Canopy Talent and The Society Management Bet on College Athletes

By Nathan Brooks

Canopy Talent's athlete creators pull engagement rates roughly six times higher than standard influencers — and now a top modeling agency wants in on that audience. Canopy Talent, the athlete management and brand partnerships agency founded by Jack Liechtung, has struck a first-of-its-kind partnership with The Society Management, the modeling firm behind Kendall Jenner and Adriana Lima. The deal gives leading fashion, beauty and luxury brands direct access to the next generation of collegiate athletes.

The target isn't the quarterback or the five-star forward. Canopy works primarily with athletes in overlooked sports — gymnastics, swimming, softball, volleyball — whose local and community followings brands have historically undervalued.

What does the deal change for brands?

It removes the mess that has kept many brands away from college athletes in the first place. Under the agreement, Canopy serves as The Society Management's exclusive on-campus partner, handling the NIL deal submission process and leveraging school relationships to streamline communication and expedite approvals.

That compliance muscle matters. Liechtung — a former corporate and entertainment lawyer — actually rejects the industry's own vocabulary. "I actually don't call it NIL," Liechtung tells Entrepreneur. "I think to the brand, they've kind of written it off historically as something that's just far too complicated and messy."

His pitch to brands is blunt: "You don't need to partner with LeBron James to make an impact, to drive consumer spend, to get eyeballs."

Why the engagement gap matters

Chris Gay, president of The Society Management, sees the opening from the fashion side. "What's incredibly interesting from a collegiate and fashion standpoint is these kids have a really engaged following," Gay tells Entrepreneur. "They don't have to win the championship or play the biggest revenue sports. There's a whole community of people deeply invested in the kid who is playing volleyball, the kid who's playing water polo and so forth."

The scale of that local fame can be startling. Liechtung recalls a conversation at an event about Merritt Beason, a former Nebraska volleyball star now playing in Major League Volleyball. "Someone overheard me talking about her, and they said, 'Merritt Beason in Omaha is bigger than Patrick Mahomes,'" he says.

"These athletes are rock stars in their communities, and sometimes far beyond, and the people that follow them are deeply invested," Liechtung says. "It's really wild how sticky these athletes are."

He points to skier Eileen Gu as the project's North Star, citing the disconnect between her skiing earnings and the scale of her fame — the exact inefficiency this partnership is built to monetize.

Athletes own the distribution

The deeper logic of the deal is structural. In the past, a Nike deal meant the brand handled the media buy, distribution and most of the audience connection. That's flipped. "The piece of content is often created by the athlete, model or entertainer, and then distributed out on their own platforms," Gay says.

Gay sees athletes and models as "extraordinarily similar" — both build fan bases independent of any team or agency. "It's more than just a passing deal that they're doing, you know, with Gucci or with Nike," he says. "This is their community. They're bringing that to the table. There's no intermediary."

That shifts the economics from one-off endorsements toward long-term brand partnerships. "The goal is never these one-off deals," Liechtung explains. "I think an athlete could kind of source their own one-off deals. We're trying to work with athletes that already have some sort of platform, a voice. We amplify that."

Why now

Liechtung argues athletes outside football and basketball have structurally different incentives. Unlike players chasing pro contracts, they've been free to build audiences. "Frankly, I did not want to be beholden to the ACL of an offensive lineman," he says.

The partnership came together after Liechtung cold-reached to Gay on LinkedIn, trading on his pre-law-school stint at WME and summers spent at fashion houses. After a couple of calls and months of silence, Gay circled back. "We really just felt a certain kinship together when we started sort of discussing this deal," Gay says. "I felt Jack was the perfect person and his company was the perfect company to go forward with it."

Gay isn't new to athletes; he represented Angel Reese while she was at LSU. And he promises the output won't look like typical collegiate content: "We're going to be revealing a really different type of quality of content that's going to be very different than the type of stuff that you might currently see."

For brand and marketing teams, the practical takeaway is simple. If this partnership works, the price of a deeply engaged, self-distributing college athlete just got a formal market — before the pros, and before the premium.