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Illustration by Annelise Capossela/For The Washington Post; iStock
After college, NIL athletes test their creator market value
The student-athletes whose lives were transformed when the NCAA began allowing them to profit off their name, image and likeness (or NIL) are now a year or two out of school. Once again, they’re navigating a new frontier of the creator economy: Will the online brand they built in college provide a career after graduation?
I spoke with several elite creator athletes who have found successful — albeit very different — paths to making the most of their creator skillset. No longer able to rely on content about their college itself, or the season schedule and highlight reels, post-college NIL creators need to reinvent themselves to keep relevant to both their audience and brands.
“The term NIL gets tied to ending when your eligibility ends, but the skill set and habits remain forever,” said Chase Griffin, a former UCLA quarterback who was twice named NIL athlete of the year. Griffin said he still considers himself a creator post-grad, and that his online accomplishments as a student set him up for his current job at UC Investments, the investment arm of the UC system. The skills learned as an NIL creator have also equipped him for continued brand deals and content production, including a current project scoring a film.
“Not only does NIL prepare you to be a really good content creator, being a really good content creator in the NIL space can also get you hired for professional jobs in general,” he said in an interview.
The same is true for Haley and Hanna Cavinder, who have pursued content full-time since their leading NIL careers as college basketball players at Fresno State and the University of Miami.
“It’s kind of hard to plan with us and some other athletes being [at] the frontier of [NIL]. We’re kind of the guinea pigs,” said Haley Cavinder. “I think that us, the Livvy Dunnes of the world, we kind of show girls that if you don’t go pro and you build and use your brand [at] every opportunity when you’re in college, you can easily navigate into this space of social media seamlessly.”
Hanna Cavinder explained how the siblings have purposefully diversified their content — from creating videos about Haley’s wedding and life as a WAG, or partner of a professional athlete, to the launch of their own tequila brand. “There’s different ways to be able to continue to grow your brand and go into different categories, regardless if you’re an athlete post-college, and I hope that we’re prime examples to girls out there,” she said.
Creator Q+A
Jonathan Maus/BikePortland
Coach Sam Balto is the co-founder and executive director of Bike Bus World. The Portland, Oregon, dad and former elementary school physical education teacher now regularly racks in millions of views on videos showing the bike bus commute. Zara Larsson, Justin Timberlake and Benson Boone have joined the rides, which he documents at @coachbalto.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dylan Wells: I first started following you when I noticed your bike ride went right through the neighborhood where I grew up in Portland. Since then, I’ve seen so many of your rides go viral and feature celebrity guests. How did all this start?
Sam Balto: I got inspired to do a bike bus on social media from a video in Barcelona in the fall of 2021. I already had a presence on Twitter at the time in terms of advocating and talking about safe streets for kids. I was leading something called “walking school buses” in Boston and Portland. When I saw the bike bus video, I was like, “Oh, I definitely need to do this at my school in Portland.” And so we did bike bus for Earth Day in the spring of 2022. A parent recorded a video of us passing, and she sent it to me; then I posted it, and it did very well on Twitter. And I was like, this is really cool. I [thought] , “Oh, wow. There’s something here.”
The kids were demanding we do it every week. And so we’ve been doing it every Wednesday, rain or shine, since that Earth Day — so over 150 rides. And it’s grown tremendously. I continue to post videos online, on Twitter, and then I started posting stuff on TikTok. The TikTok videos blew up, getting hundreds of thousands of views in an hour.
I’ve just continued posting videos. I first made a video inviting AJR to Portland, and their bassist Adam Met came. They had a show the night before in Boise. He took the 7 a.m. flight from Boise to Portland, and he was able to make it on time to our bike bus. Then JT announced that he was coming to Portland last year, and I was like, “I should totally invite him.” And so I made a video that got like 15 million views on Instagram and TikTok, and within a week and a half, his manager had reached out, and we were in talks to make it happen.
DW: Do you think of yourself as a content creator?
SB: It’s a hat that I wear. I don’t think it’s the main hat, but the content does move the movement and helps a lot in terms of growing the movement. It’s just very visual, and it’s pretty amazing to see: When you have a video that goes viral, there’s an uptick in interest — and especially with celebrities, it helps break the algorithm.
The Takeover
The Group Chat
Here for the right reasons: The internet processed the leaked video of Taylor Frankie Paul throwing a chair at Dakota Mortensen in real time, followed by the cancellation of this season of “The Bachelorette.” After the dust settled, and countless videos were posted debating Paul and Mortensen’s behavior, the creator discourse quickly turned to pouring one out for the men of “The Bachelorette” who thought they were about to be influencers. Some are still trying. As a former political reporter, I just can’t get over the fact that one of the contestants was involved in the car accident that paralyzed former Rep. Madison Cawthorn.
A hot new bombshell has entered the villa: Speaking of reality TV, the most consistently viral new generative AI account I’ve seen is @ai.cinema021. Over the last 10 days, the series “Fruit Love Island” has received more than 230 million views on TikTok alone for videos of anthropomorphic fruit — and the real-life imitations are also going viral. The AI quality is bad, and you frequently see glitches, like extra hands, but the entertainment value has drawn committed fans.
A Meta match: Meta is wooing creators. Last week they launched a Creator Fast Track program on Facebook to accelerate growth for established creators moving over to the platform, and announced that they paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025. On Tuesday they shared additional new features, including enabling product tagging via affiliate links. “We want to be the home for all creators. We think the audience is large enough and diverse enough that, ultimately, any creator that is making high-quality original content should be able to succeed here,” Yair Livne, the VP of creator product for Facebook, told Verified. “Facebook admittedly is a little late to this party” on the affiliate marketing side, he acknowledged, but added they are doubling down to catch up.
Close Friends
This week I was influenced to: join the waitlist for Reale Actives, Alix Earle’s much-anticipated skin care line, after the @wtfisalixdoing campaign dominated my feed.
I’m obsessed: with this baby beaver and this four-day-old chinchilla. And, ICYMI, two golden retrievers racked up millions of views of their wedding series.
Messy: Polymarket’s disastrous pop-up in DC.
Main character of the week: Palm Beach Pete repeatedly went viral for not being Jeffrey Epstein.
Most impressive edit I saw this week: this stop motion.
