Alter grad Borland starts new venture to tell college athletes’ stories

“I knew in my heart it was the place I wanted to play,” Borland said.

Five years later, during his senior season as a Wisconsin linebacker, he talked about growing up in Kettering with six siblings.

“Look, football is popular and I’ve gotten a lot of recognition,” Borland said. “But I’m far from the most accomplished Borland. I’m just struggling to keep up.”

In 2015, after walking away from football after one year in the NFL, Borland talked to columnist Tom Archdeacon about his future.

“I wish I had the answer,” Borland said. “I’m kind of suffering from a paradox of choices right now. But that’s a good problem to have. I have some interesting options.”

Now in 2023, Borland is pursuing one of those options. Last week, he announced the launch of ByUS Media, which describes itself as an “athlete-driven storytelling platform in college sports.” He started the company with a fellow Wisconsin graduate, Olivia Hancock.

The first story, released Friday on Instagram, focused on Drake University guard Okay Djamgouz, who wrote a first-person account of how the earthquake in Turkey in February affected him.

“I am Turkish,” Djamgouz wrote. “I grew up in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. But I am 100% Turkish. My parents met at school in Istanbul. Türkiye and Cyprus are places that define who we are as a family. It defines who I am. It’s been 5 weeks since the Earthquake. February 6th. 7.8 magnitude. It lasted 80 seconds. To date, there’s been over 50,000 deaths.I was on the other side of the world when it happened. In Des Moines, Iowa. Playing basketball. I felt helpless. Disconnected. I felt like a fraud.”

Borland was excited to start with the story of Djamgouz, whose team lost to the Miami Hurricanes on Friday in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

“He’s got strong Turkish roots and has been trying to raise funds and awareness since the earthquake,” Borland said, “So it’s a really, really powerful story, and he’s an amazing kid. His whole family’s awesome.”

In the days the weeks ahead, ByUS Media will release more stories. Each will be around 500 words long and be featured with a portrait and shared on Instagram and other social media sites and eventually the ByUS Media website.

“The beauty of what we’re doing is it’s entirely up to the athlete,” Borland said. “We don’t go in with a story that we want to tell and ask them for a quote. It’s kind of the opposite. We find athletes that have something they really want to share and then help them get it out to the world. So it’s been a range of stories. We’ve met with athletes who want to talk about protection for women’s athletes. We’ve met with athletes who want to discuss mental health. There are fun and light stories, too. There’s an athlete that takes his dogs everywhere with him. To me, that is what powers sports. You’ve got all sorts of things going on with athletes’ experiences. We want to capture that, and plus, it’s important that it passes the locker room test to resonate with with athletes who are reading our stuff.”

Borland said the idea for ByUS Media came about from his various experiences since the end of his football career. He retired after one season with the San Francisco 49ers because of the concerns he had about the risk of head trauma and its long-term effect on his health. Borland worked as an advocate for former players living with brain injuries. He founded a company called T Mindful to integrate meditation into athletics. He helped organize the Dayton Peace Festival in October 2019.

Borland also moved to Los Angles for a few years to work for The Players Tribune, another outlet which gives athletes a platform to tell their stories. The Players Tribune broke new ground with athlete-driven content, Borland said, but focused on pro sports. ByUs Media will focus on college athletes.

“There are so many college athletes — 500,000 — all with different paths and interesting stories,” Borland said. “I think one of the things I’m excited about with college sports, as opposed to pro, is that with the pros, you could have a 22-year-old rookie and a 38-year-old veteran. In college sports, every athlete has different experiences, but they’re around the same age, and they’re going through a very similar experience with being a student, being an athlete, and with their lives playing out largely on social media, which I think is fascinating component.”

Borland, 32, and Hancock, 23, partnered on the project after meeting in Madison in February 2022. Hancock had asked Borland to speak on a mental health panel for UNCUT Madison, a non-profit she started to help Wisconsin athletes share their stories.

After coming up with the idea for ByUS Media, Borland and Hancock have met with dozens of athletes from Arizona to North Carolina and plan to travel to Southeastern Conference country later in March to continue collecting stories.

“It’s been truly inspiring,” Borland said. “I hadn’t been around college sports for years, and a lot has changed since I played. It’s been fascinating to see how athletes are dealing with name, image and likeness. With with things opening up in college sports, I think there are also a lot of unique challenges. Mental health is something that’s come up every time we’ve spoken with an athlete. The pressure of college sports can be immense at times. Social media can be a negative place, and for young people to deal with that and navigate that, I know it’s been on the minds of the athletes we’ve talked to.”