In this special Monday Morning Minute episode, Alec Lewis speaks with Christopher Wyatt, founder of Danes of Greatness, the NIL collective for UAlbany basketball. Wyatt shares his journey from team captain to NIL pioneer, and how his organization is reshaping college athletics by creating sustainable, NCAA-compliant ways for student-athletes to earn money and develop life skills. Through a growing network of corporate and community partnerships—including a collaboration with United Way—the collective empowers players to succeed both on the court and in the business world. Wyatt underscores that in today’s NCAA landscape, NIL opportunities are essential to recruiting and retaining top talent, and Danes of Greatness is building a platform that supports student-athletes during and after their time at UAlbany.
Summary of this Episode
Guests
- Joanna Pasceri: Director of Communications at O’Donnell and Associates.
- Alec Lewis: Vice President and Director of Campaigns at O’Donnell and Associates
- Christopher Wyatt: Founder of Danes of Greatness, the official NIL
Major Topics Covered
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- NIL and Danes of Greatness: Former UAlbany basketball captain Christopher Wyatt discusses founding Danes of Greatness, the official NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) collective supporting UAlbany basketball student-athletes.
- Mission and Impact: The collective helps players monetize their name and image through events, sponsorships, and appearances while adhering to NCAA compliance—building business skills and real-world experience.
- Community and Corporate Partnerships: Danes of Greatness partners with local organizations like United Way and businesses across sectors (e.g., printing, freight, apparel) to generate support for student-athletes without requiring direct donations.
- NIL in Recruitment: Wyatt highlights how NIL opportunities now play a critical role in college recruitment—giving schools with active collectives a competitive edge over those without.
- Beyond the Court: The initiative not only supports student-athletes financially but also prepares them for life after college through early exposure to professional environments, public speaking, and entrepreneurship.
Full Transcript of the Episode
Note: This is a generated transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Joanna Pasceri (00:02)
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us from the lobby with Jack O’Donnell, a podcast that gives listeners an inside look at state and federal politics with Jack, managing partner of O’Donnell and Associates, a top New York lobbying firm. I’m Joanna Pasceri, director of communications at O’Donnell and Associates. It’s a new world order for student athletes and college athletics full of opportunities in the name, image and likeness marketplace.
And our own Alec Lewis, Vice President and Director of Campaigns at O’Donnell and Associates, has become a New York leader in this arena. Alec has a special guest today, Christopher Wyatt, former University at Albany basketball team captain and founder of Danes of Greatness, the official NIL collective for UAlbany basketball and they are talking about working to amplify the voices and aspirations of UAlbany basketball student athletes, helping them to compete elite on and off the court.
Joanna Pasceri (01:08)
Hi, Alec and Chris, and welcome to the podcast.
Alec (01:10)
Chris, it’s great to have you on the podcast. And we are very excited at O’Donnell and Associates to be partnering with you and Danes of Greatness to grow the opportunities for student athletes in the Capital Region and beyond, and working with you to make good things happen in the Capital Region community.
Alec (01:26)
Now Chris’s background for our listeners, you obviously played in over a hundred games for UAlbany from 2001 to 2005 and are originally native of Pennsylvania. Now since UAlbany, I know you spent time living in Los Angeles, in New Jersey, and you also worked in the healthcare and technology sectors. Now while Danes of Greatness officially launched last year, I know you were involved for quite a bit of time before that working to get it off the ground. So as a self-described avid world, excuse me, let me go back.
Alec (01:58)
Chris’s background for our listeners, you played in over a hundred games for UAlbany from 2001 to 2005, originally a native of Pennsylvania. Now since UAlbany, you spent time living in Los Angeles, in New Jersey, and have worked in healthcare and technology. Now while Danes of Greatness officially launched last year, I know you were involved for quite a bit of time before that, working to get it off the ground. As a self-described avid world traveler, angel investor, and with your corporate experience,
Alec (02:26)
What drew you back to the world of college athletics?
Christopher (02:30)
Good question Alec. I actually had an opportunity with a cloud software company that I was working for at the time to move back to be closer to New York City. So I currently reside in New Jersey full time and being back in Jersey. I was able to get to campus a lot more, get in front of the players and the team, be able to talk with coach Dwayne Killings a lot more.
Joanna Pasceri (02:41)
Mm.
Christopher (02:56)
I lived in California for most of mycareer after I graduated from Albany and then coming back East from a proximity standpoint put me back closer to campus. also coincidentally, that’s when the house settlement basically said players can get paid for their name, image and likeness. And when I was, when I was at Albany, we didn’t have that opportunity and now we do. So
Joanna Pasceri (03:02).
Christopher (03:23)
As being a former player at University at Albany, it’s something that’s very inspiring to me to get off the ground so our players have the opportunity to compete at a higher level. And I know with what is considered a collective, it’s like an organized booster group or former alumni putting together opportunities for name, image, likeness for players. That’s something I wanted to make sure that we had for our basketball team.
So I founded Danes of Greatness and doing so the last few years, it’s been a challenging journey figuring out what’s going on. The world of sports moves extremely fast. So as being a player that didn’t grow up in this environment and wasn’t part of it, there’s a lot of learnings that I had to go through to figure out what NIL is, what a collective is and sort of…work with our athletic department to put something together that is compliant and sustainable, and that also followed the NCAA rules. So happy to be back closer to campus, happy to be part of the opportunity to help these young student athletes with opportunities for Name Image like this.
Alec (04:38)
And college athletics certainly looks a lot different in 2025 as it compared to how it looked in 2005 when you were wrapping up your time at UAlbany. And you talked about this a little bit, but since 2021 college athletes have been able to pursue NIL deals. you know, athletes can do it on their own, but collectives, which Danes of greatness is, Thanks
Alec (04:59)
operates formally independently from colleges or athletic programs, and they’re a different path for donors and fans to show their financial support to create new money-making opportunities for student athletes. So can you talk more about how does the collective actually work, and what’s the role of it in a successful college athletics program in the new world order of the NIL marketplace?
Christopher (05:24)
Yes, so absolutely. So the way the collective works in particular for Danes of Greatness, we have a few ways that players can essentially monetize their value. One is through the name image likeness where a player can go to a particular event. They can run some sort of camp. They can sign autographs. They can essentially be compensated for an appearance. Two, there’s the collective.
The collective essentially is focused on building out those opportunities for these young student athletes and coordinating almost as a catalyst or an intermediary between businesses to find them opportunities. And then also as far as one of our goals with the collective is to find corporate partners that we’re seeking to help on the back end and the partnership that we’re looking to do essentially. It’s one, it’s not asking companies for money. It’s essentially, I know with donor fatigue and asking additional money given tight budget.
It’s a way for us to engage with a variety of different businesses. And on the back end, it’s a way for us to have additional revenue streams. So those additional revenue streams essentially are brought into the collective and can provide opportunities for our players and our student athletes to have business deals and to have opportunities that are basically provided by the collective.
Alec (06:54)
that makes a lot of sense and it certainly creates enormous opportunities for the student athletes who are currently part of the program and future participants in the program. And I know Danes of Greatness under your leadership is focused on developing both community partnerships with nonprofit organizations to drive social impact in the capital region and beyond and promoting positive change, but also certainly having corporate partners as well.
Now, some of the existing corporate partners run from everything from printing to apparel, payroll, software, and freight. What if these partnerships look like to date both from the community partnership standpoint and the corporate partnership standpoint and what benefit have you seen for the student athletes?
Christopher (07:37)
So right now we are partnered with the United Way of the greater Capital Region. What we’re working on there is doing appearances to the community. So these student athletes can basically, there’s a variety of different initiatives that the Capital Region has for the United Way. Those are in the works currently on what we’re doing on just basically our players coming out and being able to relate to the community. I know we have
Joanna Pasceri (07:56).
Christopher (08:06)
players from New York and outside of New York and just being able to be part of the capital region and these high profile athletes coming out to show support for different community initiatives is important for the United Way. It’s important for the student athletes.
Joanna Pasceri (08:22).
Christopher (08:22)
It’s also important for the university. So we just want to show that we are connected to the community. We’re part of the community and I think from a relatability standpoint, this gives our players access to getting in front of more and more people that are in the capital region. As far as the corporate partners that you had mentioned from printing, from apparel, there’s FinTech, there’s freight, there’s a variety of different business solutions that we do have in a variety of different business sectors. So basically the offerings that we have are our partners essentially are able to either do a price match for whatever vendors a particular company is using and or it could be from a financial perspective.
Christopher (09:06)
Financially beneficial for that partner to save money. So if they’re using vendor A and they switch to vendor B, they essentially will either one, be able to save money or two, it’ll be a price match. And then what happens on the backend for the collective is essentially this is an additional revenue stream because part of the profits are shared with the collective. So we can reinvest that back into our student athletes. So that essentially is one of the goals that we’re trying to do in terms of raising awareness for how our community partners can be more effective and make more of an impact without writing additional checks.
Essentially, it’s through some of these corporate partnerships that we have with a variety of different vendors, depending upon what industry the company’s in and what their needs are, we have a variety of different things that can fit their needs and whatever they’re looking for.
Alec (09:57)
And Chris, I’m curious, when you think back to how you were recruited 20 years ago, what is the reality of recruitment now with NIL deals when you think about a 17, 18-year-old high school student weighing their options for D1 programs versus how was for you when you were being recruited?
Christopher (10:07) Yeah. So the game has changed and evolved a lot. And so I think part of the aspect of having a collective in place, and keep in mind, not all schools and universities and colleges do have collectives. It’s just one way to continuously have a competitive advantage. And so that is the goal for this, of having a collective. But the reality is now that a scholarship is not just enough.
Christopher (10:47)
In today’s world. And we’re talking about high level, very competitive college athletics. Players flock to higher resources, higher business opportunities, better experiences. And so those are the things that we’re trying to provide in addition to just a baseline scholarship. Because the reality is, if you have two offers at universities, you can go to university A and they do not have a collective.
Christopher (11:17)
but University B has a collective and they have opportunities for this student athlete to get reimbursed or to do appearance fees, to go to different community events and get appearance fees or basically have opportunities to essentially to make money off of their name, image and likeness. It’s a great opportunity in this window that these young individuals have to basically really take advantage of financial opportunities that they have never had before.
And so the goal here is really to one, yes, there’s financial aspects of it, but also part of it is really building out whatever our student athletes, whatever their dreams are after Albany, whatever their goals are beyond Albany is really creating a platform for this, for them, for their future. And part of this goes back to these opportunities from a business perspective.
Now, at 18, 19 year old, you’re working on public speaking, you’re working with corporate partners where you might not have that opportunity if NIL wasn’t there until you graduate from school or you’re in the corporate world. So really it’s trying to help build life skills for these young student athletes and provide them with business opportunities that they may not have had until their future.
Christopher (12:43)
when they graduate from school or they’re finished with college and just really preparing them for life and what’s next. But really as an 18 year old, if you’re able to bring opportunities for them and get them compensated, allow them to be in situations where they are dealing with corporate partners and understanding the business world. And this is more specifically, they’re able to get real life business experience at a younger age. And so the goal is really to prepare champions not just on the court, but after the court, off the court, and after Albany, beyond Albany, wherever these young men and women choose to go in their careers, Daines of Greatness is really trying to provide a platform to know that they’re always supported, they’re always loved, whatever their dreams, whatever their aspirations are, we have an infrastructure in place to help foster an environment for success.
Alec (13:38)
Well, it’s incredibly exciting and it’s really gratifying to be able to work with you and the program and creating more opportunities for student athletes to help them really compete elite on and off the court. So Chris, thank you so much for joining us today from the lobby and for sharing your insights into the exciting future of the NIL marketplace and college athletics here in New York. And let me hand it off to Joanna to close out the program.
Joanna Pasceri (13:42)
Thank you Alec and Chris for some great insight on the evolving landscape of college athletics and community building in New York. You can stay updated with all the Danes of Greatness activities at Danesofgreatness.com. That’s D-A-N-E-S of greatness.com. News is breaking fast on both the state and federal levels. Stay on top of what’s happening with our Monday morning memo. Information and insights sent right to your inbox each week. Subscribe on our website at odonnelsolutions.com. That’s odonnelsolutions.com. And for daily updates, follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and threads at O’Donnell and Associates. Thanks for listening, everyone. We’ll be back from the lobby with Jack O’Donnell.
