Navigating Collegiate Sports’ Newest Frontier
By Stephen Hunt
Name, image, and likeness (NIL) has only been part of the college sports landscape for several years, but already, this concept, where student-athletes receive financial compensation for their names, images, and likenesses, has impacted the entire sports world.
As NIL has become a significant factor in collegiate athletics, the number of businesses dedicated to assisting student-athletes and their families in navigating this new landscape has grown. One such business is Lone Star NIL, which is based in Frisco and was started by Tom Burnett, a longtime local resident and former commissioner of the locally based Southland Conference.
Burnett started his firm wanting to partner local student-athletes with area businesses to maximize their NIL potential. Lone Star NIL already has two early success stories in golfers Jordan Karrh, a Frisco native and a redshirt junior at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), and Davis Ovard, a freshman at Baylor University (BU) and product of Frisco High School.
“Davis and Jordan fully represent and personify why we decided to involve ourselves with name, image, and likeness and subsequently led us to start Lone Star NIL. We intentionally identified them for our program as outstanding students and top-level competitors that have also chosen to be very active in their communities and involved with charitable groups,” Burnett said. “Davis and Jordan are ideal ambassadors for Lone Star NIL, and we look forward to working with them and expanding their NIL potential.”
In January 2024, Karrh played in the Orlando International Amateur Tournament in Florida, and Ovard traveled to Arizona for the Saguaro Amateur Tournament, excursions financed by NIL compensation arranged by Lone Star NIL. Helping finance travel to those high-profile amateur events is only one way in which Lone Star NIL has assisted Karrh and Ovard.
“Lone Star NIL has been very helpful in connecting me with other organizations and stuff. I’ve made some connections for summer internships as well, which was really cool and something I didn’t expect,” Karrh said. “That was a cool door for me to open. Most of the deals I’ve done have been with them promoting what Lone Star NIL does. They’re very invested in the brands I want to eventually work with.”
“They ask us what our dream brand is. I said, Nike. You can tell they care. Tom reaches out to me at least once a week about golf. He’s always up to date on when I have a tournament, what’s going on. As an athlete, it makes you feel seen, especially in golf when it’s not always the main focus when people think of a college athlete.”
Ovard concurs that Lone Star NIL has been invaluable in helping him and his parents navigate the ever-changing NIL world. “Yeah, they were super helpful. Mr. Burnett explained everything before we dove into it,” Ovard said. “He’s been super supportive in everything. He’s been giving us a lot of resources on what NIL is and how it works. Yeah, it’s been great because I didn’t know everything at first. I was like, ‘oh, it sounds cool,’ but he’s been super helpful.”
Since the NIL landscape can change almost daily depending on how the court’s rulings in several NIL-related legal proceedings play out, one way in which Lone Star NIL assists Karrh and Ovard is by answering any questions they or their parents have about NIL, which is very dynamic, and how they can both benefit most from it.
“They were very good about answering questions. We did a bunch of calls before we really got started just to explain what NIL was, how we could go forward with it,” Karrh said. “You have to have a bunch of things signed off by your school to let you participate. My school [DBU] is very direct with what they want to receive. On the first try, my school was like, ‘This is perfect, this is exactly what we were after.’ That’s been nice because it’s been easy for DBU to work with them, having everything up front.”
In short, Lone Star NIL’s knowledge and attention to detail about all the ins and outs of this burgeoning aspect of being a collegiate student-athlete has allowed Karrh to focus on succeeding in the classroom and on the golf course. “I’ve heard other athletes (say) that the school won’t allow them to do certain things with NIL because it’s unknown what the company’s trying to do. That has not been the case with Lone Star NIL,” Karrh said. “Working with DBU, it has been a relief for me because I just have to turn in the paper [to the school], get it signed, and send it back. That’s all.”
It’s been a similar story for Ovard, a business major at BU. “It [NIL] is so new, and it changes all the time. I feel like no one knows everything about it,” he said. “It’s really good to learn. I just dove into it, not knowing too much about it thinking he [Burnett] is going to give me stuff, this is cool. It’s been a lot more than that, and it’s been great.”
Ovard was a two-time Northern Texas PGA state champion who finished second in the 2023 Legends Junior Tour Byron Nelson Championship. He’s the second member of his family to play college golf in Texas, as his older brother Dawson played at Southern Methodist University (SMU). And like many younger brothers, he wanted to follow in his sibling’s footsteps.
One Christmas, Dawson received his first set of clubs as a gag gift from a family member who bought them to annoy their parents, thinking he would break everything in the house. However, Dawson took an immediate liking to the game, which led Davis to follow suit. “He [my brother] went to a golf camp, and they were like, ‘Hey, this kid’s good.’ Then, my dad started putting him in junior tournaments, and he did well,” Ovard said.
“When I was really little, I saw him [play] and knew I wanted to do that. Without him playing golf, I never would have played. He’s the reason why I’m where I am today. It’s great to both succeed at the college level. Our parents helped us a ton. It started out as a joke, and then we both just ran with it. Now, we’re a big golf family. My parents [David & Wren] love watching us, and my dad has started playing more. It’s great.”
Karrh, however, didn’t pick up the game until her freshman year of high school. Prior to that, she’d only played soccer. However, after being forced to give up the beautiful game for health reasons, she began looking into individual sports. “My parents [Kevin & Jill] had always said an individual sport and a team sport was what they wanted us [my brother and I] to do, have both. We never really kept up with that,” she said.
And in an ironic twist, her parents gave her the choice of starting golf or tennis. She chose tennis but her parents overruled her and picked golf because her father was an avid player. “He loves golf. I’ve always been around it,” Karrh said. “We traveled around watching my dad play amateur. The first tournament I played, I shot 106, and my parents were like, ‘You don’t know how good that is for starting golf.’”
“It just picked up from there and my scores dropped relatively fast. Then, I made the high school team, was on varsity as a freshman, which at Trinity Christian Academy (TCA) wasn’t very hard, but I got to play. I decided a year into it I wanted to play in college.”
After starring in high school at TCA Addison, where she was a three-time Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS) all-state and all-region player, Karrh landed at DBU, which is in southern Dallas County about 40 miles from Frisco, close enough for her to get home frequently to see younger brother Landon, a senior at Frisco High School who pitches for the Raccoons and will attend Baylor next fall, play. “First off, I love DBU. Whenever I came on my visit here, I was so upset with my parents for making me come on a visit because I was like, ‘I’m not going to school in Dallas because it’s too close to home,’” Karrh admitted.
“Then, the second I got on campus, [I thought] ‘It’s so beautiful, nothing like Dallas.’ I loved the campus, met with the coaches, loved the coaches. The president of the university has known me by name since the first time I met him. After every event, the president, if I don’t play well, will write me a note and put it in my mailbox. It’s little things like that I never would have imagined happening.”
One of those unexpected things came last fall when DBU faculty nominated Karrh to emcee the school’s leadership gala, its biggest donor event of the year. She admits emceeing an event like that was out of her comfort zone, but it benefited her greatly when interviewing with companies for internships and discussing NIL opportunities with them.
On the course, Karrh has earned numerous awards and has been a consistent top-ten finisher for DBU. She wants to call Frisco home after college and has already completed an undergraduate degree in finance. In January, she started work on a graduate degree in international business, which is normally a two-year program but one that this ambitious young woman aspires to complete in three semesters.
Currently a redshirt junior, she has one year of college eligibility remaining and plans to complete her golf career and her grad degree simultaneously in 2025. Oh, and if Karrh doesn’t already have enough on her plate, she recently started a marketing internship with the Coupon Bureau, a not-for-profit coupon industry association that connects merchants to the new Universal Digital Coupon.
Ovard and Karrh know each other from both playing at Stonebriar Country Club. Something else they have in common is their strong love for Frisco. “I love Frisco. I’m super proud to be from Frisco,” Ovard said. “We have some of the best athletes in the state. I tell everyone playing junior golf in Texas it is the best place to play golf. We have the best competition.”
For Burnett, this talented golfing duo epitomizes exactly what makes Frisco great. “Davis and Jordan aren’t just from a city that’s been appropriately named and promoted as Sports City USA, they are part of a growing generation that’s actually lived the Sports City USA experience by growing up and participating as athletes in this community,” Burnett said. “Like hundreds of other Frisco-based college athletes, they are also tremendous promotional ambassadors for our city.”
Stephen Hunt is a Frisco-based freelance writer.
