Illinois Swimmer Cara Bognar Bringing NIL Opportunities to Athletes From Non-Revenue Sports

When college athletes were granted the ability to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL) in 2021, University of Illinois swimmer Cara Bognar saw something that most others overlooked: an opportunity for swimmers and other non-revenue athletes to cash in on their publicity rights.

In the fall of 2021, Bognar returned back to campus after a summer home in South Carolina teaching swim lessons, an effort that required the help of two siblings due to high demand. She found a similar demand for private training sessions in Champaign, Illinois, sparking the idea for Top Tier Lessons.

“I quickly realized that most of the brand deals were between that top 1% of revenue athletes and major companies,” Bognar told SwimSwam. “So with that, I immediately looked to find a way to make NIL accessible for all college athletes and not just that top 1%. That combined with my experience teaching lessons was where Top Tier Lessons was born.”

Bognar spent her sophomore year trying to convince her fellow Illinois student-athletes from a variety of sports to join her budding business venture. College athletes could sometimes teach private lessons before the NIL era began two years ago, but any sort of marketing mentioning their school, team, or athletic talent was prohibited.

“Our first athletes, I got by walking up to them in our athletic dining hall, introducing myself to the entire team while they were eating breakfast, and really just pitching what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, why we’re doing it,” Bognar said. “The reactions were incredible. Now we’ve been able to move to INFLCR and some of the other NIL platforms out there that allow local and small businesses access to current college athletes as well as some incredibly friendly NIL coordinators at other schools who are helping make this opportunity available to their athletes as well.”

After winning a combined $75,000 at the University of Illinois’ Cozad New Venture Challenge and University of Chicago’s New Venture Challenge — one of the top-ranked startup accelerators in the country — Bognar’s Top Tier Lessons officially launched earlier this year in April. Just about six months later, the company announced its expansion from Champaign to Chicago, partnering with local facilities to create an efficient system for booking lessons online that eliminates scheduling hassles. Most of the lessons are relatively affordable at about $30 per session.

“A lot of the feedback that we get back from parents is more related to the coaches themselves,” Bognar said. “We’re finding that there is a difference. They’re seeing more improvement in their children from that first lesson than they’ve seen from other lessons in the past.”

Each lesson is technically its own individual NIL deal, but the concept of students offering instruction to youth is nothing new. Bognar has talked to almost 100 athletes about partnering with Top Tier Lessons, and about 75% of them accumulated prior coaching experience while in high school. But only one had continued coaching in college.

“It’s less of a shock or a surprise with this opportunity — it’s more of the excitement that we see,” Bognar said. “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so needed, how do we sign up?’”

Bognar plans on expanding to more cities in the future with the aim of making her work at Top Tier Lessons a full-time job as soon as this spring — while she’s still completing her senior campaign in the pool for the Illini. She scored 10 points as a junior at the 2023 Big Ten Championships, third-most among the Illinois women, placing 20th in the 200 fly (2:01.92), 22nd in the 400 IM (4:19.48), and 23rd in the 1650 free (17:02.12).

Bognar is the oldest of five siblings, all of whom swim. Her younger brother, Nils, is a sophomore at Georgia Tech and her younger sister, Lilla, committed to Florida last month as the No. 5 recruit in the high school class of 2025.