster of about 70 student-athletes across 13 of 18 varsity sports,” says Kelli Matthews, a professor in the school of journalism and the faculty director of Oregon Accelerator, who notes that earning a position as a project manager or in creative services is highly competitive for non-student-athletes. “We got 80 applications and we ended up appointing 30.”

Oregon Accelerator was born out of a desire to create opportunities for all students — not just student-athletes — to get hands-on, practical experience. University of Oregon senior and OA general manager Jonathan Schnoebelen explains that he has always wanted to work in sports, and he saw the value in supporting student-athletes, with all their time constraints and commitments, as they seek to take advantage of NIL opportunities.

OA blends strategy with creation while working with national brands that include Celsius, Dutch Bros, KT Tape, Olipop and Hollister. That said, the group predominantly partners with local businesses, such as the Lane Transit District.

“It’s everything from brainstorming all the way through collecting the analytics,” Matthews says. “I would say the vast majority [of deals] are social media. Probably 95%, if I had to put a number on it.”

For the Lane Transit District deal in particular, Oregon Accelerator partnered LTD with three student-athletes and created content for 11 posts, eight reels and 12 stories. Those social media posts garnered 13,780 interactions, 2,800 likes and over 33,000 views.

Says Matthews, “Their ridership is 40% students in this area, so that is an important audience for them. They were one of the organizations that came to us and said, ‘Hey, we know you have a good relationship with student-athletes. This is what we want to do. What do you think?’ We did all their photos and videos. We made sure the content was posted, and we gathered analytics for the brand. We are going to start a new campaign with them this fall, because they were happy with how that went, so we’re going to revise and do it again this year.”

“We had three rounds of photoshoots with our athletes,” Schnoebelen says. “The first one was really neat, because we went to Autzen Stadium and chartered an LTD bus. We drove it around the parking lot, shooting photos and videos with the athletes all together.”

While some of the partnerships and deals will be the same in the new school year, Matthews says change is on the horizon. The biggest change since the House v. NCAA ruling has been the clearing house, she says. Now, any deal OA works on that is valued at more than $600 must be filed through NIL Go, the official platform overseen by the College Sports Commission to track NCAA Division I student-athletes’ third-party NIL deals.

Even in the midst of a changing college sports landscape, Schnoebelen sees a bright future for Oregon Accelerator. “I’m excited about our growth,” he says. “We have taken off, and it’s going to be another great year ahead.”