The Search For The Next NIL Star In Women’s College Sports

TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA – FEBRUARY 7: Olivia Dunne of the LSU Tigers smiles at Coleman Coliseum on February 7, 2025 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. (Photo by Georgia Jones/LSU/University Images via Getty Images)

University Images via Getty Images

If you follow women’s college athletics – or have a TikTok account, odds are, you’ve heard of Olivia ‘Livvy’ Dunne. The 22-year-old from New Jersey rocketed from niche gymnastics fandom to international fame during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What started as a young gymnast posting short clips on TikTok evolved into a role as the poster child for Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) in women’s collegiate athletics.

In five years as a Louisiana State University women’s gymnastics team member, Dunne retained her crown at the top of the women’s NIL leaderboard. Dunne entered her sophomore year – the first year following the 2021 NIL ruling – as the most-followed athlete in college sports.

Dunne’s success was unprecedented. Not only was she an athlete from a non-revenue sport – she was female. Entering her final season, Dunne stood at #2 in On3’s NIL Valuation rankings, just behind Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders. Presently, On3’s highest ranking female athlete is LSU Women’s Basketball’s Flau’jae Johnson at #53.

With Olivia Dunne’s NCAA gymnastics career at a close, her absence has experts wondering: who’s next?

The Perfect Storm: The Making of an NIL Icon

I sat down with Cornell University’s Dr. Megan Sawey to discuss Dunne’s impact and implications for the next generation of NIL and NCAA stars.

Sawey is a lecturer with the university’s Department of Communication, and her research focuses on the intersection of media, technology, and identity, with a specific emphasis on the identities of creators and influencers, their labor conditions, and their experiences with social media platforms.

Her perspective makes it clear that Dunne’s success wasn’t random; it was the result of a “perfect cocktail” of factors.

In Sawey’s eyes, the first key ingredient was timing.

Dunne, an early Gen Z user, had been building a social media following since she was a child and an aspiring college gymnast. When TikTok’s popularity exploded in 2020, she was uniquely positioned to create content that resonated with a quarantined online audience.

“She was weaving together her gymnastics life, her personal life, (and) starting to show us a version of sports and of college sports that was more lifestyle-oriented,” Sawey explained. Balancing the promotion of one’s athletic performance and lifestyle content is something Sawey feels is “really important” to consider as NIL evolves.

Though Dunne joined Instagram at age 10, her online popularity truly skyrocketed during the pandemic. In March 2020, when her club, ENA Paramus, closed temporarily due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, she did what millions did during the pandemic’s early throes: spend her free time on TikTok.

The Statista Research Department found that TikTok usage among users aged 18-25 grew by 180% during the peaks of the pandemic. With a potent combination of luck and a solid social media foundation, Dunne discovered her audience.

Sawey says Dunne’s content was “really compelling” to pandemic audiences, with millions “working from home, living at home, (and) looking for ways to glimpse into each other’s lives.” When Dunne arrived in Baton Rouge just months later for her freshman year, she had already amassed over 3 million followers.

The New Jersey teenager’s staggering social media rise wasn’t just timed perfectly with the pandemic – it led to almost immediate success when the NCAA’s NIL rule officially took effect in July 2021.

Her early deals with brands like Vuori, Grubhub, and Bodyarmor paved the way for a broader portfolio, including an American Eagle partnership and a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit feature.

“She hit so early,” Sawey tells me. “She was one of the earliest images for us of what NIL in college sports would look like.”

The impact of that image – one in which aspiring NCAA athletes should also act as influencers – is evident already in today’s youth sports. Today, those craving brand partnerships must “cultivate an audience desirable to potential sponsors,” Sawey says. “She really kind of set the framework.”

The New NIL Reality: The Athlete as a Brand

The impact of Dunne’s (and similar) NIL strategies has already made waves in youth sports. Sawey tells me there’s already been a “surge in private equity funding in youth sports,” with minor sports organizations “rapidly professionalizing.”

While there may not be a direct causal link, it’s reasonable to say there could be a correlation between the rise of NIL and the flow of private equity into youth sports.

Sawey references institutions like IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, as evidence of this trend. IMG Academy, a college preparatory boarding school designed for aspiring college athletes, is “the world’s leading sports education brand, providing access and opportunity for student-athletes through innovative on-campus and online programming and experiences.”

For athletes competing in non-revenue sports that want to land partnerships, Sawey maintains they will want to arrive on campus with a “robust following.” Athletes on revenue teams: basketball and football, particularly those competing for schools with established team collectives, can often rely on collective money (though schools like the Ivies function differently).

“If you’re (involved in) more niche sports, there will probably be a lot more creative labor expected of you to be able to actually make that happen,” she says.’ Without an established public-facing presence, “it’s tough.”

“If you’re (involved in) more niche sports, there will probably be a lot more creative labor expected of you to be able to actually make that happen,” she says.’ Without an established public-facing presence, “it’s tough.”

There’s another piece to the puzzle. After spending years – sometimes decades – with sheer dedication to improving athletically, landing brand partnerships oftentimes has no basis in athletic performance.

While an athlete’s marketability can often run proportionally with their athletic successes, followers are NIL’s currency. Thus, a lesser athlete with millions of followers will nearly always land a partnership over a top performer with an abysmal following. With NIL, “payment is for the sponsorship fulfillment,” not athletic performance.

The Gendered Double Standard

Dunne’s fame has not come without drawbacks. As a female public figure with a primarily male audience, Dunne is “part of a very, very long history of women in the public eye being critiqued, and criticized for what they’re doing,” Sawey says.

When Dunne announced in the summer of 2024 that she would be using her fifth year of eligibility granted due to the pandemic, the criticisms were plentiful, with fans flocking to mock the gymnast for returning for an additional year.

“Greedy,” “10th-year-senior,” fans quipped, with many pinning her return on a desire to maintain her NCAA gymnastics persona for NIL funds. Many felt that she was “milking her time in college to make money,” Sawey says.

In an unusual departure from her curated content, Dunne quipped back at her ‘haters.’ “I only ever see this comment on female athletes’ posts. Why do you care if I come back for a fifth year and have another year of eligibility?”

While redshirting and taking a fifth year is “very normalized in sports like men’s football,” Sawey feels three key factors contributed to her audience’s negative sentiment: gender dynamics, a lack of familiarity with gymnastics, and Dunne’s established identity as an influencer.

Many see Dunne as an influencer first, athlete second. This view leads to many attempts to “downgrade the success” she enjoys, athletic or professional. When Dunne’s LSU Tigers won their first National Championship in 2024, many were eager to point out that Dunne did not make competitive lineups at the championship.

“The haters –so to speak – have an aversion to wanting to let you have your success,” instead focusing on their disapproval, Sawey says. Though from a different era, “the Kim Kardashian and Paris Hiltons” of the 2010s were read in the “exact” same way.

The criticisms also include allegations of Dunne’s ‘sexualized content’ – another “pretty common critique that gets lobbed at influencers and creators,” Sawey tells me. These criticisms don’t exist in a vacuum — and for high-profile athletes like Dunne, they have sometimes spilled into real-world safety concerns.

Visibility Breeds Vulnerability: The Dangers of Fame

Unfortunately, online criticisms can occasionally evolve into tangible dangers. In 2021, Dunne made the decision to attend only online classes after receiving a death threat from a stalker, threatening to “shoot up” the LSU campus.

For Dunne and her teammates, those dangers took on a national spotlight at a gymnastics meet versus the University of Utah in 2023. While Utah beat the Tigers, the headlining story came from the crowd. Thousands of male supporters flooded the Huntsman Arena, clamoring for Olivia Dunne’s attention.

“They were out there just yelling, ‘We want Livvy,’ Utah gymnast Jaylene Gilstrap told local media. ” I could tell (Dunne) was also upset about it and keeping her head down.” The fans continued their harassment after the meet, screaming at athletes as they left the arena to return to their dorms.

More recently, Dunne joined a cohort of female athletes and celebrities who have voiced concerns surrounding incessant harassment from anonymous men at U.S. airports. “I fear that I’m being stalked and I don’t know what to do,” Dunne said in late May.

She reports that the men often carry stacks of photos and will “run [her] down the TSA pre-check line” and “yell” if she refuses to oblige their requests, more recently “circling” her at the baggage claim after a redeye flight. Olympians Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, and Gabby Thomas all attested to having similar experiences.

Athletes must determine if they are “up to the task,” Sawey says. It’s not an easy determination to make as a young adult. Many of my students (some of whom are student-athletes) express concerns about the drawbacks of online fame. Though many will still create content due to the sponsorship opportunity, Sawey thinks safety is a crucial consideration.

“I would imagine that watching Livvy deal with the safety concerns she’s had to deal with has at least given some athletes a bit of pause going forward.”

Unless an athlete is equipped with the support of an established team, he or she must act as their own social media manager and public relations department. This “lack of organizational structure” can put a young athlete in harm’s way.

“Not all of these student athletes have robust media teams built up…so much of it is kind of left up to you to try to navigate. So, I think the downstream effects of that are kind of the negative consequence of the attention that we’re seeing right now on women’s sports.”

Ultimately, “visibility breeds vulnerability.”

The Search for the Next Star

So, who’s on deck?

Olivia Dunne was “lightning in a bottle,” Sawey says, but that doesn’t mean lightning won’t strike twice.

Sawey believes that the search is active, with brands likely scouring the internet for trending athlete profiles, “looking to high school athletes and trying to see who they can cultivate as the next star.”

Given the recent interest in women’s sports, the market is particularly eager for the next women’s NIL star. “Companies are probably especially hopeful that they can go out and kind of talent scout the next Livvy Dunne type,” she adds.

In this new NIL era, Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of “coolhunting” is even more relevant than before. Brands spend every waking minute scouring information from youth, determining interests, and hoping to “create lifelong consumers.”

Ultimately, brands need their “cool” messenger. In 2021, that was Livvy Dunne.

“This concerted effort being made to cultivate student athletes? Yeah, I think we will probably see more and more ad dollars come their way.”

Ultimately, Dunne was the first, but she’s likely not the last. As I write, the next generation of student athletes prepares, poised to convert talent into influence and influence into opportunity.