WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert believes NIL is ‘actually helping’ female athletes

When it comes to NIL, the first thought that comes to people’s minds is the amount of dollars top NBA or NFL recruits will be making while in college and high school.

However, little do they know that it helps athletes in any sport get paid for their name, image and likeness. Female student athletes, for instance, have been a huge beneficiary of NIL.

While the WNBA still has a long way to go in terms of providing a fair salary for all WNBA players and fair accommodations for their athletes, league commissioner Cathy Engelbert at least recognizes that current and future WNBA players can benefit from the NIL movement.

“I know there’s a lot of discussion around NIL at the college level,” Engelbert told Yahoo! Finance. “I think it’s actually helping our female athletes be more well-known. They have something that I didn’t have growing up when I played collegiate sports called the social media. 

Engelbert continued: “They’ve got huge followings, whether it’s on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter. Huge followings, and if you look at the women athletes, they’re getting national brands supporting them in NIL, not local brands necessarily. So they carry those into becoming a professional athlete. That’s good for everybody.”

The numbers back up the notion that female athletes are more engaging than their male counterparts. 

Men get over 30% of their compensation from donors and the collectives that have sprung up across the country, whereas women see almost 90% of their compensation come from brand partnerships.

Simply put, female student-athletes are outperforming their male counterparts when it comes to personal branding, and without NIL, they wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the fruits of their labor.