Student-Athlete Toolkit on Name, Image & Likeness: The Process
Over the course of a seven-week period, I created a toolkit for NCAA student-athletes on the evolving rules related to name, image and likeness. The toolkit was designed in the form of a booklet with information about student-athletes’ new opportunities to use their name, image and likeness to earn compensation – something that was previously impermissible for NCAA student-athletes to do under amateurism rules.
From my experience working with student-athletes over the last three years, I have discovered that they don’t know a lot about what is and isn’t allowed as a student-athlete when it comes to social media. The goal of this booklet was to help student-athletes understand the opportunities they have once the new legislation goes into action in the fall of 2021.
You will find the steps to my process below, along with links to blog posts from the past seven weeks and photos taken through the process.
Student-Athlete Toolkit Project Proposal
Blog: Project Management Plan – May 31, 2020
The proposal for my project was the skeleton for the end product. I outlined my ideas alongside the problem statement and added the information that needed to be included in the booklet. The proposal included my goal, which was to provide student-athletes a toolkit for when their opportunity to earn compensation off their name, image and likeness came into being.
I laid out the essential information that was going to be included, and I planned the artifacts that were going to help me add key information for the booklet that I may not have found through research.
Here are a few parts of my proposal.
I then broke down the specific questions that I, as the researcher and creator, would need to answer for the readers. I wrote out what my plan was going to entail: research, design & execution.
Research/Planning
Bibliography
In order to create a toolkit for student-athletes, I had to research about name, image and likeness. Working in college athletics and being a former student-athlete helped me to have general knowledge of the current restriction’s student-athletes have and what is being discussed to change. But, I needed to find out more and really breakdown what the new rules could look like in a language that is easier to understand than what the NCAA publishes.
In addition, I used Notion to consolidate my plans and outline what I needed to do each week to finish the project.
Artifacts
Artifacts Blog: What is the Real Scandal Here? – June 7, 2020
In order to gather more information about what student-athletes know about name, image and likeness, I went straight to the source. I interviewed four Quinnipiac student-athletes on a Zoom call and asked them about the old and new rules about name, image and likeness. The information they provided was very insightful and helped me design the information even more specifically for the toolkit. (I kept their names and images private for confidentiality.)
My first draft of the booklet was basic. It included the final copy that I knew needed to be in the booklet to provide student-athletes with enough information. But, the design aspect needed some tweaking. After rethinking the design, I changed the layout drastically and found inspiration from other sources that really helped me in the end.
In addition, a grid layout was used in the final draft. This created more of a magazine look-and-feel to the booklet.
Printing Process
Blog 7 – July 2, 2020
After revising my first draft and completing the final draft, I then moved on to the printing process. I quickly realized that in order to print my booklet, I would need to become familiar with the InDesign feature called Print Booklet and the process of imposition. Imposition is the process of reordering your pages so that the first and last page are printed on the same sheet of paper. This took some time to organize, but I figured out that InDesign can create a PostScript File, which imposes a booklet for you.
Student-Athlete Toolkit on Name, Image & Likeness
Final Product
My final booklet came out to be 24 pages (12 sheets of paper). I printed the booklet on 8.5×11 paper with a 2-up Saddle Stitch.
I believe my booklet is a great starting point for this evolving landscape in college athletics. I plan to add information as it released to the public over the next few months as the NCAA Board of Governors continues to vote on different aspects of the legislation.
You can see a PDF version of my booklet HERE:
MAGGIE PRUITT 