NIL is changing college sports. What does it mean for non-revenue athletes at Penn State?

Since last summer, student-athletes in college athletics have been able to monetize their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights, opening a new frontier at Penn State and other universities.

The Big Ten ranks No. 1 among all Division I athletic conferences in NIL compensation and in NIL activities through May 31, according to Opendorse.com. Football receives 49.9% of the NIL compensation and men’s basketball takes in 17%, leaving 33.1% of NIL compensation to the non-revenue sports.

Now, athletes and coaches in non-revenue sports are trying to navigate what’s next and what opportunities are available to them.

At last month’s Big Ten Media Days, new Penn State Athletic Director Pat Kraft shared his vision for what NIL could one day look like for all Penn State athletes.

“What I would like it to look like is if you come to Penn State, you have the opportunity to do the same thing as everyone in the country and that we have maximized the power of the brand to help you maximize your own brand,” Kraft said. “We’re really thinking now, ‘How does this work for 4-5 to 10 years? We’ve got to be the leader.’ ”

How coaches and players are adapting

Penn State head baseball coach Rob Cooper knows he still has much to learn about NIL — and he’s eager to share that with his players.

“I haven’t done a great job up until this point just because I’m still learning,” Cooper said. “It hasn’t infiltrated itself to the college baseball level until now. Now, it’s becoming an issue.”

He hopes to bring in experts they can all learn from.

“I have always been a person where unless I understand it, then I don’t want to comment on it. I don’t want to give anyone bad information, especially our student-athletes,” Cooper said.

One of those athletes is rising junior right-handed pitcher Travis Luensmann, an Altoona native (Bellwood-Antis) who spent his freshman season in 2021 with South Carolina and was still with the program in the infancy of NIL. He transferred to Penn State before the 2021-2022 school year and familiarized himself with how he could build a brand at Penn State, a place just 35.6 miles away from his high school.

“NIL stuff was brought to me last fall at Penn State,” Luensmann said. “We had a couple of meetings, classes and Zoom calls on it because it was pretty new at the time. We were just getting into it at Penn State and just getting to know the rules of how things would work and how to get yourself out there and how to build your digital profile. It was more of guiding yourself and making sure your presence online is positive and respectful of the team and university.”

Luensmann is one of the faces of the team and looks to represent that by expanding his reach on social media to build NIL deals. He has over 400 followers on Twitter and is above 1,200 on Instagram. The right-handed starting pitcher has a deal with Cellucore — a supplement brand that sends him pre-workout among other things, but he doesn’t receive compensation.

He has his eyes on certain products that he’d like to promote, specifically those that reflect the person that he is on and off of the field.

“I definitely would love to get out there with some glove brands and things like that,” Luensmann said. “Also, if I could get into the clothing brands out there. The clothing brands that I would really like to get into could include shoes, but that’s really hard to get into. I think on the other side with Cellucore, I could see myself with a paid nutrition sponsor. They send me meals, protein drinks and stuff like that. There’s sporting gear and also I could get into fishing stuff like Tackle House and Bass Pro Shop and all of those.”

Penn State women’s basketball forward Anna Camden has also taken advantage of ways to learn more about NIL over the past year.

“Me and Coach Kiegs have had lots of discussions about it and I think Penn State compliance as a whole has been helpful in educating toward all the athletes,” Camden said in July. “If you want help or you want advice, it’s there. You just have to reach out for it. I know, as a team we’ve had a couple of presentations about it … everyone is still learning and figuring out how involved they want to get and then what not (to get involved in).”

Penn State women’s head basketball coach Carolyn Kieger believes that athletes that play collegiate women’s sports have a great deal to gain in the NIL era, where women in particular are using social media to drive engagement and deals.

“It’s giving us more opportunities to be seen, it’s giving us more opportunities to be heard and it’s creating a platform for our young women to use their voices to inspire and motivate and hopefully increase the amount of young kids that want to compete,” Kieger said. “I think it gives their reach a broader net to be able to have young women to look up to them. It allows them to have a safe space to use the ball to impact things outside of the court.”

Social media at the forefront of NIL deals

Non-revenue athletes have a number of ways to break into brands through posting content on social media. Usually this would include ad placement within a video or photo, discussing a brand on a podcast.

It’s an area where Camden has seen a great deal of success in cashing in on NIL.

The rising senior touts more than 16,300 followers on Instagram, more than 1,200 followers on Twitter and over 236,000 followers on TikTok. Her social media platform has aided her and others in securing deals.

Among those opportunities are Roots Natural Kitchen, We Lock Kicks, Champs Sports and JBL headphones. She has also worked with Paramount Pictures to promote a movie and the Peyton Walker Foundation in her hometown of Camp Hill.

“I think it’s an equal platform for whoever wants to take advantage of it,” Camden said. “Obviously there are multiple ways that you can take advantage of it. Whether it be social media or appearances or starting your own business, I think that’s the beauty of it. There’s something for everyone to explore. And if that’s been super exciting, I think you don’t necessarily have to be the best at your sport to profit off NIL. On the flip side of it, you also don’t have to have a million social media followers to profit off of it.”

Growing resources to help guide student-athletes

Athletes at Penn State now have a number of resources to guide them through the uncharted waters of NIL.

Limitless NIL, created by Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford and his brother, wide receiver Liam, was formed to help student-athletes take advantage of NIL, while also helping to teach them about the new legislation. More than 25 athletes, including Camden, are involved, according to its website.

Nittany Commomwealth — with president Michael Krentzman at the helm — and Success With Honor — created by CEO Mark Toniatti, Ira Lubert and Bob Poole — are the two most prominent NIL collectives that benefit Penn State. The former is a football exclusive collective, while the latter benefits all Penn State sports.

These collectives, and others like them, are designed to assist student-athletes by creating NIL opportunities for them.

Success with Honor has subscription rates from $10 to $500 per month to benefit student-athletes. A subscriber can donate to a specific sport and a specific athlete and 85-90% of the revenue generated by the collective will go directly to the student-athletes.

While football is the driver as the biggest revenue builder in Penn State’s athletic department, Toniatti also understands that there are over 850 student-athletes at the university and only around 300 of them are on a full scholarship. With the majority of student-athletes not being on full scholarship, Success With Honor looks to be able to create opportunities for them to build upon their social media with the organization — including signing autographs for fans as he believes that student-athletes are “great representatives for the university.”

Nineteen athletes from Penn State were sent to the Name, Image and Likeness Seminar in Atlanta in June. The university had the largest representation of any school in the nation with athletes from track and field, lacrosse and fencing. Success With Honor looks to continue to build the profiles of athletes from non-revenue sports.

“We try to help the other sports as best we can and I think we’re doing OK with it right now,” Toniatti said. “I think we’ll continue to do that knowing that football is the driver. As focused as we are that coach (James) Franklin is taken care of, we also want to help out the other sports. We have fans that are really interested in the other sports.”