Pioneering College Cards Transform NIL Space
Sports cards have a certain way of bringing out the kid in nearly anyone. Just ask Cleveland State’s women’s basketball team, which attended a card show in Broadview Heights, OH in December and instinctively began tearing through packs of cards, oohing and aahing at the likes of JuJu Watkins and Hannah Hidalgo. Technically, Watkins and Hidalgo are competitors vying for the same national title as CSU, but that didn’t seem to matter.
One other thing separated the Vikings from everyone else doing, essentially, the same thing at the show: a bunch of the cards available included their own names, images, and likenesses.
That reality was made possible by the show’s producer, Greenie Sports Cards, which abruptly added “college athlete card manufacturer” to its broad array of activities in 2023.
It was certainly a happy accident. Greenie, which draws its name from founder Steve Greenberg, wanted to give one-off cards to celebrity guests at their signature Great Lakes Collectors Convention that spring, though they were shut down by a Cleveland State staffer when it came to one of those guests, star hooper Destiny Leo.
That didn’t sit well with Greenberg, who then poured unprecedented levels of commitment into what was initially just supposed to be a fun giveaway.
“We were like okay, let’s figure this out,” he said. “We kind of went to the drawing board, I had already trademarked our name, so I contacted our trademark attorney, and I was like hey, how do we come up with an NIL agreement?”
That inquiry led to a crash course over the summer, as Greenie initiated conversations with universities, NIL collectives, student-athletes, and agents, in addition to getting the necessary legal help to craft appropriate contracts.
Eventually, they were ready to try again with Leo and a re-worked, NIL-driven autographed card. Though they sold some of that pilot effort, Greenberg admits that it was “more about doing something for her,” after the awkwardness at the GLCC.
While that may have been true, the idea quickly proved to have momentum well beyond anyone’s expectations. Within a year, Greenie’s portfolio included more than 90 student-athletes, from teams as diverse as Washington baseball and Iona women’s lacrosse, selling cards for $20 each, money that the two sides split, after costs.
“He kind of reached out to all of us, and came up with the great idea of making each of us our own individual card,” Leo said. “People can purchase them through their website, he posts [on social media] a lot, the girls also post their cards out, which is really cool.”
“The model being open to any team, any school, any player gives us a pathway, without having to guess who’s the next big athlete, or whose card is going to be hot,” added Jeremy Levine, Greenie’s marketing chief. “There’s a model for these student-athletes to make money within the NIL space, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
