SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The Notre Dame football team arrived at Success Academy on the west side of town by 5:30 p.m. after practicing that morning. Ohio State was still two weeks away, training camp had just broken and the program — minus the freshman class, due to mandatory on-campus orientation — wanted to get in a different kind of work. It’s just that they’d never done something exactly like this before.
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The event was the first of its kind backed by FUND, the collective started by Brady Quinn and designed to back Notre Dame athletes in the NIL space while pairing them with local charities. Individual players — Michael Mayer, Isaiah Foskey, Blake Fisher and Logan Diggs — had already done individual work with local nonprofits through FUND, which compensates players directly and donates to the charities they support. When FUND launched in April, the hope was it could scale up to support entire programs.
On Aug. 19, that moment arrived.
All FUND needed to do to make the event work was for 65 football players to get themselves independently to Success Academy on time to work with the Boys & Girls Club of St. Joseph County, then do the same thing a day later with Cultivate, a food rescue organization 5 miles from campus.
“As a whole team being able to come here and be together, it’s good for everybody to be able to do this,” Mayer said. “The fact an opportunity like this presented itself is pretty cool. I think right away when people heard about this opportunity, they wanted to be a part of it.”
Notre Dame had perfect attendance at both events, working with dozens of elementary school kids Friday — the players rotated among gym, reading and robotics stations — and preparing 2,273 meals during three hours of work at Cultivate on Saturday. The meals go to local children in backpacks they take home for weekends, helping families dealing with food insecurity. Some of the food Notre Dame sorted was its own, as Cultivate rescues unused food from the training table at the Gug.
This is what Quinn hoped FUND could deliver for Notre Dame upon its foundation, with Tom Mendoza, who endowed the university’s business school, a key part of the operation. To make the NIL part of this venture work, Quinn had to raise the funds to support not only Notre Dame football but ideally other sports. FUND already has agreements in place with men’s and women’s basketball. Freshman football players are part of FUND too, just not that weekend. The football program plans to do another FUND event during the idle week.
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Quinn said FUND has already raised more than $5 million and is closer to $10 million. By next summer he hopes FUND will reach a level at which NIL payments to players could function like an endowment, making it sustainable even as the organization continues to fundraise. Quinn said fundraising to date has been focused on high-net-worth individuals, with plans to broaden that focus in the coming months.
For the football-specific events, all players received the same NIL benefit, regardless of their roles within the program.
“We felt like it was important to make sure we take care of as many student-athletes as possible,” Quinn said. “We didn’t want differences among players or potentially any locker room issues. It’s a level playing field.”
As Notre Dame continues to recruit in the NIL era — Sept. 1 marked the first day of contact with prospects in the 2024 cycle — the purpose of FUND is not to match some of the big money up-front deals like the potential $8 million one The Athletic reported earlier this year. However, Notre Dame needed something NIL-related to put in its recruiting pitch. The fact every scholarship football player now has an NIL deal through FUND helps satisfy that.
Higher profile players — Mayer signed NIL deals with apparel companies Levi’s and Rhoback — still have the chance to seek out additional NIL contracts.
“We want the decision to come to Notre Dame to be for Notre Dame, the education, the football. That’s what’s life changing,” Quinn said. “NIL is not life changing. It might be for a period of time, but for 99.9 percent of student-athletes, it’s not.
“Our differentiator compared to other schools out there is that our mission isn’t just for the student-athletes, it’s impacting the communities.”
Jacob Lacey and 64 teammates made a Boys & Girls Club appearance Aug. 19. (Courtesy of the Boys & Girls Club of St. Joseph County)On that front FUND’s weekend of team events for Notre Dame football looked like a success. Rylie Mills and Joe Alt read to kids in the hallways of Success Academy. In the gym, Lorenzo Styles tried to get Evan, a shy grade school kid, to play basketball. It took three attempts to get Evan to un-clutch himself from his mother’s leg, but he finally joined Styles on the court. Evan hugged Styles at the end of the event and asked when he’d be coming back.
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At Cultivate, the 2,273 meals prepared broke the organization’s hourly record. Foskey got involved with the food bank after being familiar with food rescue growing up in Northern California. Though some of the charitable organizations championed by players are well known like the YMCA and Boys & Girls Club, the food rescue southwest of campus was more off the grid.
Foskey started working with Cultivate on his own earlier this year by preparing meals. Then he delivered the meals to schools on Fridays so kids would have them for the weekend. He brought his parents to a Cultivate event during the Blue-Gold Game weekend in April.
“We don’t have a very big marketing budgeting. We’ll take any way we can to get the word out or get our story out there,” said Laura McNally, communications and educational coordinator at Cultivate. “Athletes have a lot bigger following than we do. The Notre Dame football name goes a long way.
“When the team came I posted pictures on all four of our social channels and they were all the highest viewed and commented posts of the year.”
What the added visibility means for fundraising or volunteerism at Cultivate or the Boys & Girls Club over time remains to be seen. But as far as introductions into the NIL world go, what FUND has been able to deliver to the Notre Dame football program and local charities appeared to be a match. And the more FUND can raise, the more opportunities for Notre Dame’s athletes and local organizations that need the help.
“We’re really trying to find something for every single sport at Notre Dame,” Quinn said. “The events with the Boys & Girls Club and Cultivate for football demonstrates that this is a team, on the field and off, not just going to Ohio State this weekend and for the rest of the season, but when they’re done playing, too.”
(Top photo courtesy of the Boys & Girls Club of St. Joseph County)
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