The first thing you might notice about Indiana University Indianapolis Athletic Director Luke Bosso–besides maybe his red sports jacket, often worn at basketball games–is his energy. He’s vocal in his courtside seat at The Jungle, shouting out encouragement to players, and gesturing to the crowd to be louder when situations call for it.
He’s also quick to remind that there’s a lot more than basketball going on in, say, early February at his institution, but it is Indianapolis, this is Indiana, and it would be be easy to be discouraged with an 8-18 record on the men’s side and 6-18 on the women’s side.
Why is attendance up then? And why is the number of sponsors going up? Why are fundraising dollars coming in? At least part of the answer comes from the enthusiasm Bosso models and the vision that drives it. “You’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who loves Indianapolis and Indiana more than me,” he says.
His pursuit of an athletic director position not quite two years ago wasn’t an obvious next step in his career, as he was working at Katz, Sapper, & Miller (KSM)–“a leading advisory, tax, and audit firm,” according to the company’s website–and it was going well. Before KSM, he’d had stints at the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and the Indiana governor’s office.
But Bosso had also grown up attending Horizon League championships with his father. He had played football at Franklin College and spent a few of those summers working for the Indianapolis Indians. While devoting his early full-time work to other places, he’s still managed to find time for getting involved with Indiana Sports Corp.
When a professional contact brought the opening at IU Indy (then Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis) to his attention, he had to admit to himself that he knew of other sports leaders in his town–especially Douglass Boles and Mark Miles in car racing–who had pivoted from the political world. So while being the athletic director at a local mid-major may not have initially been in his plans, it didn’t exactly seem, in other words, to have been a tough sell either.
“I tell people we want to win in three places: the classroom, the community, and then on the field of play,” he says.
Two of those three are commonly emphasized by people in the amateur sports world, but it’s the community pillar that may have Bosso positioned well to lead his institution into the evolving Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) space, and he encourages Jaguar student-athletes to take their own initiative when they can.
“I just try to call it sports marketing…When I hear student athletes say, ‘Hey, I want an NIL deal,’ my question back to them is like, ‘Well, what have you done this week?’ In a good way, right? …’What restaurants did you go to? What local clothes are you buying? Where are you hanging out at?’ And it gets the wheels spinning.”
One avenue for the kinds of communal connections that can be made between IU Indy athletes and Indianapolis at large comes through a partnership between IU Indy Athletics and a local coffee shop, Java House. The program offers student athletes the opportunity to show up once a month to have coffee in the presence of various community leaders, and the program has–according to Bosso–led to several recent internship offers for IU Indy athletes.
Bosso was doing some of his own networking (“sports marketing?”) at an NBA Summer League event when an acquaintance told him about a guy named Ryan Boswell, though Bosso admits he didn’t think that much of the name drop at the time. Then Boswell showed up at an Indy 11 game–a United Soccer League professional team that plays on IU Indy’s campus–and the two agreed to have lunch.
Boswell is a partner at Cold Plunge Studios in Carmel, Indiana. He’d once been a social media intern for the band, The Killers, but moved to Indianapolis to help launch the studio after gaining some traction on TikTok by making videos about cold plunging. He’d initially sought out the practice as an attempt to address an ADHD diagnosis and what he describes as “brain fog” ever since a bout with COVID in October of 2020. He says the relief he felt of those symptoms after plunging was immediate.
Originally from Chicago, Boswell had gone to college for a time at Utah Valley University, which he says reminds him–especially in terms of the positioning of its athletics program in its city–of IU Indy. Soon he was getting invited by Bosso to one of those monthly coffee events, at which Boswell met IU Indy men’s basketball player Sean Craig, who stayed after to talk to with the entrepreneur.
Craig is a 6-7 finance major from Ohio who–in his first season at IU Indianapolis after transferring from the University of Indianapolis to follow his coach, Paul Corsaro, across town–is averaging 11.5 points a game. He has “really put himself out there” in a sports marketing sense, according to Bosso.
Craig hasn’t studied cold plunging, though, in the way his teammate, guard Paul Zilinskas, has. Zilinskas, who also came over with Craig and Corsaro from UIndy, immigrated to the United States from Lithuania with his mother, Vilia, when he was 6 years old. Zilinskas doesn’t have any siblings, but his mother was a professional-level basketball player who would become his trainer in addition to being his parental support and now a fan who often drives from the Chicago area to his games.
“You’re gonna have bad nights, times when you don’t shoot well,” Zilinskas says. “But one thing that stayed consistent was my mom and I were always in the gym. Whether it was after a game or early mornings, the next day off, we’re always shooting. We’re always in the gym, working out, getting better.”
All those hours have paid off for Zilinskas, who hopes to one day follow his mother’s footsteps into professional basketball in Europe, as he now leads IU Indy in scoring just a few years removed from being offered a grand total of 1 Division II scholarship–at Quincy University in Illinois, where he played at before UIndy–and 0 at that time at the Division I level.
Paul was still in high school when he came across a YouTube video about Wim Hof, a Dutch breathing and cold exposure guru of sorts and extreme athlete who has run a half marathon barefoot in snow, who holds the Guinness Book of World records for swimming under ice, and who has climbed Mount Everest in shorts. It was intriguing enough information for Paul to start experimenting with cold showers.
About plunges in particular, Zilinskas says “I really don’t want to do it once I’m looking at the tub, and I know how cold it’s gonna be. But then once you’re out, you’re like, ‘Okay, I can do this.'” He also admits that Craig may be the more enthusiastic plunger of the two, even if Zilinskas is the better student of why.
These days, the two teammates try to make it up to Cold Plunge Studios once or twice a week when they’re not too busy with classes, practices, and away games. They have an NIL deal with the outfit that exchanges those plunges on the house for some help with social media marketing.
Boswell, who has continued his relationship with the team by going on a road trip to their Xavier game and joining the team flight to Iowa State, says money for agreements like these come out a company’s marketing budget, and as an example of how working with Zilinskas and Craig can benefits a small company, he points out that the Instagram post that announced the agreement was Cold Plunge Studios’ best performing content to date on the site.
Zilinskas has his own unique take on the agreement: “It’s not like we’re doing it just for the contract, just for the promotion. I would do it even if I didn’t know Ryan or if I didn’t know anyone there, like it’s something that really helps me, and I believe in from all the research I’ve done, so it’s not about anything contractual.”
Zilinkas and Craig have tried to spread their love for cold plunging with other teammates, though Craig admits that 6-8 freshman DeSean Goode was a lot less enthusiastic about the practice after feeling that cold water. Craig thinks he might be able to get 6-3 guard Jarvis Walker to come back for another round, though.
The deal with Cold Plunge Studios has made Zilinskas bolder in his willingness to initiate conversations with local businesses. He says he’s been shot down a number of times, but one ask that recently worked out was with Toppers Pizza. Zilinskas and Goode were frequenting the spot close to IU Indy’s campus often enough that the idea of an NIL agreement came up over one of the meals.
“I just shot (the restaurant) a text,” he says. “I didn’t think they’d respond…And then the next day they’re like, ‘Hey, thanks for reaching out. We’d love to, let me know when you’re free to talk’ and then from there it just kind of grew.”
While Bosso appreciates when NIL agreements come out of “organic” interactions like most of the ones highlighted above, he says the process can also be started even if a company doesn’t have obvious ins with players or coaches or administrators. Interested parties can simply go to TheLinkU’s website, select Indiana University Indianapolis as the school to support, and then pick from a list of teams and individual players.
