Ohio State Buckeye Cade Stover excited to make community impact

On May 5, 2022

Ohio State's Cade Stover had one catch for seven yards against Penn State last week.

MANSFIELD – Imagine being a young boy attending a football camp where the instructors include Ohio State heroes and future NFL players like James Laurinaitis and Brian Hartline. Heck, you don’t even mind that Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson, a Heisman Trophy candidate, was one of the invitees.

Cade Stover was that young boy.

“It was at Lexington High School, run by (then) head coach B.J. Payne,” Stover said. “I might have been 9 or 10. I still have the shirt signed by all of them.”

That was a big deal.

The youth camp coming to Mansfield’s Arlin Field in June will be a bigger deal.

A huge deal.

Stover, who was Ohio’s Mr. Football for Lexington in 2018, and seven of his Ohio State teammates will be among the headliners at the Nike Football Skills Camp, set for June 6-8. Accommodations have been made for 150 campers, ages 8-18, with 35 spots still available.

To register, visit ussportscamps.com/football.

The local camp was in large part the brainchild of 2013 Ontario grad Jacob Byrd. He runs NextGen Camps, which is putting on this three-day event in collaboration with Nike and NIL Management, a Columbus-based sports agency.

NIL Management brokers name, image, likeness deals for Ohio State athletes like the ones who will be instructors at this camp.

Byrd had experience putting on Nike camps as a tennis teaching pro and has seen his business marketing career evolve to where he will be running 11 football skills camps for Nike all over the country this summer. The first one he put together was for Mansfield and Stover’s name was the first one that popped into his head.

“It’s home,” said Stover, who will fill a prominent role at tight end this fall for the Buckeyes,”so I’ll be ready to come back.”

Stover is nothing if not a homebody.

He comes home as much as possible to help with the family business, Stover Farms. You would know that if you follow him on social media. Some of his Instagram and Twitter posts show him doing chores and operating heavy equipment.

“When we were going through the recruiting process, these coaches would come and talk to me a lot of times before they’d talk to Cade,” said Taylor Gerhardt, then Lex’s head football coach. “I’d say, listen, man, you need to talk about your agriculture department because that is very, very important to the kid. He’s got a passion for that.

“How rare is that for someone to already know what he has a passion for and that’s what you’re going to do from a young age? The success his family has had with their farm, his plan is to bring it to the next level. That’s just the kind of kid he is. It’s a pretty cool thing.”

Last January, because of injuries and departures, Stover was pressed into duties as a starting linebacker in Ohio State’s comeback win over Utah in the Rose Bowl, But from the moment the team plane landed in California, he was thinking about the farm.

“I don’t know how to describe it; that (starting assignment) was a long time coming for me,” said Stover, a fourth-year junior. “But I couldn’t wait to come home.”

The bright lights of Hollywood and soaking up the SoCal lifestyle, if only for a short while, didn’t appeal to Stover.

“I picked an orange off a tree for the first time in my life,” he said. “That was pretty cool. That was my favorite memory.”

Like several of the Buckeyes, Stover is taking advantage of the new NCAA policy that allows college athletes to cash in on their name, image and likeness. He was signed in January by NIL Management, which tries to set up players with business partners who share their interests.

Stover has endorsement deals with Rocky Boots and Central Ohio Farmer’s Co-Op in Mount Gilead, where his family does a lot of its shopping. He recently announced on Instagram that he has hooked up, like some of his teammates, with CoughlinCars.com, a dealership in Columbus where his dad has gotten his trucks.

In the IG post, Stover is pictured with a new steel-gray truck with the downtown Columbus skyline as the backdrop.

The partnership with Coughlin Cars will include toy drives, fund-raisers and other community outreach programs.

“We try to align (the athletes) holistically (with branding partners),” said Zach Beebe, co-founder of NIL Management. “Hey, what are you majoring in? What are you in school for? So (linebacker) Cody Simon loves finance and medical sales. My business partner, Ed Brown, knows one of the top medical guys, so we linked them up for a dinner. (Defensive end) Zach Harrison wants to get into real estate. So some of the other businesses I own, we do a lot of real estate, so we got him with the home town (realtor).

“It’s crazy. I’ve been around a lot of these guys, the Zekes (Ezekiel Elliott) and Chases (Chase Young) for many years. Going from what it was (where college athletes couldn’t be paid) to this is insane. That’s why it is so important to have a good core group and to protect them. We’re making these kids enough money where someone can’t prey on them.”

According to a press release from the Ohio State athletic department in late January, a total of 220 student-athletes had participated at that point in a combined 608 name, image and likeness opportunities for a total compensation value of $2.98 million since the NCAA’s NIL policy went into effect July 1.

NIL Management was responsible for a big chunk of that.

All three figures ranked No. 1 nationally, according to Opendorse, a company hired by Ohio State to help its athletes with education and resource opportunities to maximize their NIL potential.

With the NIL landscape constantly evolving, OSU has also created an internal advisory team – called the NIL Edge Team – to help connect student-athletes to additional opportunities.

Beebe said one of NIL Management’s priorities is to keep Ohio State athletes compliant with NCAA rules and Ohio State’s NIL policies.

While he appreciates his newfound earning power, Stover doesn’t want it to get in the way of the main objective.

“As nice as it is, it’s secondary to what the goal is for me,” he said. “If you keep that mindset, it’s not bad at all.”

He admits that his versatility as a football player – he’s changed positions four times in four years, including a move back to tight end this spring – has been a blessing and a curse.