With college football looking more and more like professional football by the day, there is an increased need for efficiency. Scheduling. Recruiting. Budgeting. Deal-making. Compliance. Payments. College coaches are now being asked to do more than ever, creating a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for ambitious software companies.

This is where Teamworks comes in. Founded by former Duke Football player Zach Maurides, Teamworks has established itself as the go-to player in college sports.

Think of Teamworks as the internal operating system for an entire athletic department. College coaches use the platform to communicate practice time with players. A team doctor uses it to map out weekly medical rehabilitation plans. A nutritionist uses it to tell athletes what’s on the menu for team dinners, and athletes use it to reserve game tickets for their family and friends.

The software is incredibly comprehensive, and it wasn’t built overnight. Maurides founded the company in 2004 while he was still on Duke’s football team. The business has since raised $165 million in venture capital and now has over 450 employees.

Teamworks provides tech to over 300 professional sports teams, including teams in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Indian Premier League, and across European football.

The company also currently works with more than 700 NCAA institutions — and with the introduction of NIL and the recent House v. NCAA settlement, which will allow schools to directly share over $20 million in annual revenue with its athletes as soon as next year, Teamworks’ college sports solution is becoming even more critical.

Teamworks recently announced its acquisition of NIL tech platform Basepath. This is a big deal because Basepath currently works with 75+ schools and NIL collectives across college sports, including The Grove Collective (Ole Miss), Happy Valley United (Penn State), Classic City Collective (Georgia), and Rising Spear (Florida State).

These schools use Basepath to do basically everything when it comes to NIL. That includes things like recruiting and roster management, as well as the actual signing of NIL contracts, transfer of payment, tax preparation, and, eventually, revenue sharing.

Basepath was only a few years old and wasn’t a massive company, with about 15 full-time employees. But by integrating this software into their existing infrastructure, Teamworks is now the clear market winner, working with 99% of all Division 1 schools to secure its spot as the go-to platform for the next phase of college sports.

This is the type of stuff that excites me. While most people don’t even think about the technological backend of collegiate athletics, Teamworks did its homework after seeing that the changing landscape was creating a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

Teamworks started by conducting over 75 discovery phone calls with athletic directors and coaches at the country’s biggest schools. And while there were way too many issues discussed to include in one newsletter, three key problems emerged.

1. Increased Athlete Earnings: The money paid out to student-athletes, mainly driven by NIL, has gone up 20% per quarter since NIL began, according to Teamworks.

2. Complex Compensation Structures: Managing athlete payments will only get more complicated, and there will be multiple revenue streams.

3. Player Valuation and Roster Construction: Athletic departments will need reliable data and value measurement tools for player evaluation and roster construction.

With this in mind, Teamworks has spent several years building a comprehensive, one-stop-shop solution for hundreds of NCAA clients.

Teamworks Personnel includes several components — Teamworks General Manager, Teamworks Influencer, Teamworks Wallet, and Teamworks Intelligence. Each product would be incredibly useful on its own, but when you combine them, it’s even better.

For example, college GMs will work with the coaching staff to use the Teamworks General Manager product to work on roster construction and cap management, efficiently allocating the school’s NIL and revenue-sharing budget to different players.

Teams will then use Teamworks Intelligence, powered by Zelus Analytics, to identify players to target in the transfer portal. With five years of student-athlete data across all FBS schools, including position-specific metrics like arms strength and pocket awareness, recruiting staff can make objective roster decisions to build their best teams.

Zelus Analytics is widely used and highly respected by professional sports teams worldwide. In fact, this leading sports intelligence platform has even received investment from the “Moneyball” man himself, former Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane.

But after coaches have locked their rosters through a combination of Teamworks tools, it’s not like the job isn’t finished. They still need to pay players the money.

Enter Teamworks Wallet. Teamworks Wallet is essentially a digital banking solution that enables student-athletes to receive, store, and spend money.

In simple terms, this is one centralized account for athletes to receive all payments, including collective payments, NIL earnings, scholarships, and revenue sharing. There are no transaction fees or monthly deposit minimums. Players can earn income on the money through high-yield savings accounts, and Teamworks helps them prepare for the inevitable year-end tax bill by setting aside a portion of the money for Uncle Sam.

Purdue and its NIL collective — Boilermaker Alliance — implemented Teamworks Wallet technology earlier this year, and the results were promising. Teamworks says 95% of Purdue’s student-athletes activated their Teamworks Wallet Visa debit card in their Apple Wallet, and there were over 160 transactions within the first two weeks of athletes receiving their debit cards.

This is a critical component of the workflow, as the wallet is not just a digital bank for NIL deals, but the entire athletic department, which will soon include revenue sharing.

The college sports landscape is still changing every day. A few years ago, players could not legally profit from their name, image, and likeness. But today, top recruits like Bryce Underwood at Michigan are signing eight-figure NIL deals, and college coaches are now spending as much time on roster retention as recruiting.

So, while many people don’t think SaaS companies are sexy, especially in sports, Teamworks has built an impressive and valuable business with a strong moat.

This technology will only become more valuable as time goes on. Revenue sharing is coming to college sports soon, but that will only complicate things even further.

Programs like Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Texas now effectively run billion-dollar businesses. These football teams act as the marketing department for the school’s admissions office. They need the appropriate infrastructure in place to ensure everything continues to run smoothly, and Teamworks has uniquely positioned itself as that solution through innovative products that solve real problems.

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