As part of an appearance at a trading card show in Broadview Heights, OH late last month, the entire Cleveland State women’s basketball roster sat at a long table and, helped by interested kids in attendance, tore through numerous packs of 2023 Topps Chrome McDonalds All-American cards laid out for them.
Almost instinctively, most of the Vikings started forming rosters from the cards. Kali Howard pulled a JuJu Watkins Future Stars insert and immediately moved it into her starting lineup. Colbi Maples went even further, winding up with an 11-player roster that included KK Arnold and MiLaysia Fulwiley on the bench, backing up the likes of Watkins (though a base card in this case), Hannah Hidalgo, and Tessa Johnson. Filippa Goula became frustrated with her luck, and remarked that she didn’t know any of the men’s players in her packs.
Nobody thought to include themselves or their teammates in the selections, even though they could have – after all, stacks of their own cards that they had just signed sat only a few feet away.
Those CSU collectibles exist thanks to Greenie Sports Cards, a dealer that has bought and sold the 2.5 by 3.5 inch pieces of cardboard since 2006. Greenie, which draws its moniker from the nickname of founder Steve Greenberg, subsequently began producing card shows which, for the uninitiated, are akin to indoor flea markets, with rows of dealer tables packed into a gymnasium, community center, or another similarly vast space. Their portfolio includes the quarterly event in Broadview Heights and numerous others around the Cleveland area and beyond.
Then, nearly two years ago, Greenberg and Jeremy Levine, who helps run the shows and serves as Greenie’s head of marketing, began a venture that they hope revolutionizes the Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) landscape for thousands of college athletes: they began producing trading cards.
On the surface, that might seem like a logical step for a company as embedded in what’s colloquially called “the hobby” as Greenie. However, sports trading cards are a $10 billion per year industry dominated by a handful of major players like Topps, Panini, Upper Deck and Leaf. Prior to the summer of 2021, when the NCAA began permitting NIL payments to student-athletes, cards depicting players on college teams were an awkward mélange of school-produced team sets (which were allowed, with the profits often funneled to a charitable organization), and wider-ranging sets featuring graduated players no longer subject to NCAA rules.
In that market, there was plenty of room for a smaller producer, but things have changed dramatically. For example, Watkins, still just a sophomore at USC, has already had 364 different cards produced of her, nearly all by the major companies that can afford the superstar’s ever-growing fee, according to the website Trading Card Database.
How does a start-up like Greenie enter that space? Mostly by accident.
In the spring of 2023, Greenie began running a show called the Great Lakes Collectors Convention (GLCC), in Independence, OH. Greenberg and Levine, who rarely think about anything in two dimensions, decided to park a stage in the middle of the cavernous Independence Fieldhouse and invited numerous Northeast Ohio celebrities to appear for scheduled segments, entertainment for people milling between tables looking for their holy grail cards.
Levine used his media connections – he’s also the director of brand partnerships for Audacy, which owns several Cleveland radio stations – to pull in a healthy collection of sports media figures, which was joined by several past and present athletes. One invitee was Destiny Leo, who had just emerged as a local sports star by leading Cleveland State to the third NCAA Tournament appearance in program history while winning the Horizon League’s Player of the Year award.
Greenie had a bit of an existing affinity for CSU as well, given that Levine’s father was Les Levine, an area broadcasting legend who spent 23 years calling Vikings men’s games, including the program’s Kevin Mackey-era salad days.
As something of a thank you gift, Greenberg and Levine decided to print cards of their guests at the show, but were quickly shut down by a university staffer when they tried to give one to Leo; though NIL payments were permissible by then, undocumented handouts still were not.
That didn’t sit well with Greenberg, who then poured unprecedented levels of commitment into what was initially just supposed to be a fun giveaway.
“We were like okay, let’s figure this out,” he said. “We kind of went to the drawing board, I had already trademarked our name, so I contacted our trademark attorney, and I was like hey, how do we come up with an NIL agreement – we weren’t even thinking like money or anything – but how do we hand these cards to these girls?”
That inquiry led to something of a crash course over the ensuing months, as Greenie initiated conversations with universities, NIL collectives, student-athletes, and agents, in addition to getting the necessary legal help to craft appropriate contracts.
“We became experts in the field of NIL,” Levine said. “You get sort of this whole picture where all of these entities can’t talk to each other, for compliance reasons, but we got sort of a global perspective on how to make this work, and how to structure it so that student-athletes can benefit from it.”
By that fall, they were ready to try again with Leo, this time inviting her to autograph cards at one of the Broadview Heights shows. Though they sold some of those cards, Greenberg admits that the show was “more about doing something for her,” after the awkwardness at the GLCC.
It probably would have been easy enough to claim victory at that point, given that Greenie had accomplished what it set out to do, but Greenberg and Levine still wanted more.
They sought out other successful local athletes and landed on another women’s basketball star, Reagan Bass, a Strongsville High School graduate then putting together a dominant season at Akron, and ran a signing event with her. Notre Dame football alumnus and Lakewood, OH native Shaun Crawford provided an avenue to the Fighting Irish women’s basketball team, and the opportunity to create a team set featuring nationally recognized stars like Hidalgo, Sonia Citron, and Maddy Westbeld.
The duo quickly learned that between the cost and the administrative headaches, not to mention the competition, dealing in the high-major world is a bit more complex than what they experienced to that point.
“Ultimately, Notre Dame is just a different animal. We got Hannah [Hidalgo] to sign 50 cards that are selling now, and we’ll eventually break even at some point,” Greenberg snarked, as he burst into laughter.
“But we got to say that we made Notre Dame cards. That was more of an advertising expense than anything else.”
Greenberg and Levine recalibrated in time to punch out a Cleveland State team set midway through the 2023-24 season, and when the 2024 GLCC rolled around, they invited – and seamlessly gave event-branded cards to – both Maples and backcourt partner Mickayla Perdue. But the idea of consistently producing team sets as a default quickly gave way to an individual model that traces to those original efforts with Leo and Bass. By the spring of 2024, they came up with their current framework: sign as many individual student-athletes as possible, have them autograph cards, then sell those cards for $20 each. After costs, Greenie and the student-athletes would split the profits.
“He kind of reached out to all of us, and came up with the great idea of making each of us our own individual card,” Leo said. “People can purchase them through their website, he posts [on social media] a lot, the girls also post their cards out, which is really cool.”
It’s a setup that clearly benefits the more entrepreneurial players, the ones who have large social followings and consistently find creative ways to use their accounts as sales tools. However, Greenberg insists that the product that they’re pushing can sell itself.
“We don’t just make packs of cards that they just open and, okay, fine, you’ve got a card in there,” he said, drawing a distinction from the earlier ND and CSU sets that were primarily unsigned. “They’re going to get a signature with it. That’s what we want, is that value. You get something from that student-athlete.”
Greenie managed to draw in everyone on the 2024-25 Cleveland State roster (though the Vikings’ full team visit to the recent Broadview Heights show was ostensibly a promotional appearance, having them hammer out the signatures on their cards was the primary motive) and they continue to work with Bass, who now plays at Purdue. A few of Bass’ former Zips teammates are under contract and Crawford, their Notre Dame hookup, indirectly led to a handful of Ball State players as well.
The result has been a unique opportunity for a growing roster of mid-major basketball players. Unlike the Hidalgos and Watkinses of the world, who might be seen in national campaigns for State Farm or Nike, opportunities for Greenie’s clients are typically much more limited.
Leo has dipped into NIL as much as anyone on the Vikings’ roster, which mostly entails running a basketball camp at Eastlake North High School, her alma mater, as well as commissioning a line of merchandise featuring her personal logo. Teammates Perdue and Paulina Hernandez have worked with two of the companies that have sprung up specifically to create NIL-driven apparel, and there are a handful of other small opportunities out there, but not many.
“Dunkin’ Donuts is not knocking on Horizon League women’s basketball players’ doors,” Greenberg said. “So this helps them, while it also helps us build our brand.”
“It’s really cool just being able to have your picture out there, and other people can buy it from you, whether it’s family, or even random strangers that you don’t know, but they’re fans,” said Jordana Reisma, who has been among the more active Vikings players, in terms of engaging with the cards. “It’s really cool that our team has been able to have this opportunity.”
Though both Greenberg and Levine stress that they’re open to making cards of any student-athlete from any team at any school, thanks to the way the branches of their network have grown, it’s turned out that Greenie has developed largely as a women’s basketball brand to this point.
“We’ve become real fans of the sport,” Levine said. “The game is much more accessible, the players are more accessible, the teams, the coaches, and it’s an entertaining game, as so many other people are finding out.”
Greenberg and Levine will often sit around brainstorming massive, seemingly off-the-wall ideas with each other, or anyone else who will listen, then push the limits of rationality to bring those ideas to life. It’s the sort of ethos that led to initiating what they call the first-ever multi-stream trading card auction, a weekly show on eBay Live (but simulcast on just about every social network in existence) that will typically open with a long interview segment featuring a sports or hobby figure, before shifting into the nuts and bolts of the card auctions.
Their NIL venture is no different. Greenberg has already devoted plenty of mental bandwidth to product enhancements like higher-quality paper, and maybe even chrome-faced cards like the ones that captivated the Cleveland State players at their show. He’s also more than willing to talk about his content ideas. What about a limited three-player card, if a third different Viking follows Leo and Maples as the Horizon League Player of the Year? What about a card featuring both Leo and Kailey Klein, should the former break the latter’s program scoring record?
Then, moments later: “Why can’t we do the whole Horizon League? The whole MAC? The whole Conference USA?”
That last thought is probably more necessity than hubris for something that Greenberg openly admits is “a work in progress” and “not a business yet.” He sees a viable path to get there though, largely through the networking and persistence that’s brought Greenie to this point.
“People can now see that these cards are live and they’re sold,” he said. “Then, maybe, the men’s teams says that they want to do this too. Or the volleyball team. There’s probably, at Cleveland State alone, 400 student-athletes. Then we say to Kent State and Akron ‘look what we did here.’ Maybe across Northeast Ohio, we can get a thousand kids to make some money and help us build our name too. And not just basketball, we can do lacrosse and gymnastics and volleyball.”
“The model being open to any team, any school, any player gives us a pathway, without having to guess who’s the next big athlete, or whose card is going to be hot,” Levine added. “There’s a model for these student-athletes to make money within the NIL space, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”
