Tennessee athletes say that NIL has immensely bettered college athletics.
Karoline Striplin, a junior on the Lady Vol basketball team from Hartford, Alabama, has not known a reality of NCAA sports without NIL.
“NIL has been around since I’ve been in college, basically right when I got on campus in May of 2021, we started having meetings right off the bat just informing us [athletes] about everything,” Striplin said in an interview.
A big piece of the NIL puzzle is the role of NIL collectives.
NIL collectives are third-party organizations that fundraise money outside of the athletic department to support student-athletes. Collectives cannot simply pay athletes for doing nothing. There must be an exchange of services – whether it be a brand promotion or an autograph signing – for that payment.
In Knoxville, the main NIL collectives supporting athletes are Spyre Sports, the Volunteer Club, and the Lady Vol Boost(Her) Club.
Striplin explained that the Lady Vol Boost(her) club, which solely works with female athletes, hosts events where they pay athletes for attendance, autograph signings, and sell athlete-branded merchandise.
“That’s the bulk of the [NIL] work that we’re doing - just meeting with fans, but some of the high-profile athletes on campus are actually getting deals from the Lady Vol Boost(her) Club as well,” said Striplin.
Karoline Striplin had high praise for NIL and its impact on Tennessee athletics.
“I think the way that it benefits athletes the most is that our time is taken up so much by our sport that we’re unable to maybe get a job or something to pick up the extra slack and money that we’re needing just to satisfy basic needs on a daily basis,” Karoline Striplin said.
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Some outsiders in the NIL discussion focus on the fact that some college athletes are making millions of dollars in spending money, but for some student-athlete, these NIL payments can help make ends meet. Only 58% of college athletes are on scholarship, and a majority of these scholarships are only partial, meaning that these the athletes benefitting from NIL payments can use this money to pay their tuition.
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Some people do argue that the financial opportunities that NIL provides have encouraged athletes to shift their priorities away from their academics, but Striplin’s teammate, Jewel Spear, argues that this is a matter of subjectivity and varies from athlete to athlete.
![IMG_1985[4423].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c9e93f_5777cb4970c74236b547915d4c2f61b1~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_491,h_601,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/c9e93f_5777cb4970c74236b547915d4c2f61b1~mv2.jpg)
“I think NIL can do really good things.
For a person that has to go to college for four years because they might not have a higher chance to get into professional athletics, then maybe they do have to prioritize their education a little bit more, but there are people that do both; like they can have NIL and they also prioritize their education because they know the benefits of both because the ball is not going to keep bouncing forever.”
- Jewel Spear, Lady Vol Basketball player on NIL on the Transfers Talk Tennessee Sports Talk Show
“When you’re in the NBA, and you’re very successful for a long time, like LeBron James and Steph Curry, you have generational wealth, but that’s not everybody, so you need to have something to fall back on,” Spear added.
Spear’s experience with NIL differs significantly from some other Tennessee athletes. She completed her first three years of college basketball at Wake Forest University before transferring to Tennessee last spring.
“At my last school, we didn’t really have NIL collectives,” she said. “And that’s not really the main reason why I transferred, but we didn’t have any NIL collectives on the women’s side. Football did, and men’s basketball did, but when I came here, there was an NIL collective for the women’s team - the Lady Vol Boost(her) Club - which specifically emphasizes women athletes here.”
NIL has far-reaching effects effects across sports.
The NCAA to WNBA pipeline is deeply impacted by the recent growth of NIL. Before NIL, talented women’s college basketball players would not hesitate to declare for the WNBA draft as soon as they were eligible.
Today, however, NIL deals have evened out the playing field between the NCAA and professional women’s basketball. For example, On3 NIL reported former Lady Vol Basketball player Rickea Jackson’s NIL valuation at $83k, and the starting salaries for the WNBA range from $60k to $70k per year.
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This means that Jackson could actually be making more money via NIL in collegiate basketball than she would be as a first-year player in the WNBA.
Of course, these professional players usually have brand and contract deals that help them make a lot more money in the long run. However, the fact that the growth of NIL has made deciding whether to play professionally or not such a difficult choice for athletes speaks to its positive changes and growth.
Another sport heavily impacted by NIL is men’s basketball.
JP Estrella, a freshman on the men’s basketball team, was able to dive right into NIL as soon as he arrived in Knoxville last fall. As of late, Estrella has done NIL deals with several clothing brands, and he has been able to work with the primarily men’s sports only NIL collective, Spyre Sports.
“They’re awesome,” Estrella said about Spyre Sports in an interview. “I feel like they’re one of the better foundations in the country. They’ve helped me do a ton of different things, and they’ve been helping me as an athlete earn money.”
Many male athletes have NIL deals with Spyre Sports, a local Knoxville NIL collective.
Notably, football player Nico Iamaleava allegedly signed an $8 million contract with Spyre in high school.
Estrella goes even further to talk about how NIL has positively impacted locker room culture on the men’s basketball team at UT.
“I feel like NIL has impacted everyone in such a positive way,” Estrella said. “I just feel like people in the locker room talk about NIL in general, and everyone’s happy, everyone’s excited that they’re making a little bit of money. It can help with family stuff, you can use it for whatever you want to use it for.”
JP Estrella is young in terms of his college athletics career, but he sees no downsides to NIL at this point and time.
“I feel like NIL is such a great tool for all student-athletes,” Estrella said. “It just benefits us in so many different ways, and it’s just such a helpful tool for us as athletes because, like I said, we’re not able to work jobs if we wanted to because of sports and how busy we are.”
Football and men’s and women’s basketball are the “big three” in terms of NIL impact, but NIL has also brought non-revenue sports a great deal of visibility.
72% of NIL deals are social media promotions. In this Instagram post, Lady Vol softball player Karlyn Pickens promotes her partnership with Weigel's convenience store.
Take the sport of softball, for example.
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The Lady Vols were SEC Champions last season and made it to the Women’s College World Series, and NIL has allowed Tennessee softball players to capitalize on the hype.
“Softball has made huge impacts with NIL, I think this year and past years have had the most views on TV,” said Karlyn Pickens, a sophomore pitcher. “So, I think that not only has NIL allowed for individual growth, but it’s also impacted the sport as a whole.”
Karlyn Pickens recently began a partnership with Weigel’s, an east Tennessee-based convenience store chain.
“We have a deal where, for every six strikeouts I get during a game, everybody gets a free 24-ounce Coke product,” Pickens said in an interview. “So if they have a membership with Weigel’s, they can go in the next day and get their free Coke product.”
“Basically, if I play good, [the fans] get a Coke,” she joked.
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Pickens also does work with the Lady Vol Boost(Her) Club. She explained that, although the Club does pay her for NIL related duties, it actually goes above and beyond.
“The main takeaway is that in working with the Boost(her) Club, not only do they care about the financial aspect of it, but they also do a great job of protecting who you are as a person and respecting what brands you want to work with that fit with who you are,” Pickens said.
Baseball is another non-revenue sport that has been rapidly gaining traction with NIL
"It's growing more and more each year for baseball, " Cal Stark, Tennessee catcher said on the Transfers Talk Tennessee Sports show. "I think more and more people are starting to watch it, and with the players that are in the game right now, not even just [Christian Moore] and [Blake Burke] on our team and and [Billy Amick], but just in all of college baseball, there are some big-time names that are getting recognized."
Stark says that NIL has provided the sport of baseball with more visibility, which makes the game more fun to watch for sports fans.
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"I think, you know, with the bat flips and the trash talking, it makes all that more fun to watch, rather than just going and sitting at a stadium for three hours watching a ball get thrown around," Stark said.
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Over the last several years, Stark compiled several NIL deals of his own.
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"I got a couple shirts out there," Stark joked, referencing his NIL branded merchandise (left).
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For Stark, NIL has opened up opportunities that he never considered.
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"It's been cool because I never really thought about getting money in college for sports," Stark said. "I just thought, oh I'll go play sports while I go to school."
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