At Ithaca College, student-athletes follow the same guidelines pertaining to name, image and likeness (NIL) deals that any other NCAA athlete does. The difference between NIL at Dvision I and Division III schools, much like most differences between DI and DIII athletics, is that the student-athletes do most of the work themselves.
The NCAA has allowed its athletes to receive compensation in exchange for their name, image and likeness for over four years. While the rule has caused a major shift toward monetization of the DI athletics scene, not much has changed at the DIII level.
When opportunities for DIII athletes to make NIL deals do arise, they look much different from deals at the DI level.
Sophomore Renee McGowan, a defensive specialist on the volleyball team, struck up an NIL deal with Hotworx, an infrared fitness studio best known for its hot yoga classes, in Fall 2025.
In the deal, McGowan said she gets paid $100 per month if she makes four promotional posts a week to her Instagram page of about 1,780 followers and successfully refers two people.
“I have focused more on ‘how can I promote to help other people?’” McGowan said. “It didn’t have to really be gaining money for me when I started [with] Hotworx, it was more like, this is helping my body so much, let me promote it.”
McGowan began frequently going to Hotworx in 2025 for recovery after training, practices and games. Once she started to promote the studio as a part of her NIL deal, she saw an increase in IC student-athletes also going to the studio for recovery. Some student-athletes have even joined her and have signed deals with Hotworx.
“I do wish that they did give us more opportunities, but I know that if you look out for them, they can come to you,” McGowan said. “But it would be nice if we had the school or the athletics [department] giving us options, opportunities, things like that.”
For McGowan, she does not only seek out deals that are most convenient for her to sign. As a physical therapy major, McGowan said she seeks opportunities that allow her to promote personal health and improvement.
“If I happen to find opportunities with NIL more that will promote health and a journey to becoming better for other people, then it’s something I would do,” McGowan said. “But if it’s more like a fake artificial energy drink that is not going to benefit anyone, that’s not what I would want to do.”
McGowan also said that the college does not allow student-athletes to complete deals that involve selling merchandise with the student-athlete’s name on it. However, this is not explicitly stated in the college’s NIL policy.
The Ithacan reached out to the Ithaca College athletics department for clarification on the policy, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
DIII NIL deals often come in the form of local partnerships, where the student-athletes have a traditional exchange of compensation for promotion and free products. NIL deals with larger brands are also common, but often are an exchange of free products for promotion of the brand.
Junior Lauren Babineux, who is on the gymnastics team, is a Celsius brand ambassador. Similar to McGowan, Babineux posts to her personal Instagram of about 10,200 followers to promote the brand. According to Celsius, brand ambassadors can receive cases of the energy drink in correlation to the number of social media posts the ambassador makes.
A few DIII schools have NIL collectives, organizations run by people close to a college’s athletics program that help student-athletes complete NIL deals. While Ithaca College’s student-athletes are not represented by an NIL collective, they can get connected to smaller, short deals through apps like the NIL Club.
First-year student Samuel Lopez-Cardenas, who is on the tennis team, said he does not use the app often, but recognized how the app can connect DIII athletes to brand deals.
“I think these apps are really good for smaller schools or smaller teams that really don’t generate that much revenue, but the players still want to get a bit of money,” Lopez-Cardenas said. “It’s really hard for us DIII athletes to reach out and have a brand deal with a company just because we don’t have that many followers.”
Lopez-Cardenas also acknowledges the personal interactions missing and amount of work that goes into using the app.
“For me it’s like, ‘oh, it’s free money,’ but sometimes you have to put more in than you get out, essentially,” Lopez Cardenas said.
While Ithaca College student-athletes are still mostly on their own when it comes to NIL deals, some students have shown interest in connecting athletes to local partnerships. Sophomore sports media major Jack Behan started the NIL Middlemen as a part of a class project, but seeks to extend the “business” outside of the classroom.
“I think at first it was a little bit almost kind of like what everyone thinks when they hear NIL Division III College, it’s like ‘really?’” Behan said. “‘Oh, it’s probably I’m making a hundred bucks here and there or whatever.’”
In Behan’s interactions with student-athletes pertaining to NIL deals, he said the primary problem that student-athletes have is that they simply do not have time to worry about completing deals.
“The higher ups here at the college, they cannot help with NIL at all for any student and any athlete,” Behan said. “These athletes have to take that on themselves and that’s extremely hard when you’re dealing with as busy of a schedule as these athletes are.”
NIL still provides opportunities to DIII student-athletes to earn money alongside their hard work. However, the DIII NIL scene can still be tricky for them to navigate without any external help.
“NIL is hard for us DIII athletes to pursue, because unless you have that many followers on social media for some reason, or you have just a lot of attraction from people, it’s really hard to get these brands to partner with you so you can advertise their product,” Lopez-Cardenas said.
