Illinois’s Cara Bognar Opening ‘Community-Based NIL’ Avenues through Top Tier Lessons
Cara Bognar was seven years old when she had an interaction that didn’t change her swimming trajectory so much as supercharged it.
The native of Travelers Rest, South Carolina, loved swimming. When Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones came to town to meet with her team, she leapt at the chance. Getting a glimpse of someone who’d reached the highest levels of the sport was a revelation. Seeing what it meant to her small swimming community – the quaintly named Travelers Rest has a population of around 8,000 people – underscored the importance to her swimming family.
“Any opportunity I had as a child to meet people who were able to take swimming to the next level was important,” Bognar said Wednesday. “There were not a lot of professional athletes in swimming when you compare it to baseball or football, just not that many that have that avenue. As a little girl, being able to see someone make a career out of the sport that I loved so much was so inspiring me.”
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Bognar has put that inspiration into action, not just as a South Carolina state champion and a swimmer at the University of Illinois but in the company she’s founded, Top Tier Lessons. With name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation allowing college athletes to profit off their skills, Bognar has created a platform to help athletes market their skills for private lessons and connect people looking for that specialized instruction.
Bognar is starting with athletes in Champaign and Chicago, from her school and from Northwestern. Top Tier is the marketplace that connects young athletes (and their parents) looking for lessons with college athletes looking to get into coaching. Top Tier handles logistics (venue availability, payment processing, scheduling) to lower barriers for coaches and students to attend.
Cara Bognar; Photo Courtesy: Kevin Snyder/Illinois Athletics
The grassroots and scalable model aims to connect college athletes with the communities in which they reside. Bognar hopes that creates long-lasting connections.
“There’s an opportunity for a lot of smaller deals that may not be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said, “But they’re still just as relevant, because it’s evening the playing field for all college athletes. I think as we see the future taking shape, we’re going to see more community-based NIL.”
She’s hoping to capitalize on a niche within the landscape. Money in the NIL space has gravitated toward major figures – influencers on social media like Livvy Dunne, major brand deals (think Shedeur and Shilo Sanders with KFC), toward names like Bronny James. But Bognar sees thousands of opportunities for athletes in any sport and any community. Whether that’s the hockey player in an ad for the local car dealership or the wrestler getting paid by the town’s favorite Italian restaurant, it doesn’t have to be six figures to be impactful, either to the athlete’s bottom line or to a program’s place in a community.
Starting with something skill specific was important to Bognar to establish meaningful, potentially long-term relationships and help athletes get a leg up on a potential post-playing career path.
“It has a lot to do with one, what are people looking to do, and for our athletes, what is a consistent job to work out of,” Bognar said. “And two, what is that consistent impact that helps us keep driving toward that goal to keep inspiring that next generation. For us, that is sports lessons, because it’s a chance for one-on-one interactions, to be consistent, to see be involved over a period of time. And you’re watching growth, whether it’s someone improve or make that travel team they’re trying to reach.”
This wasn’t the path that Bognar, a distance swimmer who scored at Big Tens last year, originally followed to Champaign. The Supreme Court’s landmark NIL ruling came down in the spring of her freshman year. She was attracted to Illinois for its bioengineering major. She has since added a second major in innovation leadership and engineering entrepreneurship.
Cara Bognar; Photo Courtesy: Kevin Snyder/Illinois Athletics
The company isn’t tied to any of her classes. But Bognar won Illinois’s Cozad New Venture Challenge as well as the College New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago last year, injecting $80,000 of prize money into the project.
Bognar’s vision for Top Tier Lessons returns often to the notion of community. While Jones’ visit was influential, an Olympic medal wasn’t required to pique her interest. She recalls “microcelebrities” among the older generations her swim teams, at Team Greenville and Eastside High, who reached college swimming and would come back home to train or visit.
That individual success meant so much to the community that fostered it that Bognar sees the pride as one in the same. That value is what she’s hoping to help others unlock through Top Tier Lessons.
“A lot of people think of swimming as individual sport, and it couldn’t be further from the truth,” she said. “You wouldn’t be able to do what you do without the community. For me growing up, swimming was my community. It was the people I was with day in and day out, outside of swimming, that you spend so much time with on the deck, traveling and training. It turns into something that is more than a community, that is a family.”