Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript taken from part of WRBB Sports’ recent interview with Northeastern Athletic Director Jim Madigan. You can listen to the full 40-minute interview as a podcast on The Northeastern Hockey Show or Hockey East This Week feeds, which is available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The following questions and answers have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Matty Wasserman: Name, Image, and Likeness [NIL] in college hockey is obviously a little bit behind other major college sports. Where has that put Northeastern on the trajectory in terms of developing its NIL, and where would you say Northeastern is with NIL right now?
Jim Madigan: I’m monitoring what’s going on with our peer institutions on the hockey side, both men’s and women’s. There are some Big Ten schools in that space, for obvious reasons. I’m not saying that there aren’t some schools in Hockey East, but we’re not losing young men [to NIL]. We actually lost a young woman player to a Big Ten program for a little bit of money, but we’re not losing players right now because of NIL.
Right now, we’re providing our men’s and women’s ice hockey players and men’s and women’s basketball players cost of attendance, as well as Alston-related benefits. Not all the schools in Hockey East are doing it, so that’s the start there. It gives us a leg up. I think there’s probably about six or seven schools in Hockey East that are doing that right now. So we’re doing the right things to make sure that we’re still prioritizing men’s and women’s basketball and men’s and women’s ice hockey.
We’re bringing in a little bit of money this year on the men’s basketball side through NIL, which is through our legitimate 501(c)(3), nonprofit. And we’re actively out there letting folks know — our alumni, family and friends — if they want to support NIL activities, that they can do that.
I’m mindful of how it might cannibalize our athletic development program, because we still need funds to help supplement our programs so the coaches can provide a certain standard of support for our programs. So we’ve got to be mindful of both. The university does a good job providing the school funding with a quality budget. But then there’s all these things that our coaches always want to do that come from private philanthropy.
And, there’s the NIL component of how we’re going to maintain and retain our students. So we can’t let [NIL funds] cannibalize one program for the other. So it’s trying to get people to understand, ‘hey, maybe you can support both or, you know, or support one little more this year than the other.’
Wasserman: How much of that is a donor or someone who wants to contribute to Northeastern athletics, saying, ‘look, I want to make a contribution to Northeastern athletics and you as the athletic department can divide that up,’ versus a donor saying ‘I’m interested in supporting the men’s basketball team through X contribution’?
Madigan: We’re donor centered, so wherever the donor wants to drive the dollars towards, that’s up to them. I’m just saying both are important. And you as a donor, you as a contributor, you decide where you want to make the greatest impact for your gift. And we do that anywhere within our development system, whether you want to give to the College of D’AMore-McKim School Business, to College of Engineering, to Athletics, to the library, to scholarship, wherever you want to give, ‘hey, we appreciate that support.’
When you give to the NIL collective, it’s not to the University, but it is still supporting our athletic programs. So there’s a little change within the new rules coming that hopefully we can adopt in April of 2025, where then we can have NIL all in-house. That will be nicer, so that we can be that much more aggressive in asking for donations to our NIL in-house. And it allows us to be a little bit more equitable from a Title IX perspective, because when it goes outside to third-party NIL, there are no rules on gender equity and Title IX.
Luke Graham: On a personal level with NIL, you came in as AD in mid June of 2021, and NIL became official in July. How prepared were you to make that change and then what were the steps that you had to take between June 2021 and now to prepare Northeastern for NIL?
I took the job on June 17, and it was my parents 60th wedding anniversary. My family lives in Toronto, and all my family and my two sisters from Canada were there celebrating….So two or three days after that, the NCAA lost the Alston lawsuit, and then right after that, the NCAA just threw their arms up and just said, ‘NIL effective July 1.’
So literally, within two weeks of getting the job, I went from being the dumb hockey coach to now I’m supposed to be a smarter administrator, and I’m like, ‘What the hell is happening here guys?’ They’re asking, ‘what’s our NIL policy,’ I’m looking at them like they’ve got five heads. I’m just trying to figure out where the bathroom is here in Cabot. So thank God we had a great staff. Regina Sullivan, Marshall Foley, our Office of General Counsel was there to help me through that process.
I was drinking out of a firehouse, even when I got the Athletic Director job. But we managed through it. We were on the sidelines for a little bit, just because, some of our alums, and I get it right — some of our alums, think, ‘jeez, I don’t want to get into pay for play. I don’t want to support paying our student athletes.’ And I understand that philosophy. But the amateur model is gone. It’s no longer there.
It used to be that the head football coach and head basketball coach probably made more than every president in the Power Four, Power Five Conferences. Now, can you imagine the quarterback, the starting point guard, the receiver, the edge rusher — they’ll make more than the present of the University on their respective campuses. Like, the model has changed significantly. So for us to be competitive, we have to be in that space of NIL and still maintain support for our athletic programs through regular donations. We have to be there, because that old model is done. It might not be a cup of tea or the appetite of everyone, but there’s going to be more people getting into that space. Because if you want us to be successful, we need to be in that space.
I hope that we can get to about a couple hundred thousand this year for men’s basketball, and we’re on our way to getting there. And for me, it’s not just on the attraction, it’s on the retention, right? We’ve had some basketball players here for a couple years, and then they move on. And people always say, ‘Well, hey, we need a guard for basketball. Yeah, I know. But one is playing Michigan State, and one’s playing at Butler,’ and you who I’m talking about. And good for them. But it wasn’t like we haven’t recruited good guards.
So how can we do a little bit more to put our best foot forward to retain the student athletes so that they graduate from Northeastern, and they stay in their third or fourth year. And we will benefit, I think, with the elimination of the fifth year of eligibility and the extra COVID year.
The two hockey programs, we are a destination from the portal, people want to come to Hockey East. The travel is great. It’s Boston, the Beanpot. There’s enough there. But basketball — not just us, but any team in our league or any mid-major — we’re susceptible to being grabbed by the Power Four, Power Five programs who want our student athletes.
Wasserman: We’re not going to get too much into the specifics of the arena today, because a lot of that is still pending. But I’m curious how you’re thinking about what this transition period is going to look like, and what you from the administrative perspective can do to best equip Jerry Keefe, Dave Flint, and the hockey programs to maintain some momentum through that transition?
Well, first of all, Matthews has been a great home for the program for a long time. It’s reaching the end of its usefulness, whether that be six months, a year, or year and a half, whatever that’s going to be. And at 115 years of age, it’s time that we create an environment and a building that’s more than a building — it creates connections and affinity for the university.
This building has the ability to be what I call a generational building, similar to, if you think of a generational talent. And when I think of a generational talent, a couple of names come to mind. Bobby Orr is a generational talent, Wayne Gretzky is a generational talent, Michael Jordan is a generational talent. What do generational talents do? They attract other great players, they bring people in, and you win with that.
This building is going to attract a lot of people, not just athletes, not just student athletes. It’s going to attract fans, it’s going to attract our student athletes, the City of Boston, the Boston community, Northeastern. It’s going to bring people in, and it’s going to last. A generational talent comes around once every 25 years, 50 years, 100 years, whatever this is going to last us for. So it’s a generational building.
Now in saying that, there are going to be some challenges, and you just mentioned Matty, with the men’s and women’s ice hockey programs, where we won’t have a home for a couple of years. And we’re going to do the best we can to support those programs, and, most importantly, support those student athletes.
So we will create a practice facility that will have some amenities there, that allows us to have a home in a rink close by in this area. So there’ll be a nice locker room, there will be nice amenities there for the young men and young women. We’ll have a satellite setup here on campus with a locker room and offices so that when we’re not out wherever our practice facility is, we have a place here. Because hopefully, our home games will be played at some of the local schools around this area, and then it’s just trying to provide elevated amenities and benefits to our student athletes.
We’re already treating the men’s and women’s hockey programs, the basketball programs, and all of our student athletes well. But then you might need more meals, more things like that that we can help with. For scheduling, we’re looking at doing a little bit more of tournament scheduling, maybe looking at a Belfast trip. That’s back on the docket; they’ve asked us to go back there, and tentatively, we’re scheduled to go back there with the men’s program in a couple years.
We’re trying to get as many non conference away games in those two years, so that the reciprocation comes back when the new building gets up and running. And having that over a couple years, so that we have 18, 19, 20 home dates in those first two years, so we celebrate the building and highlight and showcase the building.
So there’s going to be some challenges. I look at it like this: When Conte Forum was built, it was during the 86-87 season, and Brian Leetch was on that team. Greg Brown was also on the team as a freshman. Brian Leetch never played a game on their campus, they won Hockey East that year and we actually lost to them in the semifinals that year. They played more games in our building than any other building, just the way the schedules worked out, but they played some at BU, some at Harvard. So basically, the three of us all accommodated them, but they still had success.
So it’s going to take a special young man, young lady, but we can still win. We’re still going to go out there and compete, and we still have the high-end academics, the touch points from the coaching staff, the development that they’re going to get from the coaching staff. The players are still playing in Hockey East. So yeah, it’s going to look a little different. We’re not here on campus, but we can still provide, and we’ll do as much as we can to provide a great experience for them while they’re here.