Meet Success With Honor, the Penn State NIL Collective, Version 2.0
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During his introductory tour as Penn State men's basketball coach, Mike Rhoades met with a group of donors, past and potential. Among them was Mark Toniatti, CEO of Success With Honor, the NIL collective endorsed by Penn State Athletics.
The availability of NIL funding at Penn State had been a concern of former basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry, who publicly discussed the deficiencies he perceived. Toniatti attended this donor meeting with Rhoades to re-introduce the newly independent Success With Honor collective and define its terms of success.
"If we can have our coaches identify their needs, and we fulfill the coaches' needs while making it a great opportunity for the athletes, then we've been successful," Toniatti said.
Success With Honor embarked on Year 2 and Version 2 as a collective on March 23, one week before Penn State introduced Rhoades at a press conference at the Bryce Jordan Center. After the media session, Toniatti and Kerry Small, Success With Honor's executive director, discussed the collective's past, acknowledged a few missteps and detailed their vision for its future.
Once operated by a national Name, Image and Likeness agency with more than a dozen college collectives, Success With Honor now runs as a stand-alone. The collective's board named Small as the executive director, hired a team of Penn State graduates and students and obtained 501c3 status to facilitate tax-deductible donations.
Success With Honor increased its social media presence, which Small said was lacking during the transition period that coincided with Penn State basketball's run to the Big Ten Tournament final and NCAA Tournament. The collective has reached out to major athletics donors, spoken with alumni groups and rebuilt its website to attract individual donors.
Ultimately, Small and Toniatti said, Success With Honor wants to capitalize on the fundraising boost of March, when subscriptions increased by more than 10 percent. The collective that supports Penn State's 31 varsity sports also wants to clarify its priorities.
"It was always a 31-sport collective and it’s still a 31-sport collective, but we are smart enough to know that ... we need to identify those people who have the passion for football and basketball," Toniatti said. "Our focus is on football and basketball."
Year 1 for Success With Honor
Success With Honor was formed in March 2022, Toniatti said, as the product of two collective pursuits.
Toniatti's initial team — which included Penn State alums Ira Lubert, Anthony Misitano, Bob Poole and Rick Sokolov — had been approached by former Penn State Athletic Director Sandy Barbour to form an NIL collective. Meanwhile. Penn State Trustees Anthony Lubrano and Jay Paterno were working on a separate collective.
The groups joined forces under the Success With Honor brand and signed a one-year operating contract with SANIL, a NIL agency. SANIL operated the collective, raised money, signed athletes to deals and handled promotion.
Though it doesn't reveal financials for competitive reasons, Success With Honor states on its website that it has executed contracts with 350 athletes on all 31 varsity teams totaling more than $2 million.i
But along the way, Penn State coaches and administrators sought to nudge those NIL efforts. Last summer, football coach James Franklin called NIL a today problem. "There is no long haul," Franklin said. "It needs to be now, it needs to be yesterday."
In December, Penn State Athletic Director Patrick Kraft said the NIL opportunities needed to improve but were better positioned than when he took over in May. "I don't lose as much sleep over that anymore," Kraft said.
But Shrewsberry evidently did. In December, Shrewsberry appeared on the Blue White Illustrated podcast, where he said Penn State men's basketball ranked "13th or 14th" in the Big Ten in terms of NIL funding.
"I'll call that a catalyst," Toniatti said.
Success With Honor Reintroduces Itself
By December, Success With Honor was re-calibrating. The board decided not to renew its contract with SANIL, instead orienting the collective around a core of Penn State graduates. That transition required time. Then basketball hit the heat map.
Small said that past and potential donors contacted him during the Lions' March run. In between meeting with donors and building its new platform, Success With Honor didn't capitalize on the broad public outreach opportunities that the tournament provided.
"On social media, we were a little bit slow during the Big 10 Tournament but we caught on," Small said. "But it's one of those things that, we were focused so much on the donors that we were talking to going forward. It was a learning lesson from where we were in November.
"We take responsibility for that. But now that we understand that, we've assembled a team that's addressing it. On engaging our fan base, we just have to be better about it, because we have a great story to tell. We just need to tell it better."
On March 13, the day after Penn State received its first NCAA Tournament invitation in 12 years, Shrewsberry conducted a Zoom call with a group of donors. Its purpose was to discuss capitalizing on the basketball team's momentum.
According to Toniatti, Shrewsberry provided those on the call with a dollar amount Penn State needed to raise to be competitive in NIL.
"We worked our tails off and exceeded that number," Toniatti said of the cross-section of donors who were on the call. "So when Micah left, we had the number that he was looking for."
Success With Honor re-introduced itself as an independent collective March 23, one day before Notre Dame officially announced Shrewsberry's hiring. Through that period, and the ensuing week in which Rhoades was hired, donor interest continued, Small said.
"We feel very confident that on the calls, even on the smaller calls we're doing with 15 or 30 people, people have changed their minds or increased their support of basketball," Small said.
What's Next for Success With Honor?
Through its first year, subscriptions and donations to Success With Honor ranked in this order: Football received the most, followed by wrestling, men's basketball and an all-sports pool. The collective now wants to prioritize Rhoades and the men's basketball program.
"We're going to focus a lot of energy on [football and basketball] because they require the most attention," Small said. "You can view it like 31 mini collectives in the sense that, when you donate to a sport, it stays in that sport. And right now our focus is on basketball because of the [transfer] portal and the enthusiasm."
Rhoades reiterated the need for a robust NIL program at his introductory press conference. "It's so important," he said. "Some people will tell you it's everything to build a program."
Toniatti said that, as an independent collective, Success With Honor plans to increase the share athletes receive. The collective intends to reduce overhead by 5 percent and distribute 90 percent of subscriptions to athletes. Success With Honor asks athletes to sign non-disclosure agreements regarding their contracts.
Success With Honor brands itself as a collective pursuing NIL "the Penn State Way." The group is organizing charitable events and youth camps to introduce athletes to fans. It has reached out to alumni and fan groups, including the Penn State Hoops Club, to build NIL awareness. It wants to teach more Penn State fans how NIL can benefit them by making them stakeholders in athletes' success.
But Small and Toniatti made clear that football and men's basketball will be their focus. Can the "Penn State Way" work for this new iteration of Success With Honor? Small believes it will.
"Our focus on football and basketball is something that we all can get behind," Small said. "But people think of NIL money as a finite amount based on who's given in the past or even who's within earshot. But the reality is, we want to make that pie gigantic. That means educating people.
"We're going to reconnect with them because Penn Staters love this university. And when you give them a good story that they can believe in, and I think our athletics and NIL done the right way is a good story, we're going to create a much bigger pie."
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