The most successful athlete on Texas Tech’s college has more than 427, 000 Instagram followers and 427, 000 TikTok followers.
She has starred in a famous streaming line, appeared on Dancing with the Stars and routinely performs before tens of thousands of followers on Sundays at Jones AT&, T Stadium.
She has no interaction with The Matador Club, the school’s NIL community, and has hardly any impact on the Red Raiders ‘ detector. It is advisable to check out Opendorse, the performer support market, to the degree that the athletic department has given her any advice on how to use her name, image, and likeness. That’s been about it.
Higher education institutions are supporting the economic privileges of their most actually gifted students, which is supposed to be the new era of economic independence for college athletes. However, the great change has so far produced little for Division I college girls like Maddy Brum, who has 120, 000 more Instagram followers than former Texas player Arch Manning.
To be sure, Brum also has managed to do a number of deals during her time at TTU, with companies like as T-Mobile, Halara and Under Armour. She insists that the school whose uniform she wears does n’t have any of that to owe.
I detest Texas Tech’s use of the word” Texas Tech” to describe her efforts to close company offers.
A native of Massachusetts, Brum rose to fame two years ago while cheering at Navarro College, a two-year class in Corsicana, Texas, about a five-and-a-half hours drive from TTU’s Lubbock school. The second year of Netflix’s Cheer, which premiered in January 2022, saw Brum’s Navarro crew and its federal rival Trinity Valley Community College face challenges from COVID-19 in a national championship contest in Daytona, Florida.
Gabi Butler, who led Cheer’s freshman season as a result, was Gabi Butler’s follow-up, who followed her on social media to become a star.
Brum says she chose to move to Texas Tech because it allowed her to be in-state and offered the big-time school sporting game-day experience. The Big 12 has a proven to be more of a drag than a benefit for an athlete looking to capitalize on her most profitable career.
For instance, the school had just announced it would end its 18-year agreement with the clothing business and sign with rival Adidas when Under Armour reached out to her this flower about a package. Because of that, Brum says, she was never allowed to report herself in any Texas Tech service or involve any allusion to the class. She claims that the school has particularly instructed her not to use her cheer even in paid social media posts in different situations.
We do not support or force using university signs in their ads, according to a Texas Tech director in a speech to Sportico. Some students have freely obtained “influencer” agreements.
The biggest limiting factor is institution cheerleading’s unrelenting time devotion, which includes side duties at every TTU house soccer, basketball and tennis contest, as well as a number of apart games. She and her colleagues are also required to volunteer for the praise facilities Texas Tech holds for high school and college students to fill the money-strapped nature agency’s bare bones resources.
According to Brum,” we must give to the school first.” ” I have had plenty of opportunities]for brand deals ] and have had to say no. … I would like it to be simpler at the school.
Brum and Texas Tech are not the only ones who are affected by this. Rather, her situation points to the challenges faced by D-I cheerleaders trying to participate in the college sports influencer economy.
According to Lisa Bregman, Senior Director of Campaigns and Marketplace Success at Opendorse, “it is an untapped market.” Some of the [cheerleaders ‘] follower counts have unreal engagements and numbers, according to the article. … It is a cult following, but they get overlooked in the NIL world”.
Being overlooked was once seen as a form of commercial gain.
Cheerleaders were the only group of college athletes who were not prohibited from exercising their publicity rights prior to the adoption of the NCAA’s provisional NIL rules in July 2021. That’s because sideline cheerleading is not an NCAA-sanctioned sport, and therefore free of its restrictions.
In light of this, a New York Times article from November 2020 praised the “lucrative” opportunities for cheerleaders that were n’t previously available to players in football and basketball. It no longer exists, regardless of whether that was ever the case.
” The main struggle for me and many cheerleaders is it feels we never get appreciated for our skill and talent”, Brum said. I contrast myself with Livvy Dunne, a LSU gymnast. Why are n’t cheerleaders given those kinds of [NIL] opportunities? We do basically the same things”.
But not in the eyes of the powerful.
Numerous D-I schools made an effort to develop their club spirit squads into varsity sports programs in the early 1990s. However, that effort was upended in 2012, when a federal appellate court determined that cheerleading did n’t qualify as a sport by the standards of Title IX’s gender-equity provisions. After the school attempted to replace the program with cheerleading, former volleyball players and the team’s head coach filed a lawsuit against Quinnipiac University in 2009, the lower court’s decision was reversed.
On behalf of the plaintiffs, Jeff Webb, the founder and CEO of Varsity Brands, the cheer corporate Goliath, testified during the trial that cheerleading was more of a recreational pastime than chess. Webb’s assertion aligned with the business interests of Varsity—as borne out in one of the company’s SEC filings—for the sport not to be subject to a governing body, the NCAA, that it did not hold sway over. Since founding the International Cheer Union, Webb has lobbied for the alleged sport to be recognized as an Olympic sport.
A& T, a sideline cheerleading competition, was followed by a Varsity-backed version called Stunt, which was followed by Quinnipiac and a number of other universities, which were forced to form a cheer-gymnastics hybrid discipline in the wake of sideline cheerleading’s judicial rejection. Both sports have steadily grown their members over the last decade-and-a-half and, in recent years, have each received formal NCAA recognition as “emerging sports for women” across all three divisions. Both sports would need at least 40 school sponsors for each division in order to qualify for the NCAA championships. At the moment, there are 22 Stunt programs competing at the D-I level, and there are currently 12 acrobatics and tumbling.
A&, T, and Stunt heavily recruit from high school and all-star cheerleading, giving them the opportunity to use their hard-earned experience as fully recognized NCAA athletes with access to a variety of advantages. Those now include NIL.
Cami Wilson, a former four-time All-American cheerleader featured in the AwesomenessTV YouTube series Cheerleaders, said,” I knew the opportunities were going to open a lot more doors.”
Wilson made the decision to switch to acrobatics and tumbling in Oregon in September 2020.
” I understood how much influence the Oregon brand has to the nation, to my audience, to my other brands”, Wilson said.
She was chosen to take part in a joint Meta-NCAA NIL education program for female athletes during the 2022-23 academic year, which eventually led to paid social media ads for Champs Sports and Jersey Mike’s and a well-known collaboration with ESPN’s College GameDay. Wilson was designated by Division Street, Oregon’s official NIL collective, last year, as a brand ambassador for a year.
None of this would have been on the table had she stuck with sideline cheerleading. However, Wilson lost the opportunities in her audience when she graduated four years later, when her Instagram following dropped from 35, 000 to just over 29,000.
Nobody knows what acrobatics and tumbling are, she said, so that could be a contributing factor. ” It has gone through ebbs and flows— I have had a couple of viral videos—but my following is constantly declining”.
Cheerleading is not an NCAA sport, but it can still be a part of a school’s athletic department. The spirit program is housed elsewhere, though, in the majority of D-I schools today. In 2001, Texas Tech’s was moved out of athletics and under the domain of Student Life, the university unit within the office of the provost that also oversees student government, the Greek community, the chess team and the Air Force ROTC.
Texas Tech cheerleaders continue to practice in the athletic department’s facilities, but they do so on weekends at 6 o’clock to avoid tying other programs. Overall, the spirit-athletics strategic alliance is lopsided, with cheerleading acting primarily to support a department with limited financial resources committed to its survival.
Brum sees little her program can do to change the situation, either with facilities or NIL help.
My coaches have tried in the past, but they can only try so hard for us before going too far, according to Brum. Athletics seem to need us for events, and they do n’t realize how important they are, in my opinion.
This point hits home for Opendorse’s Bregman, herself a former college cheerleader at Northwestern.
We were lifting at the same athletic facilities, according to Bregman, who recalls that when I was in school, we had none of the benefits that no student athletes did.
There have also been a few instances where cheerleaders have received NIL deals as a result of their school affiliation.
In March 2022, Indiana cheerleader Cassidy Cerny signed a licensing deal with a T-shirt maker to commemorate a viral moment that occurred during the Hoosiers first-round NCAA men’s basketball tournament game, when she climbed on her cheer partner’s shoulders to retrieve a game ball that had gotten wedged between the backboard and shot clock.
Mielle Organics, a hair care company, announced a three-year agreement with Florida A&, M University’s cheer team last November, which it claimed was worth$ 250, 000. In a larger campaign involving Tigers female athletes, Gordon McKernan, a personal injury attorney from Louisiana, announced an NIL deal with LSU cheerleader Kyla Hebert the same month.
Bregman says that recently, medical device company Abbott gave an NIL deal to a Big Ten cheerleader as part of its conference-wide blood donation awareness campaign.
Although NCAA regulations state that NIL deals are not used as recruiting inducements, it is well known that the majority of the money paid to college athletes is not related to their reputation as product and service promoters. Even so, Southern Utah’s David Berri, a sports economist, contends that fans of their schools should be encouraged to support their cheerleaders.
” I think this gets at the fact that when it comes to the value of college athletes, the marketing aspect is totally ignored in all the calculations”, said Berri, who has written about cheerleaders and NIL. ” Ticket sales and broadcast deals are the only things we concentrate on.” We never mention how universities use athletes to promote themselves.
Brum says talent representatives have reached out to athletics about potential ways in which she could do free content for the Red Raiders ‘ social channels. A day-in-the-life Instagram video series about her college nationals was the subject of some preliminary discussion, including a few ideas. Although Brum’s representative, Shayla Thomas, stated” we’re actively working on building those connections,” nothing significant has yet been achieved.
Maddy Brum gained fame by appearing on the second season of the Netflix series Cheer, while cheering at Navarro College.
Empire State Realty Trust photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images
Bregman claims that Opendorse has been interested in working with cheerleaders since the beginning of NIL, but that he is reliant on other people to take the initiative.
” Even for the schools we do work with, they wo n’t necessarily send us]names of ] cheerleaders to on-board”, Bregman said. We may not know many of them, regrettably, from our viewpoint. They must figure this out on their own, so they are not benefited from the instruction provided to other athletes.
In April, the Open Championship Series ( OCS), a cheerleading competition circuit, launched a mini-marketplace on Opendorse called Cheer Fare.
Mat Lunsford, a Dallas-based sports marketing professional who had no prior experience marketing cheerleaders before joining OCS last year as its director of brand, came up with this idea.
According to Lunsford,” The system is inordinately broken for these kids to be financially successful through a collegiate career,” which is sad.
To date, Cheer Fare has engaged about 100 collegiate cheerleaders, from the JUCO to D-I levels, and has paid some of them between$ 200 to$ 1, 000 to promote the platform.
From an outsider’s point of view, Lunsford was immediately struck by the number of extracurricular responsibilities D-I college cheerleaders simply must perform to maintain their programs.
This note appears on the Texas Tech website’s fundraising page, which asks for donations to various spirit-support funds.” The university provides a great job supporting our student leaders and athletes. However, with rising costs and university-wide efforts to reduce and have more efficient budgets, we want to ask you to consider making an additional financial contribution”.
How much is the university’s financial support? The program’s star, Bruno, receives a$ 500 scholarship for the semester and a$ 75 per month food plan.
” That is where I get pretty fired up”, Lunsford said. From the perspective of the NCAA, some of these kids are not receiving financial compensation because they have better social engagement and followings. And these women and men actually attend classes, making them more noticeable on campus than a quarterback or a guard.
Forgoing the glamor of Power Four athletics, Gabi Butler and a number of other top JUCO cheerleaders have, over the years, opted to attend schools like Weber State, which competes in the modest Big Sky Conference and averages fewer than 9, 000 fans for its home football games.
The spirit squad, which has won grand national titles at the NCA Championships for best overall college team score, regardless of division, in two of the last three years, is by far the Wildcats ‘ most renowned program.
Hailey D’Lynn Smith, a native of Texas and a graduate of Trinity Valley Community College in 2023, was drawn to this domineering record. Before TVCC, Smith had competed as a gymnast for 16 years, where she had already developed a following and was doing brand deals by the seventh grade.
Smith claims she is not paying any tuition to attend a four-year college, which is covered by academic and scholarship awards, in contrast to Brum. And Smith has only witnessed her online following grow since joining Weber, in contrast to Wilson. As of last week, her Instagram follower count exceeded 384, 000.
After completing a three-year brand agreement with GK Elite, a sportswear company that produces gymnastics and cheerleading leotards, Smith signed on to represent Rebel, the maker of cheerleading apparel. Smith claims she has so far made$ 25, 000 between the two businesses. She’s also done a number of ads for vitamin and supplement brands and beauty companies, some of which she’s parlayed into free products for the entire team. In exchange for two social media video posts and free access to protein powder and pre-workout vitamins, Just Ingredients, a Utah-based dietary product manufacturer, paid her$ 750 per month last year.
The program’s symbiotic relationship with Nick Prak, a well-known cheer videographer, who is now based in Weber State’s hometown of Ogden, is one of Smith and her teammates ‘ strengths.
During the height of COVID, Prak, then living in Washington state, traveled for the first time to Weber to visit friends who were competing on the spirit team. Prak claims that he was immediately taken aback by the talent and effort put forth in order to raise awareness. Prak’s self-described “mediocre camera holder” currently has over 125 000 followers on his cheer-focused Instagram account after a number of videos quickly went viral. Although he now gets paid to produce freelance content for a growing list of cheer clients, Prak continues to film Weber State on a voluntary basis, offering the cheerleaders free access to professional-quality clips they can post on their own social media.
Institutional barriers persist, despite Prak’s benefits.
We are in the same position as Texas Tech, Smith said, specifically with regard to NIL [opportunities]. ” Anything the school really does, we are n’t going to be part of that because we do n’t want to be looked at as a sport. We would n’t be permitted to practice the number of hours that were required of us if we were subject to (NCAA ) sanction.
Despite the success of her program, Smith claims that Weber cheerleaders must also serve as volunteers at three monthly outside cheer clinics, which the organization organizes to cover costs at the Daytona national championships. And there are other opportunity costs.
For instance, she claims last March that she received a$ 15,000 offer to host a TV show in China but that she had to turn down the offer because it clashed with the practice schedule of her team.
Smith claims that Weber State’s training schedule ahead of Daytona will” 100 %” conflict with her and her stunt partner’s invitation to compete on America’s Got Talent in the spring of 2019. She hopes the production will accommodate her commitments, but acknowledges that might be unrealistic.
If you work for a multimillion-dollar company, they do n’t usually care about your schedule, she said.
She has come to expect nothing more from her role as a college cheerleader.