How a College Basketball Program in North Dakota Built Community With a Trading Card Drop

Even though you wouldn’t know it from the national headlines, there is a subtle cleverness to what is going on in Grand Forks this winter. The North Dakota men’s basketball team chose to take an almost retro approach while the rest of college basketball focuses on NIL valuations and transfer portal drama. Trading cards were printed by them. There were sixteen. And the first 200 spectators to enter the gates of six conference home games will receive them, one batch at a time.

It’s the kind of concept that seems insignificant until you give it some thought. With three player cards, the drop began on New Year’s Day against Oral Roberts. Then, two nights later, three more against South Dakota State. Before head coach Paul Sather’s card finally shows up on February 7 against Denver, the sixteenth and last piece of the puzzle, the program is rationing the set across the calendar: January 15 against St. Thomas, January 17 against South Dakota, and February 5 against Omaha. When the team plays in-state rival North Dakota State on February 14, fans who have all sixteen can bring them to the marketing table. On February 19 against Kansas City, five winners selected from that pool will receive autographed basketballs.

Observing this from a distance gives the impression that the creators of this promotion know something about their target audience that larger programs overlook. Fandom isn’t really about chasing the NCAA tournament bracket in a town like Grand Forks, where winter settles in hard and the Engelstad Center is one of the warmer places to spend a Saturday. It’s all about being present. being aware of the names. identifying the child who last week hit the corner three. In contrast to a roster page, a trading card featuring a player’s face makes that recognition tangible.

The mechanics are also important. The program has effectively created a soft-touch attendance incentive by distributing the cards over six games. You miss Garrett Anderson, Matthew Bothun, and Marley Curtis during the game against South Dakota on January 17. It’s impossible to catch up. Gently implementing that kind of scarcity is precisely what gives the season a subdued narrative arc that goes beyond victories and defeats.

It’s important to note how this feels different from the larger cultural trend surrounding sports collectibles. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about NIL trading card deals at institutions like the College of Idaho, One Piece promo cards being distributed at college basketball games, and the speculative frenzy that turns cardboard into commodities. The version from North Dakota avoids all of that. The cards are not for sale. They’re not graded. An hour after the last buzzer, they aren’t being flipped on eBay—at least not at a significant volume. These are freebies intended for the building’s occupants.

It’s difficult to ignore how revenue-chasing has changed college athletics in other places. Billion-dollar media rights agreements are being negotiated by powerful conference schools. Five years ago, it would have been unimaginable for elite athletes to sign collective bargaining agreements. Here is a Summit League program that meticulously prints fifteen player cards and one coach card in the hopes that the small ritual of gathering them in February—bringing them to a folding table—will have some significance.

It’s still unclear if the experiment performs as the program anticipates. A game with 200 cards is not very many. A prize pool with five winners is not revolutionary. However, such promotions are rarely successful on a large scale. They are successful because of the conversations they start in the parking lot afterward, the cards that wind up taped to a child’s bedroom wall, and the parents who suddenly recall why they used to take their kids to games in the first place. That may be the true return on investment, rather than the giveaway itself.