Wake Forest-focused NIL collective Roll The Quad launches

The NIL collective Roll The Quad officially launched Wednesday to support the NIL opportunities for all Wake Forest athletes. The first wave of Wake Forest athletes to sign with Roll The Quad will include football and men’s and women’s basketball players.

The agency Student Athlete NIL (SANIL) will power the organization. SANIL provides support for collectives across the country, including Crimson and Cream at Oklahoma and Success With Honor at Penn State.

The phrase NIL collective is a catch-all phrase for various organizations, which range from nonprofits to marketing agencies, that facilitate NIL opportunities for athletes. Roll The Quad will help facilitate NIL opportunities for athletes across all of Wake Forest’s athletic programs.

Here you can view the On3 database of roughly 200 NIL collectives across the country.

Roll The Quad’s board of directors includes Bob McCreary, Ben Sutton, Mit Shah, David Couch, Alan Fox, Robert McCreary, Don Flow and Michael Drum. Shah is a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks.

“There are some very, very, very big supporters,” SANIL co-founder and CEO Jason Belzer said in a phone interview.

Belzer said Roll The Quad will be another element of the selling points for athletes considering Wake Forest.

“You’re getting to go to an elite, private institution that is amongst some of the best private athletic programs in the country,” Belzer said. He said many Wake Forest students aspire to become doctors or lawyers, or to work on Wall Street.

SANIL’s plans for Roll The Quad

Wake Forest has a smaller student and alumni population than its peers. The university had a total enrollment of 8,950 students in the 2021-22 academic year, including 5,472 undergrads.

“Leveraging the Winston-Salem business community is certainly something that we’re going to have to be successful at to make sure that the collective’s successful,” Belzer said.

Roll The Quad’s website lists tiered subscription levels including $10, $25, $50, $100, $250 and $500 per month, as well as a one-time donation option.

The NIL collectives that SANIL powers often have a multi-faceted approach to fundraising. The collectives leverage subscriptions from fans and local businesses.

For example, Success With Honor, the Penn State-focused collective that SANIL runs, has a partnership with the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County. Subscriptions range from $100 to $1,500 per month.

“We’re allowing businesses to subscribe directly to the collective,” Belzer previously told On3 about Success With Honor’s partnership. “It’s a first-of-its-kind program that allows brands and organizations to receive immediate, turnkey, benefits for advertising, marketing and promotional services with student-athletes at major universities.

“The word collective is being used out there. But our work is really as an agency of record. Functionally what we do is represent all student-athletes at the university. So, what we want to do is create a frictionless vehicle for any business or fan to be able to work with student-athletes in any capacity.”

In addition to Roll The Quad, another Wake Forest-focused NIL collective called Top Hat Collective launched in April. The platform YOKE also launched the Winston-Salem NIL Club, which is a player-driven, membership-based community in which the participating players share the revenue equally.