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Mizzou's Bailey using NIL to give back

Chad Bailey’s first exposure to foster care came because he needed someone to play with.

The Missouri linebacker was born more than a decade after his two older siblings, so as a child, he didn’t have anyone his own age to chase around his Houston home. Thus, his mother, Tishanna Bailey, figured she could accomplish two goals at once — finding her youngest son a playmate and giving back to the less fortunate — by applying to become a foster parent.

Roughly 15 years later, both Chad and his mother remain involved in the foster care system. Tishanna is still fostering. She currently takes care of three boys, ages five, seven and eight. Meanwhile, Chad, entering his senior season at Missouri, has found his own way to help foster children.

On Jan. 11, Chad took advantage of the new name, image and likeness rules in college athletics and announced a partnership with Coyote Hill and 573 Tees. The local t-shirt company (which, full disclosure, is a PowerMizzou sponsor) is selling “Fill the Gap” shirts with Bailey’s picture on them. Half the proceeds will be donated to Coyote Hill, which provides foster care for children and works to support foster parents in Mid-Missouri.

“It really isn’t much about the t-shirts, but it’s just about the fact that there’s money going into the foster care system,” Chad said last week.

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Chad’s efforts provide an example of an unexpected trend in college sports: athletes using NIL to give to charity. While the novelty and non-uniform implementation of student-athletes being allowed to accept money has caused plenty of teeth-gnashing among both fans and coaches since the legalization of NIL, there’s been a wave of players taking advantage of the new landscape to do some good for their communities.

At Missouri alone, Chad is at least the third player to donate NIL proceeds to a local charity. Cornerback Ennis Rakestraw and Hornsdownshop.com pledged a portion of merchandise sales to the Boys and Girls Club of Columbia last fall, while half of offensive lineman Drake Heismeyer’s proceeds from his t-shirt line at 573 Tees are being donated to the Food Bank of Mid-Missouri.

“I think it’s a really exciting thing,” Chad said, “and it’s going to open a lot of doors for other athletes out there that’s trying to do NIL deals not just for themselves, but to help other people.”

Missouri linebacker Chad Bailey, who started eight games last season, is seeking to use name, image and likeness to raise money for a foster organization in Mid-Missouri.
Missouri linebacker Chad Bailey, who started eight games last season, is seeking to use name, image and likeness to raise money for a foster organization in Mid-Missouri. (Denny Medley/USA Today)

Chad Bailey can hardly remember a life without foster siblings. His mother took in his first foster brother, Terrell, when he was about seven years old.

Adding a second young child to the family wasn’t without its challenges. Tishanna noted that Terrell, who was a grade ahead of Chad in school, had endured a rough upbringing to that point, and that led to some trouble in school. Chad began to emulate some of Terrell’s behavior, and after he, too, got in trouble with a teacher, he received a stern talk from mom.

“He was a tough kid,” Tishanna said of Terrell. “I mean, you could let him out — he was seven at the time — but you could let him out into the worst part of Houston and he would survive. That’s how much he had been through.

“One day Chad came home and he had gotten in trouble at school, in elementary school. And I’m like, ‘dude, what’s going on?’ Because we didn’t do that. That’s not what we do. And he’s like, ‘but mom, Terrell has a lot of friends.’ And so I was like, oh, so he was looking at what Terrell was doing thinking that was cool, because children gravitated to him.”

After Terrell, Tishanna started fostering children who were a bit younger than Chad so that he could serve as an influence on them rather than the other way around. But she wasn’t deterred. She called fostering “addictive.” The goal was always to reunite a child with his biological family, and Tishanna understood that, but she said that every time a child left her home she would be hit with “total depression.”

“If you’re any kind of a decent human being, especially a mother, you get attached,” she explained. “Kids would walk in my house, when they walk through my doors, they become mine. And they’re treated like mine, and they’re disciplined like mine and they’re dressed like mine. They do what we do, they become my family members.”

Neither Tishanna nor Chad is sure exactly how many children she has fostered. Chad guesses more than 20.

Both mother and son said growing up alongside foster siblings taught Chad perspective. He’s not one to take opportunities for granted, and if he sees a need, he wants to help. As evidence, Tishanna offered an anecdote from the hours after Missouri lost to Army in the Armed Forces Bowl last December. She had made the trip from Houston to Fort Worth to watch the game. Afterward, Chad asked her to drive him to get something to eat. When they arrived at a corner store, a homeless man approached Chad. Tishanna’s guard went up. As Chad chatted with the man, she texted him, urging him to move along. Chad ignored her. Eventually, the two went inside the store together. Chad used his money to buy food for the homeless man but none for himself.

“He got back in (the car) and he was like ‘Momma, I don’t like when you do stuff like that. He just wanted something to eat. He just needed somebody to talk to,’” Tishanna recalled. “And what else could I say after that, right? … That’s who he is.”

Chad Bailey and his mother, Tishanna Bailey.
Chad Bailey and his mother, Tishanna Bailey. (coyotehill.org)

So, a couple weeks later, it didn’t come as a shock when Chad called his mother and told her about his plan to raise money for Coyote Hill. The partnership came about after Joe Knight, the director of corporate relations and major gifts for Coyote Hill, heard Bailey say on a radio interview last season that he had grown up alongside foster siblings. The Missouri football program had gotten involved with Coyote Hill in the past. Last August, the team hosted the “Night of Champions,” during which local foster children got to tour the Mizzou facilities and participate in drills alongside players on Faurot Field. In December, several Missouri players (including Bailey) used their own money to buy Christmas presents for the foster children at Coyote Hill.

Former strength coach Zac Woodfin, a Coyote Hill volunteer, put Knight in touch with Bailey. Once Knight explained his idea for an NIL partnership, Bailey quickly agreed.

In a little more than a month, Knight said, more than 100 “Fill the Gap” t-shirts have been sold. The proceeds will go to the foster parent support arm of Coyote Hill, helping people like Tishanna Bailey, who have volunteered to foster children. Knight said that, nationally, half of foster parents stop fostering after their first year. But Coyote Hill has a 90 percent foster family retention rate because of its commitment to walk alongside foster parents.

“Most times foster parents get licensed and it’s just like, alright, good luck,” Knight explained. “Nobody ever talks to them again, and that’s why they give up. So we want to make sure we’re with them all the way, through the good times and the hard times.”

Perhaps more beneficial than the proceeds from Bailey’s t-shirt sales has been the publicity he’s generated. A lot of people will hear about Coyote Hill for the first time through Bailey’s social media accounts, including those from Houston. Knight pointed to that as a unique benefit of athletes using NIL for charity: They can use their platform to galvanize a following from their hometowns to support a cause where they play college ball, or vice versa.

“A lot of Chad’s shirts sold out of Texas,” Knight said. “Like, people in Texas have no idea who Coyote Hill is. So it’s cool to see these players, where they grew up, can put eyes on the community where they went to school.”

Bailey hopes this is just the beginning of his involvement in the foster care system. When his football career ends and he has a family of his own, he plans to foster children like his mother. Tishanna is proud to see her son follow in her footsteps.

“It’s just a beautiful thing to me,” she said. “It really made me feel a certain type of way, kind of fuzzy, all warm inside. Because he’s watched me do it, it impacted all of us, and I’m still doing it. Like, when he comes home from school, he doesn’t have a room anymore because somebody done moved into his room. But he never gave me a hard time about it, taking time or things away from him. So it just made me feel really, really good. Really proud.”


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