WaPo makes it difficult to share, sigh. Here is the part about Shaylee. This is only a portion of the article - lots of detail is included about UCLA, Colorado, LSU, SCarolina …
Washington Post = October 21, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By the time she took the court for the final March Madness of her college career, Shaylee Gonzales had built her brand into a bona fide small business.
A starting guard at the University of Texas, she had endorsement deals with Steve Madden, Skims and Whataburger. She had 88,000 followers on Instagram and 200,000 followers on TikTok, more than the other four starters combined. Yes, she had been second-team all-conference the previous season and had aspirations to go pro, but she was under no illusions about what was driving her growing income.
“It didn’t matter how well I played on the court,” she said. “Those brands just looked at how many followers you had.”
Gonzales offered those brands a valuable commodity: the chance to be associated with women’s college basketball. The sport’s popularity has surged in recent years, drawing television ratings that rival the men’s college game and producing superstars more famous than any men’s player. All those new eyes started tuning in just as college athletes were permitted to get paid for their name, image and likeness, or NIL.
Gonzales and her Texas teammates earned a combined total of $435,000 in NIL income from July 2021 to July 2024, the records show. Their counterparts on the men’s team made a total of $4.8 million, even as the women won more regular season and NCAA tournament games and had more than twice as many social media followers on their personal accounts at the end of last season. A pay gap existed between men’s and women’s earnings at nearly every school that released NIL records.
At Texas A&M, men received 98 percent of all NIL dollars — $25.2 million, compared with $534,000 for women — for disclosed deals from July 2021 to February 2024.
For women, the smaller slice also can require more labor. Like Gonzales, many get paid only if they build their social media followings and secure brand deals, according to records and interviews. Men, the records show, typically receive much higher sums for token tasks — sometimes arranged by a collective — such as signing autographs or appearing at meet and greets, effectively providing them with de facto salaries.
Before she made her way to Texas, Shaylee Gonzales grew up in Arizona and began her college career at BYU. A casual social media user with modest local renown as a budding athlete, she had 3,000 Instagram followers when she enrolled in 2018.
Then she started hooping. During her first season, the 5-foot-10 guard led her team in scoring and received the West Coast Conference newcomer of the year award.
After tearing her ACL, she missed the following season. Rehabbing her knee and stuck at home during the early months of the pandemic, she started a TikTok account, often scrolling but rarely posting.
She returned to the court in fall 2020 better than ever, winning WCC player of the year and leading BYU to the second round of the NCAA tournament. Her profile rose, as did the frequency of her posts. Her Instagram featured action shots on the court and glamour shots from beach vacations. Her TikTok page showed trendy dances with teammates and clips of jump shots and dribble moves at the practice facility. Her follower counts grew.
“Your social media definitely starts with what you produce on the court,” she said. “It was something I enjoyed, a hobby that took my mind off basketball and school.”
The following summer, the NCAA started allowing athletes to profit off their personal brands. Among the first generation of athletes to benefit from this new economy, Gonzales navigated a frontier shaped by rules being written in real time, with no precedent to follow.
She researched what social media influencers charged companies for advertisements, hired a graphic designer to craft a business card that listed her rates, then began contacting brands she hoped to work with.
While her follower count wasn’t yet large enough to command the attention of national brands, she signed deals with small clothing companies, posting Instagram ads for Thrifthood in December 2021 and Swoosh Resell in February 2022.
That year, she won her second straight WCC player of the year award and her team finished at the top of the conference. After the season, with her coach retiring and her skills in high demand, Gonzales entered the transfer portal. Dozens of schools contacted her, she said. She chose the University of Texas, which boasts one of the most recognizable athletic programs in the country.
While her performance on the court had raised her profile throughout her years at BYU,
Gonzales said her social media numbers began to balloon after she arrived in Austin. Her July 2022 Instagram post announcing her decision garnered more than 91,000 “likes,” three times as many as anything she had posted before.
At Texas, Gonzales started at guard but was no longer her team’s centerpiece. With the level of competition higher and her role more complementary than starring, her scoring, rebounding, and assist numbers dipped. Still, she played well enough to earn all-Big 12 second team honors in 2023, and in 2024 she helped push Texas to its highest win total in nearly four decades, as well as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
And she emerged as one of the NIL era’s success stories.
Like other athletes who spoke with The Post, Gonzales declined to divulge exactly how much she has earned from NIL deals. In the records The Post reviewed, women’s basketball players rarely appeared to make more than high five figures in a season. Whatever Gonzales made, to her, it was “tons of money.” (Texas’s athletic department declined to comment, saying state law bars them from publicly disclosing the specifics of NIL deals.)
As her opportunities multiplied, her budding influencer business took up more time. Unlike the celebrity athletes who appear in ads produced by brands or marketing companies, Gonzales often had to create the content herself. Filming and editing the videos — fast-paced jump cuts of her modeling clothes for fashion brands, eating meals at fast-food restaurants, or getting ready in a bathroom mirror — sometimes took hours. Even more laborious was the process of communicating with companies and negotiating deals.
Gonzales decided to sign with a management agency, trading a cut of profits to offload the labor that threatened to drain energy she would rather devote to hoops and school.
“I didn’t want to spend as much time chasing brands,” she said.
Once she turned pro, signing this summer with a team in Mexico and then Italy, she stopped posting branded content.
“It’s super nice to be able to focus on one thing,” she said.
