This college volleyball player has scored more than 40 NIL deals this year. Here’s how she’s advocating for women athletes at her university to work with brands.

Glover had the most new NIL deals this year of any athlete on the endorsement platform SponsorUnited, the company stated in a 2023 report. While the report tracked 19 of Glover’s deals, Business Insider confirmed that she’d gotten around 40 NIL deals in total this year, and she said she’s pacing to pass 50 with a holiday boost.

“I think it’s a great time for NIL,” Glover told BI, “for at least me or any woman who’s in sports and wants to start with content creation.”

Glover has passed on the knowledge she’s learned from NIL as a guest on panels and podcasts, and created an ebook to share the platforms and tools she uses for partnerships and videos, such as tax information for reporting deals and a list of brands that want to work with student-athletes. She has also stood up for female athletes getting equal NIL opportunities at SMU.

Treating NIL like a competition to make the best deals and content

Glover used to model back in high school, so she already had some experience building her brand online. She started in college posting trendy dance videos with her teammates and developed her signature style of “day in the life” videos, all on TikTok.

Once she began posting videos on Instagram, Glover said brands started reaching out to her for deals, and has since learned that the more videos she posts, the more successful she is.

“It’s almost like a competition with myself at this point,” Glover said. “What brand can I do a deal with that I really love and I feel like really aligns with my personal brand? Or how many views can I get on this video? Or how many impressions can I get?”

Glover used to do more brand outreach, but now companies more often come to her, she said. She’s worked with a wide range of brands targeting an audience of young women, including Ulta Beauty, Skims, Aerie, Dove, and Kendra Scott, as well as other companies like Buffalo Wild Wings, Coach, DoorDash, Caktus AI, and CVS.

Glover said she tries to promote one small or Black-owned business per month. She charges less to those businesses, but the rest of her deals are usually gifts of products from a company or are worth at least five-figures, she said. She also gets a small amount of income from her ebook and personalized merchandise that her friends and family buy.

Glover said she wants to continue making content after she finishes at SMU in the spring, maybe as a women’s sports creator or broadcaster, she said. She’s part of a growing trend of student-athletes who are using NIL to help shape their careers after graduation.

“If I was able to keep growing my social media and get to a point where I felt like full-time influencing is something that is feasible for me and that I could do, I would definitely do that,” Glover said.

Advocating for female athletes with SMU’s NIL collective

SMU has two donor-funded groups, known as collectives, that help facilitate NIL dollars to the school’s student-athletes. Both concentrate mainly on men’s sports: One focuses on football, while the other, the Boulevard Collective, was set up to do deals with football and men’s basketball players.

Collectives drive about 80% of the money in NIL, which meant, at SMU, only male athletes would get those lucrative opportunities. That didn’t sit right with Glover.

“Some of them don’t even have a personal brand and aren’t even working at NIL. This is just something that you’re paying them to do,” Glover said of the focus on male athletes. “And I just at least wanted to give women’s sports a fair shot.”

Glover reached out to Boulevard Collective expressing the volleyball team’s interest and was told the donors choose which teams receive financial support. She doubled down — emphasizing the social media presence that she and her teammates have and saying they’d love to step in for any opportunity.

The collective ultimately got a deal for Glover’s team with a local ice cream chain for players to receive cash and a gift card. The Boulevard Collective later said that, because of its conversations with Glover, it wanted to bring on women’s basketball and volleyball as focus areas, she said. They’d get fewer deals than football and men’s basketball, but it would be more than the other sports that had also been left out of the collective’s budget.

Glover said her team has now done a handful of deals through Boulevard Collective, including meet-and-greets and back-to-school drives.

“It’s not just about me, it’s about my teammates who are going to be at SMU even far after I’m gone,” the grad student said, “and deserve to have the same opportunities or close to the opportunities that the men’s players do.”