Today marks the six-month anniversary of several new state laws that ensure college athletes the right to endorse products without being punished for doing so by the NCAA. For years, the NCAA’s leadership had proclaimed that state-mandated NIL reform would lead to worsening of the gender divide of college sports. However, in reality, women’s college athletes have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of college sports’ 2021 economic reform.

A few of the many examples that help the illustrate the point of emerging opportunity for women’s college athletes to profit from endorsement opportunities include the following:

• At the University of Connecticut, star women’s basketball player Paige Bueckers has signed at least two major endorsement deals, including one with the famous sports drink, Gatorade. According to Wall Street Journal, Bueckers’s endorsements could earn her upwards of $1 million per year, which is more money than the average, annual take-home pay of most WNBA players.
• At Fresno State University, twin guards Haley and Hanna Cavinder, who were already well known for their Instagram and Tik Tok fame, signed  several quick endorsement deals with companies including Boost Mobile and Six Star Pro Nutrition. Not only are these deals projected to earn the Cavinder twins more than their own basketball coach, but these deals also have helped the young basketball players to augment their personal brands and their social media followings.
• At Louisiana State University, 19-year old gymnast Olivia Dunn, who has more than 1.3 million Instagram followers, has signed endorsement deals with brands including Plantfuel, American Eagle AEO and Vuori that combined are approximated in value at upwards of $1 million per year.

Meanwhile, beyond these big-ticket endorsements, there is also growing opportunity for less nationally known women’s college athletes to endorse brands for free product and smaller sums of money, much as former Stanford University volleyball player Hayley Hodson testified before the California state legislature would be the case in July 2019.

Heading into 2022, the new big questions for collegiate sports is not whether women’s athletes will have the opportunity to profit from endorsement opportunities, but rather if these newfound NIL opportunities will help to keep elite women’s athletes in college and graduate school programs rather than pursuing professional opportunities in their sport. 

The end result of NIL reform very well could be that athletes in women’s sports where their earning potential is short-lived will now be more likely to stay in college rather than need to choose between education and economic opportunity. At the same time, female athletes in revenue-generating and university-promoting sports such as college basketball will finally be able to share in some of the fruits of their labor.

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Marc Edelman (Marc@MarcEdelman.com) is a Professor of Law at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, Sports Ethics Director of the Robert Zicklin Center on Corporate Integrity, and the founder of Edelman Law. He is the author of “A Short Treatise on Amateurism and Antitrust Law” and “The Future of College Athlete Players Unions.

Source: Forbes