BLOOMINGTON – In January 2023, IU basketball’s Anthony Leal made national headlines when he gifted his sister, Lauren, full repayment of her student loans for Christmas.
A video, recorded by their mother, Sherry, captured the gesture, which became news beyond the world of sports. It was held as an example of the positive impact of name, image and likeness reform, as Leal used income from personal NIL deals to help pay off his sister’s loans.
It also made Leal a more public figure in the NIL world, one still not fully formed and often difficult to navigate. Leal found other athletes contacting him for advice — how to secure deals, how to balance responsibilities, anything. Everything.
That inspired Leal, a Kelley School of Business graduate now in an MBA program with the school, to start developing a structure athletes could use to better organize and execute a personal NIL strategy.
But the more Leal teased out his ideas, the more he recognized the need for something broader. College athletes, coaches and administrators intersect in countless ways in their daily lives, from compliance to NIL issues to academic concerns to things as basic as practice schedules.
Yet so much of that intersection, Leal realized, is disorganized and decentralized. Some things dealt with via group texts, others email, more through official channels, too many of which, Leal felt, weren’t designed by people with the necessary understanding of the demands of college sports.
What if someone could provide a platform for all of it? One place every stakeholder in a college athletic department could go to manage all the interwoven, moving parts of their ecosystem?
“I started it as just an NIL-based company, trying to connect athletes to businesses and do NIL deals, and that went well,” Leal told IndyStar. “Through that, I figured out, having conversations, with businesses, athletes, athletic directors all around the country, that there’s a whole lot bigger problem that I could try to solve.”
That gave rise to Motion Sports, an all-in-one operating system for college athletics.
Its website describes Motion, whose name is a nod to Bob Knight’s famous and successful offense, as “a fully integrated single-platform solution, all in a mobile-native, NIL-native experience.” It runs primarily as an application on a personal phone and, as it’s developed, it will be built to house everything from calendars, to messaging, to wellness and nutrition, to NCAA compliance requirements, to NIL payments and contracts. Leal said the company even has a film distribution platform set up already, so coaches can send athletes tape through the app.
The idea started for Leal as an NIL-specific endeavor.
When NIL became official policy, several different companies and platforms offered athletes pathways into the space. Leal used some of them before deciding it was easier for him to manage his NIL opportunities himself.
That gave him the experience necessary to advise and assist other athletes when they contacted him for help. Working across several sports gave Leal the sense there was a larger problem looking for a solution.
“It went from being just an NIL-based thing to a more department-wide solution,” Leal said.
Leal connected with fellow IU alums Jay Townsend and Nate Ebel, and the trio founded Motion, what Leal described as “a one-stop shop” for coaches, athletes, administrators and other stakeholders to communicate, schedule, plan and manage daily requirements.
Already, they’ve acquired and built the framework for key elements of the app, including messaging, scheduling, nutritional support and film distribution. The team is building out its compliance framework now. As revenue sharing becomes practice across college athletics, Motion plans to build in financial tools as well, including payment-tracking and money monitoring functions.
The day-to-day tools will help athletes organize their responsibilities and schedules, and allow coaches a more straightforward way to manage their teams. Leal said the app is meant to be just as useful to an administrative class in college sports now dealing with a host of complicated new and evolving responsibilities.
“If we can put all that into one platform, it saves people a lot of time,” Leal said. “From our discussions with compliance people, athletic directors, everything, it gives them a way of monitoring everything from an administrative standpoint, so they know what all their teams are doing at a certain time.”
Already, Leal, Townsend and Ebel have 3-5 unnamed athletic departments beta testing their framework. And Motion secured the investment necessary to continue building out more of it.
Motion’s co-founders have targeted early 2025 for further expansion of both business and funding, with the goal of scaling up next year.
Leal credited his education and experiences in Kelley as crucial to helping him and his partners master the bolder elements of their endeavor thus far. And, recognizing the continually shifting needs college sports would require of the product itself, Leal said he believes he’s ideally suited — given both his experience in major college athletics and his access to others in the same position — to helping Motion navigate whatever lies ahead.
“The last few years have been a whirlwind for everyone in college sports,” Leal said. “I think that gives me an advantage in terms of knowing exactly what’s needed and what it should look like, and how it should work.”
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