BEAVER TOWNSHIP — When the NCAA approved its NIL policy on July 1, 2021, student-athletes nationwide became eligible to profit from their name, image and likeness.

At Youngstown State University, Ty Petrey and his company, H.D. Growth Partners of Liberty, oversee its Penguin Collective, the fundraising arm dedicated to helping Penguin athletes in all sports profit from their name, image and likeness capabilities.

“Our founder, Tim Petrey, is a YSU alum who felt like his contribution was to start the Penguin Collective,” Ty Petrey told the Curbstone Coaches during Monday’s meeting at Avion Banquet Center. “We are a separate business entity from YSU that works strictly with its student-athletes.”

Ty Petrey said there are multiple ways to help assist athletes in all sports with their rising profitability.

“The first way is partnering with local businesses, traditionally through commercials and promotions,” Ty Petrey said. “It’s like last year when Mitch Davidson, quarterback of the football team, appeared in multiple local commercials and at promotional events. Another way is fundraising with the various partnerships we already have available to them, where someone can purchase items from our website, for example, a monthly subscription, bottle of bourbon or even Penguin City light beer, and the proceeds from those partnerships help fund the NIL collective. In return, we collaborate with the athletes to do certain NIL endorsements throughout the community.”

Penguin bourbon, ‘The Red and White are Waving,’ is a take-off on the YSU fight song.

“Penguin bourbon is a partnership we have with a company called Swilled Dog Distillery out of West Virginia,” Ty Petrey said. “We basically have a white label agreement with them where a portion of the proceeds from that particular bourbon will be contributed and earmarked to YSU for its NIL funds. We saw that they had partnered up with Country Road Trust, which is the NIL collective for West Virginia University, just happened to have a connection with Brad and Brooke Glover, CEO and partners, were introduced and that partnership began almost immediately.”

Petrey notes that NIL has taken off since its approval a little over three years ago.

“This is a lot bigger than anyone had anticipated,” he said. “Our founder is the reason that I am in this role right now, just because he was not expecting how big this was going to turn out for YSU. We are one of the top NIL collectives for mid-major universities, so it has been awesome just being a part of this train, pushing the coals into the furnace and keeping this rolling.

“A typical day includes making a handful of phone calls to supporters, faculty and others that are interested in supporting student-athletes, just to talk and promote our NIL initiative and keep them updated. Sometimes there’s breakfast, a luncheon or dinner program we need to attend and we try our best to attend games in support of the athletes.”

While football, men’s basketball and women’s hoops garner most of Petrey’s attention, he said all sports deserve collective attention.

“I believe all sports deserve NIL deals, and I am one of those people that believes it should be spread around,” Petrey said. “We have already done deals with players from our women’s softball, women’s soccer and baseball teams as well.”

The NIL initiative continues to pick up steam and is only getting stronger.

“NIL, itself, is turning into a billion-dollar corporation over basically a couple of nights,” Petrey said. “I believe there will be more rules and regulations passed, hopefully soon, because there were jokes made that this is the Wild, Wild West, simply because there was a lot of gray area.

“Back in 2023, when I first started with our collective and the way things were going, they made everything less gray and there were go-aheads with a lot of things. However, the one thing they hammered down on were NIL collectives, which originally was allowed to start as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

“Right when we were starting, that was not allowed so I advised our board not to go that route, go the route of a marketing-advertising for profit entity and that was the route we took. Because of that, we have been successful dodging that and any problems with the IRS.”

On Monday, Dr. Ray Duffett, YSU team physician and sports medicine expert, will serve as guest speaker.