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Today’s Case

College baseball stars sign NIL deals with tech company Rapsodo

Ahead of the 2024 college baseball season, five top MLB Draft prospects are enhancing their training with a new NIL deal.

Blake Burke of Tennessee, Brody Brecht of Iowa, Chase Burns of Wake Forest, Jac Caglianone of Florida and Vance Honeycutt of North Carolina signed with technology company Rapsodo to add new elements to their games.

The company creates professional-grade baseball, softball and golf training devices at affordable prices to allow athletes at all levels to elevate their skillsets. Tapping into the NIL space with a roster of top MLB Draft prospects should help showcase the technology and corresponding data that make the brand a trusted resource across college programs around the country.

Rapsodo’s roster of NIL athletes will help promote the brand's HITTING 2.0 and PITCHING 2.0 devices, which use innovative radar and camera technology to provide instant feedback and advanced analysis to athletes. Their newest diamond sports product - the PRO 3.0 - is used for both hitting and pitching in live-on-live situations, utilizing three cameras and two radars to track full ball flight.

This past June, Rapsodo signed two softball players (Tiare Jennings and Nicole May of National Champion Oklahoma) and four baseball players (Ben Wiegman and Greg Farone of Louisville, and Rafe Schlesinger and Alejandro Rosario of Miami.)

The Verdict

• The marriage of tech and NIL will continue to grow

  • With tech being at the forefront of society, along with opportunities to work with college athletes, more companies will want to partner to gather athlete data for their products.

  • Specificially, sports tech is a billion-dollar industry, so there should be no shortage of partnerships for the foreseeable future.

• Numerous content angles

  • For the five signed athletes, I’d be interested to see the content creation that comes from the posts.

    • Hopefully it will show real-time data, along with the benefits of the products. In turn, the company promotes affordable products, so look for these posts to convert to sales. (And hopefully athletes earning some commission.)

• What sport will be next?

  • Rapsodo’s products seem to have carryover into other sports. Along with golf, I feel products related to lacrosse, ice hockey and field hockey will drop in the future. (Purely speculation on my part, though.)

Student-athletes: leverage your NIL for community service

This is a great way to get involved with local organizations as we are now in holiday season. Check out this video for more!

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