The SportTechie Awards highlight the teams, executives, sports technologies, venues, investors and leaders that most deserve recognition for their work in pushing our industry forward. To view all the 2018 categories and nominees, click here.

The premise behind the OneTeam Collective is creating a space at the intersection of investments, startups, and athletes. While the NFL Players Association brings in more than $160 million each year from companies like Electronic Arts, Fanatics, and Nike, through the OneTeam Collective, it still makes space for early-stage companies like Octi, StatMuse, and Hashletes.

Before the OneTeam was founded in December 2017, many startups might not have considered a marketing initiative through the NFLPA in the realm of the possible, let alone the sort of thing their seed-round and Series A investors would consider a worthwhile venture.

“We began our thinking as more of a traditional investor,” said Ricky Medina, a co-founder of OneTeam Collective and Head of Business Development at NFL Players Inc., the marketing and licensing arm of the NFLPA.

“But after talking to our founding partners like Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins and BlackRock, we really focused on what our value proposition is: the intellectual property rights we own for 2,000 current NFL players.”

Startups apply as they would any other accelerator. The only constraint is that the company must fall under the broad umbrella of improving player performance on or off the field. OneTeam Collective’s board reviews the opportunities that come in and selects which companies will join the portfolio.

The board is made up of not only experienced venture capitalists and investors, such as representatives from the founding partners, but also a group of athletes. The Athlete Advisory Board has eight current and former players, whom Medina describes as “very well-seasoned and educated on what a good investment opportunity looks like—the Kelvin Beachum’s and Russell Okung’s of the world. They have leveraged their platform to educate and inform themselves, and ultimately to be in a position to decide where investment makes sense.”

Like other accelerators, OneTeam Collective works with startups in exchange for equity. But unlike standard licensing agreements, that equity grants startups access to exclusive intellectual property rights held by the NFLPA. A common next step for portfolio startups is working with players individually. The OneTeam Collective then steps back into a facilitator role as startups and players sound each other out for follow-on marketing, hiring or investing opportunities.

“One thing our partners will say about the NFLPA is that we truly try to get players involved in the businesses. We know football takes a lot out of the players—it has a 100 percent injury rate—so we want to make sure we maximize their time in the league to get involved with our venture capitalists, our sponsors, the world of tech and investments,” said John Fitzpatrick, Marketing Manager at NFL Players Inc.

“At conferences like [the USA Sports Analytics & Technology Conference] we try to bring out active players because we want players to be involved. That’s one of the key selling points of the NFLPA: players can get involved because they want to get involved.”

While Fitzpatrick says the initial contact is usually very straightforward and traditional—a startup wants a player endorsement—the company quickly learns how much more players can and want to bring to the entrepreneurial environment.

“Those players are extremely driven,” Fitzpatrick said. “They come through high school, college, and professional football as the best of the best of what they do. They know how to win, they know how to succeed, they know how to collaborate and work as a team. They’re natural-born leaders.”

Couple those qualities with a fascination for technology and innovation, and you have players going deep into blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, and wearables.

Ricky Medina sees the OneTeam Collective at the leading edge of the macro trend of athlete investment. As it enters its third year, the goal is to position the OneTeam Collective to growth-stage companies. The value proposition remains much the same as it was at the outset: Athletes.

“How can we make that group of really smart people and connected influential people relevant to our portfolio companies, so those portfolio companies get a level of value they wouldn’t get through a traditional accelerator or a traditional investor?”

For the impact that the NFLPA’s two-year-old accelerator is already having on many of the relationships that exist between players, their union, and league licensees, and the initiative’s future potential, we have selected the OneTeam Collective as SportTechie’s Outstanding Investor for 2018.