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USA Today
9 hours ago
- Business
- USA Today
Big Ten media days: Beth Goetz sheds light on Iowa athletics' revenue sharing plan
Iowa athletics director Beth Goetz joined the Hawkeye contingent that descended upon Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas for Big Ten media days on Thursday. Goetz broached a number of topics, including the new courtside riser seating section that is being implemented for men's and women's basketball and for Hawkeye wrestling during the coming 2025-26 athletics seasons. In addition to the future of Carver-Hawkeye Arena, Goetz was asked how the revenue sharing process has gone for Hawkeye athletics thus far after Judge Claudia Wilken approved the House v. NCAA settlement in early June that paved the way for schools to play athletes directly. "We've been really pleased. It's gone really smoothly in terms of the operationalizing of making that distribution. For many of our athletes, we made a first payment on July 1. No issues. It went relatively smoothly. I think it's already been reported that we're working through Venmo and so they were a really good partner. A lot of leg work and things like that to get it uploaded, but it went as smoothly as it could," Goetz said. Goetz was asked if every athlete or sport on campus would receive revenue sharing or if it was exclusive to a select list of sports. "Every athlete on our campus will not receive revenue sharing. So, we made decisions based on the first year, so we really looked at this as a snapshot in time with the ability again to pivot as we needed to. So, certainly focused on our revenue sports. "Doesn't mean you may not have a sprinkling of others. We have some scholarship pieces that will be a part of that as well. But, we'll have to see how it all plays out and how we need to adjust to the market to what our peers are doing etcetera as we go forward," Goetz said. Goetz didn't reveal which sports would be receiving revenue share payments, but indicated that the Hawkeyes' largest revenue generators would be considered first. "Well, it's sort of a moving target. At the end of the year, we'll have to see. Clearly, we're focused on men's, women's basketball and football and wrestling is a priority for us as well. But, there'll be a smattering of other individuals I think along the way that we'll see," Goetz said. There's still uncertainty beyond the initial House v. NCAA settlement. Yahoo! Sports' Ross Dellenger reported earlier this week that attorneys for the House plaintiffs have struck an agreement with the power conferences and NCAA officials to amend the decision-making from the industry's new enforcement arm, the College Sports Commission, related to how booster-backed collectives can compensate athletes. Per Dellenger, as part of the agreement, the College Sports Commission is expected to treat collectives or any 'school-associated entity' in a similar fashion as other businesses when determining the legitimacy of third-party NIL deals submitted to the CSC's NIL Go clearinghouse. This may relax some of the roadblocks that could exist for Iowa's SWARM collective as it pertains to exceeding the $20.5 million revenue share "cap." "A little more clarity would obviously be nice. But, at the end of the day, right now, all of that really just lies in terms of the settlement agreement. So, that's working with the plaintiffs lawyers and trying to figure out what that piece is going to play out. "It's helpful because I think Brad (Heinrichs) and I have a good relationship. We talk all the time. Just trying to get comfortable saying, hey, 'We're going to make the best decision we can today with the information we know and then pivot if we learn something else.' Probably since COVID, I think that's the way we've all had to operate in athletics for a while. And so you learn to get pretty comfortable in having a few contingency plans and just waiting to make plans to adjust in another six weeks or so," Goetz said. Iowa recently launched its Flight Funds program which is designed to support revenue sharing for football, men's basketball, women's basketball and men's wrestling, along with a general support Flight Fund. "Driving revenue has always been a priority at this level in college athletics and it's going to continue to be, so the different avenues that we have to do that, obviously being able to do a good chunk of that in-house now is helpful, and so we've got a lot of different strategies going on there. "But, depending on how settlement terms play out with collectives, we'll have to see if there's some things we can continue to do and to support from a third party, whether that's in a true collective form or something we work that into going forward. But, it's a lot of resource. We all know that is a component of it, but I think we're going to be well positioned to make sure we're at the table and can execute," Goetz said. Contact/Follow us @HawkeyesWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Iowa news, notes and opinions. Follow Josh on X: @JoshOnREF
Chicago Tribune
14-07-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Bob Chiarito: Surveillance video, often decried, may be the key to getting justice
A white man who alleged he was afraid for his life shoots Black teens. This was the gist of the 1984 incident involving Bernhard Goetz in New York City, and it seems to be the gist of the shooting involving Charles Leto that took place on June 26 here in Chicago. The major difference thus far seems to be that in the most recent case, there is surveillance footage. The plethora of surveillance cameras in society, from banks to residences and everywhere in between, is often looked at negatively, as something Orwellian and as a way for the government to control the masses — but there are many upsides for those seeking justice. In 1984, when Goetz shot four Black youths on the New York subway after they approached him and asked for $5, America had not yet entered the surveillance era. Although he was charged with attempted murder, assault and reckless endangerment, he was ultimately found guilty of only one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm. Had there been a surveillance video, things may have turned out differently. Instead, the word of a white adult was taken over the word of four Black youths, and Goetz not only was found not guilty of the major crimes against the boys, but he became a hero known as the 'Subway Vigilante.' It's important to realize that along with the fact that surveillance video was nowhere near as prevalent in 1984 as it is today, 1980s New York was a powder keg, unlike Chicago in 2025. Crime in New York was rampant, and racial tensions were high. Two years after the Goetz incident, a white mob in the Italian American enclave of Howard Beach in New York chased 23-year-old Michael Griffith and two friends, all Black, and beat Griffith to death for simply being in their neighborhood. Had the jury in that case had surveillance video, it's likely the sentences of the white perpetrators would have been longer. Then, in 1989, the Central Park jogger case came along, and five Black and Hispanic teenagers were convicted of the crime of brutally raping a white woman. They served sentences ranging from five to 12 years, and in 2002, their convictions were vacated because they didn't do it. Had there been surveillance video, there is little doubt that things would have turned out differently for those innocent boys. In Chicago, the closest parallel to the racial attacks in 1980s New York was the 1997 Bridgeport attack on Lenard Clark, a Black 13-year-old, by a group of teenagers including Frank Caruso Jr., who was convicted of the beating but ultimately forced to serve only two years of an eight-year sentence. Had there been video, it's likely that Caruso would have had a much harsher sentence. Almost 20 years after the Clark beating, Chicago would experience another high-profile incident — the shooting death of Black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer. The initial report put out by the Police Department was that McDonald was walking erratically down a street while carrying a knife and then lunged at officers when they approached, forcing them to shoot him. However, there was a video of this incident, which was withheld from the public for more than a year before it was finally released and only because a Cook County judge ordered it. The video led to the resignation of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision not to seek reelection and the conviction of Officer Jason Van Dyke for second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery, one count for every shot that hit McDonald. Without the video, it's very likely that the initial report would have been the final word, and Van Dyke would still be a Chicago police officer today. This brings us to the most recent incident: It is alleged that Leto shot two black youths who approached him while he was fixing his bicycle outside the Douglass Park pool, where he worked as a lifeguard. Marjay Dotson, 15, was killed, and 14-year-old Jeremy Herred was critically wounded. (Ironically, Herred is a cousin of McDonald.) Unlike in the McDonald case, it took authorities just a few days to release the surveillance video, and Leto was quickly charged with murder and attempted murder. While he is likely to claim that he felt threatened and that he believed the boys had weapons, no weapons were recovered, and it's a safe bet that the video will be key to the prosecution. Every day, surveillance videos help solve all types of crimes, from carjackings and purse snatchings to murder. They can help convict and exonerate, but they are not a cure-all. We've all seen savvy defense lawyers attempt to take them apart frame by frame in court and twist them before a jury. It worked in the trial of the Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney King in 1991, but it did not work in 2016 when Van Dyke's attorney tried to convince jurors that McDonald posed a threat. It will be interesting to see how the case against Leto plays out. What is apparent to those favoring justice is: It's much better to have surveillance video than not to have it.
Eater
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
Teams Behind Charleston's Last Saint and Lupara Go Italian-ish for Next Project
Restaurateur and cocktail creator Joey Goetz (of James Island hangout Bar George and vibey cocktail bar Last Saint) and chefs Mason Morton and James Ostop (of Bar George and red-sauce pop-up Lupara) are coming together for a new project in the Wagener Terrace neighborhood. Located at 1117 King Street, Ok Donna will be a collaboration of Goetz's bartending skills and Morton and Ostop's Italian flavors — but do not call it an Italian restaurant, even though Ok Donna is named for Goetz's mother, Donna, who is from Palermo. 'I think when people think Italian, they think of a certain experience they're going to have,' says Goetz, 'like a certain tablecloth or it's only for special occasions, things like that, and we want the space to be very neighborhood-y, very Bar George in a way. We want it to be a cool, downtown neighborhood bar and restaurant.' Bar George partner Hank Weed and Goetz's fiancée, Megan Hill, who currently runs Bar George, will also join the project. The food menu at Ok Donna will draw inspiration from Lupara's pop-ups, featuring fresh pastas, as well as adding pizzas and seasonal vegetable specials to the lineup. 'It's not going to be your traditional red-sauce restaurant,' says Goetz, 'I don't want the kitchen to be hamstrung by Italian cuisine or any style of cuisine. I wouldn't call it Italian, but it's rooted in Italian.' He cites the menu at Bar George as a guiding example. The James Island restaurant serves Peruvian chicken, oysters, fancy hot dogs, and farm-fresh produce plates — there isn't really a set style to any of it. The same will go for the bar at Ok Donna. Goetz doesn't want only to serve Negronis and Americanos. 'I wanted a little bit more freedom to do some other stuff,' he says. The drinks at Bar George are craveable and creative, like the recent addition of the Safe Word, which features spicy tequila, Salers aperitif, lime, celery bitters, Ancho Reyes, and olive brine. If you've ever visited Bar George or Last Saint, you know that they're hip spots with cool soundtracks, mismatched furniture, and quirky, irreverent menus — we're expecting much of the same for Ok Donna. It has to be cool if there's a poem about dirty martinis and cigarettes on the homepage. 'I want this to be the sort of place where you feel comfortable coming in for a beer and a slice of pizza,' says Goetz, 'I don't want you to think you have to make a reservation and it's a whole thing. I want the neighborhood to sense that they can come in as they are.' Look for the newcomer to open later this summer. See More: Carolinas Restaurant News Charleston Coming Attractions
CNBC
19-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
In college, he spent $3,500 to launch a popsicle business—now it brings in $63 million a year
Daniel Goetz spent many late nights as a college senior cutting and blending fresh fruits, and freezing them into popsicles to sell to parched customers near the University of Texas at Austin. The advertising major fell in love with Mexican ice pops, called paletas, while visiting Mexico City with his college girlfriend. Inspired, Goetz started mocking up potential brand names and doodling logos during a class in 2009. He landed on the name "GoodPop." Today, the Austin-based organic popsicle and ice cream bar company's frozen desserts are sold in more than 10,000 locations across the U.S., including Costco, Walmart and Whole Foods Market. GoodPop brought in more than $63 million in gross sales in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. It's never taken external funding, says Goetz. GoodPop has been profitable nearly every year since its launch, with 2024 as an exception. It likely won't be profitable in 2025 either, following the winding down of an unpopular product line, but is projected to return to profitability in 2026, says a company still the company's CEO, built GoodPop with extremely little experience or industry expertise. He "knew nothing" about supply chains or the consumer packaged goods market, he says, and spent years "driving a lot ... running around all over Texas, making deliveries." He spent his first four years after graduation sleeping "rent-free" on friends' couches around Austin so he could save money while trying to build GoodPop, he says. He cut fruit and froze 80 popsicles per hour, by hand, in a local paleteria that let him use its kitchen after hours. "I just knew that we had this delicious pop with lower sugar, real fruit, and there was nothing like it on the market," says Goetz, 38, adding: "Any opportunity that I could to put these products in front of Austinites, to introduce them and to see if we were on to something, I did." Goetz's family has a history of entrepreneurship: His great-grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Russia over a century ago and "sold consigned ice out of a pushcart," he says. That great-grandfather then founded a grocery supply business in Houston in 1923, which grew into an operation with multibillion-dollar annual revenue by the time Goetz's family sold their interest in 2014. "I'm so fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. But, at the same time, I knew that I needed to make my own mark on this world and do it on my own," says Goetz. With GoodPop, he spent $3,500 — money he'd saved from a lawn-mowing business he started in middle school — on signage, a pushcart of his own and produce to make and sell his first popsicles. He sold them for $2 apiece at local music festivals and farmer's markets, bought more ingredients with his proceeds, and spent three weeks making 18,000 popsicles to sell at the annual Austin City Limits music festival in October 2009, he says. Then, rain turned the festival into a "mud fest," he says. "It [was] a cold, sloppy mess ... and out of those 18,000 pops, we sold four. I thought that this was going to kickstart [the business] and change everything, and we were left with 17,996 pops that I had to figure out what to do with and [almost] no money." Goetz rushed the popsicles to a cold storage facility, paid $50 per month to store them and returned to school "dejected," he says. A few months later, he cut his losses and handed them out for free at Austin's annual SXSW festival. After graduating college, Goetz couldn't shake the GoodPop idea, he says. But the only remaining piece of the company was its website — so Goetz put his marketing skills to work, maximizing the site's search engine optimization (SEO). Soon, "when you searched for organic frozen pops or organic popsicles, because none existed at that time, GoodPop was actually the No. 1 result," he says. A week later, a marketing agency called Manifold asked GoodPop for a price quote for 50,000 organic popsicles with custom packaging. Goetz put in a bid and won it: Manifold paid him $80,000 for the job, giving him half the money up front to cover his production costs. "I hand-stamped every single pop stick," says Goetz. The second half of the payment was pure profit for Goetz, putting GoodPop back in business. Luck similarly gave GoodPop its first major retail partner: Goetz's roommate played recreational soccer with a Whole Foods employee, who put him in touch with a representative from the grocery chain's Southwest regional office. Goetz brought some samples and got the representative's approval to pitch buyers at individual Whole Foods stores. As he won buyers over — building relationships and shaking hands, he says — he spent four years sleeping on friends' couches, staying up late to make popsicles and getting up early to deliver them to Whole Foods locations and other, smaller grocery stores by 6 a.m. "I put 212,000 miles on my Toyota, running around all over Texas, making deliveries for years," says Goetz, adding that the hands-on dedication often left him "completely exhausted." By 2014, GoodPop's products sold well enough for Whole Foods to take over distribution for the Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions, meaning Goetz no longer had to make the deliveries himself. That year, GoodPop brought in $1.3 million in gross sales, the company says. In 2017, Whole Foods expanded GoodPop to national distribution. The brand got into Walmart and Costco the following year. The U.S. popsicle market was worth more than $1.3 billion in 2024, according to an estimate from Cognitive Market Research. That makes GoodPop a small player in a market dominated by packaged goods giants: Unilever, the world's largest ice cream producer, brought in more than $9.5 billion in 2024 revenue from frozen dessert brands like Magnum, Ben & Jerry's and the original Popsicle. Even among plant-based, real-fruit frozen desserts, GoodPop competes with brands like Outshine, owned by a joint venture between Nestlé and French private equity firm PAI Partners, and New York-based Chloe's, which sells low-sugar fruit pops in more than 10,000 stores nationwide, including Walmart and Wegman's. They all face a tough road convincing more Americans to buy lower-sugar desserts. In January, GoodPop wound down a line of low-sugar beverages — which mixed fruit juice with sparkling water — after customers said their kids didn't think the drinks were sweet enough. "We were not willing to compromise on any added sugar or any additional sweeteners," says Goetz, adding: "We have some tough times ahead, as far as continuing to reset those taste buds. But it's a worthwhile cause." Ultimately, Goetz's goal from college remains roughly the same: get GoodPop's desserts into as many new hands as possible. In February, the company landed a licensing deal with The Walt Disney Company, adding "Star Wars" and Mickey Mouse-themed products to GoodPop's offerings — a new strategy for the company to catch shoppers' attention. "The future looks like doubling down on what makes our products great," Goetz says.
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Just unreal': Country music star, non-profit gift house to family who lost home in Helene
A non-profit, a country music star, and a knife company came together to provide a home to a family who lost their home in Hurricane Helene. The Pogalz family watched as their Yancey County home was washed away in Hurricane Helene. And six months later, they learned FEMA wasn't going to help cover their costs to rebuild. 'We make too much money for help, and that's not fair, because the hurricane didn't ask us how much money we made before it took everything,' Ashley Pogalz told Channel 9's Hannah Goetz. 'So why? Why does it matter how much we make? We need help.' The family shared their story with Goetz eight months ago as they hiked to safety from their home, and they caught the attention of a local non-profit. On Monday, Goetz joined them again as they hiked to receive a surprise from the non-profit We Must Protect. READ: 'We need help': Western N.C. family struggles to rebuild months after Helene At the top of the hill, the Pogalz family stood on land they newly purchased with FEMA funds and flood insurance. There stood country music singer and Buncombe County native Chase Rice and Montana Knife Company CEO Josh Smith with news for the family. 'We raised quite a bit of money,' Smith said. 'We raised enough money to build you guys a house.' And representatives with We Must Protect said they couldn't have done it with out support from the two. 'From the first day we met you all, we knew we wanted to build you a house, but our thing is we can't commit until we have the funding to finish the house,' one representative said. 'We are so grateful for what Chase and Montana Knife Company did because now we can build you the house that you need.' Goetz watched as the teary family said 'I love you' and exchanged hugs. 'There's so many different things that came together,' Rice said. 'I'd say the number one thing coming together was God, putting all these people together to make this family finally have a home.' The Pogalz family told Goetz they felt like they'd been slipping through the cracks and that they had no help. The family of six had been living in trailers, campers and two-bedroom rentals. 'I keep repeating, just unreal,' Danny Pogalz said. 'Never thought we would be in this kind of situation to begin with, and now, you know, we got knocked down, but now we're going to be ahead.' We Must Protect said they will be working in western North Carolina to build homes until there are no more left to build. Or their funding runs out. To participate in the Montana Knife Company's causes, visit their Come Hell or Highwater webpage. WATCH: 'We need help': Western N.C. family struggles to rebuild months after Helene
