These days, you can watch UConn’s athletic teams on a variety of networks and streaming services. But if you want exclusive, behind-the-curtain, insider access to the athletes, a new website hopes to satisfy those cravings. Storrs Central, at storrscentral.com, was conceived by the leaders of Bleeding Blue for Good, a UConn name, image and likeness […]
These days, you can watch UConn’s athletic teams on a variety of networks and streaming services.
But if you want exclusive, behind-the-curtain, insider access to the athletes, a new website hopes to satisfy those cravings.
Storrs Central, at storrscentral.com, was conceived by the leaders of Bleeding Blue for Good, a UConn name, image and likeness (NIL) collective.
Ben Renshaw, who is on Bleeding Blue’s board and is an investor in Storrs Central, said the website was created as a for-profit entity to raise NIL money.
“As the world has morphed, we quickly realized that a 501(c)(3) charitable donation organization is not the right way to approach corporations as well as individual fans,” he said. “We created Storrs Central to handle those two pieces of the three-legged stool.”
The exclusive content website, and a new mobile app, can better reach more fans, while “also being able to offer sponsorships to corporate entities,” Renshaw explained.
He added that while Bleeding Blue and Storrs Central are linked by their NIL fundraising for UConn, “they have distinctly different ways of going about it and different audiences to appeal to.”
Both the website and mobile app offer free content or a premium subscription for $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year.
As of May, Storrs Central had 1,000 subscribers, which it hopes to build on, with all the subscription revenue going directly to UConn athletes.
“We want to tell the stories of what Cam Spencer was saying to (University of North Carolina’s) Armando Bacot that got him fired up. We want to know what they do on an off day,” Renshaw said. “And we realized that the players are really open to that because, one, it does build their brand, and two, it’s going to generate income for them. The more subscribers there are, the more revenue, the more subscribers, the more eyeballs, the more sponsorship revenue follows that.”
