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.

• Alex Glover is a volleyball player at Southern Methodist University.
• She’s done more than 40 NIL deals this year with companies like Ulta, Dove, and Buffalo Wild Wings.
• Glover has advocated with SMU’s NIL collective for equal opportunities for female athletes.

Alex Glover is having a fantastic year.

The middle blocker averages one block and one kill per set for the Southern Methodist University volleyball team, which recently won the conference title and is on a 13-game winning streak.

Glover had less than 10,000 Instagram followers before the volleyball season began, and she now has over 30,000. Her TikTok account has over 60,000 followers.

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

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

Glover has shared her knowledge from NIL as a panelist and podcast guest, and she has 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 advocated for equal NIL opportunities for female athletes at SMU.

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

Glover used to model in high school, so she was already familiar with the process of building her online brand. She began on TikTok in college, posting trendy dance videos with her teammates and developing her signature style of “day in the life” videos.

Glover said that after she started posting videos on Instagram, brands started reaching out to her for deals, and she 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 told reporters. “Can I do a deal with a brand that I really like and that I believe aligns with my personal brand?” Alternatively, how many views can I get on this video? Alternatively, how many impressions can I get?”

Glover used to do more brand outreach, but now she says companies come to her. She’s worked with a variety of brands aimed at young women, including Ulta Beauty, Skims, Aerie, Dove, and Kendra Scott, as well as Buffalo Wild Wings, Coach, DoorDash, Caktus AI, and CVS.

Glover stated that she makes an effort 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 company products or are worth at least five figures, according to her. She also makes a small profit from her ebook and personalized merchandise that her friends and family purchase.

Glover plans to continue creating content after graduating from SMU in the spring, possibly as a women’s sports creator or broadcaster. She is part of a growing trend of student-athletes who are using NIL to help shape their post-college careers.

“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,” he said.

Advocating for female athletes with SMU’s NIL collective

SMU has two donor-funded groups known as collectives that assist in the distribution of NIL dollars to the school’s student-athletes. Both are primarily concerned with men’s sports, with one focusing on football and the other, the Boulevard Collective, establishing relationships with football and men’s basketball players.

Collectives account for roughly 80% of the money in NIL, which meant that only male athletes would be eligible for those lucrative opportunities at SMU. That did not sit well with Glover.

“Some of them don’t even have a personal brand or work at NIL.” “You’re just paying them to do this,” Glover said of the emphasis on male athletes. “And I just at least wanted to give women’s sports a fair shot.”

Glover contacted Boulevard Collective about the volleyball team’s interest and was told that the donors decide which teams receive financial support. She doubled down, emphasizing her and her teammates’ social media presence and saying they’d be happy to step in for any opportunity.

Glover’s team eventually struck a deal with a local ice cream chain in which players received cash and a gift card. According to her, the Boulevard Collective later stated that, as a result of its discussions with Glover, it wanted to add women’s basketball and volleyball as focus areas. They’d get fewer deals than football and men’s basketball, but more than the other sports that had been excluded from the collective’s budget.

Glover stated that her team has completed a number of transactions 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 graduate student said, “and deserve to have the same opportunities or close to the opportunities that the men’s players do.”