Illinois State holds NIL forum for international athletes

When the NCAA adopted its interim NIL policy, Illinois State volleyball player Nora Janka frustratedly sat through NIL-related meetings. A native of Innsbruck, Austria, who’s in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa, Janka is unable to monetize her NIL in the same ways as her American teammates and fellow athletes whom she sat alongside.

However, last week, Illinois State held an International Student-Athlete Name, Image & Likeness Forum to provide guidance specifically to athletes like Janka. It was a rare example of programming specifically designed for a segment of the college athlete population that has generally been left behind in the NCAA’s NIL era.

“A year ago, I was super frustrated at that point because I was like, ‘Oh my God,'” Janka, a junior setter, said during a recent Zoom call with On3. “It just made me feel so excluded from my teammates because I sat in all those meetings about NIL knowing damn well I wasn’t going to profit from that whatsoever and I was like, ‘OK, why am I here? This is annoying. I shouldn’t even be in this meeting right now.’

“I know that Illinois State, especially, is working really hard to create those opportunities for us but there’s only so much they can do.”

Janka is one of more than 20,000 international athletes who competes in one of the NCAA’s three divisions, based on the three most recent years of available data from the NCAA Demographics Database. Almost all of them are excluded from almost all NIL opportunities while they’re in the U.S.

Illinois State’s director of Name, Image and Likeness and Community Engagement Maya Bulger and Director of Social media, NIL and Student-Athlete Branding Dayton Hammes echoed some of Janka’s sentiments.

“It was essentially heartbreaking, I would say, in the beginning because when we had our team meetings, our international student-athletes would reach out and say, ‘Hey, do I have to be in this meeting? None of it applies to me,'” Bulger said during a Zoom call. “You know, like, ‘I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to listen to it. It’s not something that I can capitalize on.’ … We can’t do anything about it — the law.

“The university can’t do anything about it. The NCAA can’t do anything about it right now but we can advocate for you and find ways for you to capitalize in the ways that you can. As a university and as an athletic department, that’s our responsibility.”

Weighing risks, rewards in passive income

Illinois State’s NIL forum featured Erin Groves from the university’s tax team, the consumer intelligence company Talkwalker and Tay Hawker, a former rugby player from New Zealand who attended Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Hawker is now the president of Hawker Family Sports & Entertainment.

“The inspiration behind the forum was letting our international student-athletes know that there is a space for them in the NIL world,” Bulger said. “Whether that’s them doing it through the passive income, when we get a little bit more information on that, or whether they go and do these NIL opportunities back home — whether that’s over summer break, winter break, fall break, whenever they have time off — we want to make sure they’re equipped and know that they’re included in the space and how to go about doing it.”

Individuals who are in the U.S. on an F-1 visa are allowed to earn passive income. In short, passive income is that in which the recipient doesn’t have to actively participate in a business or trade. Multiple attorneys and Division I athletic department employees told On3 they believe group licensing income could qualify as passive income.

It could be a game-changer for high-profile international athletes in terms of their NIL opportunities in the U.S.

Kentucky forward Oscar Tshiebwe, the reigning Naismith Men’s College Player of the Year who’s from the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been “able to license his name, image and likeness — a lucrative loophole that is netting him about $20,000 a month in just apparel sales,” according to The Athletic.

However, as shown by the recent example of Cincinnati‘s Australian punter Mason Fletcher, who announced the income from his replica jerseys will go to a scholarship fund for the team’s walk-ons, university administrators will typically be conservative in their guidance as to not risk their athletes’ visa statuses.

“Honestly, we take the visa status so serious here because I would hate for one of the student-athletes to be deported back to their home country over a jersey that’s selling for $120 and they’re getting $20 of it,” Bulger said. “That’s just not worth it. So, I talk with our student-athletes through that process, like, ‘Yes, it can be considered passive income but I need you to know how serious this is and what the actual royalty rate is and take all of that into consideration.'”

There’s also an immigration attorney to whom Illinois State refers international athletes if they have additional questions.

Illinois State has roughly 40 international athletes

More than a year into the NCAA’s NIL era, Janka hasn’t pursued any NIL opportunities. To her knowledge, none of her friends who are international athletes have either. Bulger said there are about 40 international athletes at Illinois State.

Even other international athletes, such as Janka, may not know about the NIL opportunities available to Tshiebwe, one of the most marketable college athletes, whose On3 NIL Valuation of $914,000 ranks No. 25 in the On3 NIL 100.

“I do have a lot of international friends. So far, I don’t think any of them has really had the confidence and all the legal information to follow through with a deal yet,” Janka said. “It’d be interesting to know if any international students have done that, like in general.”

Janka said she’d love to participate in an NIL deal. She said she gets to go home to Austria for roughly two months of the year, once in December after the volleyball season and then in May.

During Illinois State’s international athlete NIL forum, Bulger said Hawker, the former rugby player, told Illinois State athletes to work on building their audience when they’re in the U.S. so they can hit the ground running when they return home. Talkwalker, the consumer intelligence company, provided insights from Illinois State athletes’ social media profiles to help show them how they could make their return home more profitable.

“Talkwalker actually took two of our student-athletes’ profiles and put them up on the board and said, ‘Hey, you have an audience over here in Europe,'” Bulger said, almost growing giddy over the insights. “‘And you have an audience here and we can actually track it down to the street to figure out where these people are and then figure out what those peoples’ interests are.'”

It might sound obvious, but Janka offered a good reminder that she has a larger network in Austria, where she lived for 19 years, rather than the U.S. She has one dream company in mind for a theoretical NIL deal — a food brand — but she didn’t want to name it out of precaution.

Illinois State’s recent NIL forum reminded international athletes of the potential consequences of violating their visa status.

“It’s honestly terrifying because we’re all like 18 to, what, 22-year-old athletes and hearing that if we make a mistake, our visa’s getting revoked,” Janka said. “You’re getting deported. You’re getting literally banned from a country for like five to 10 years, I think they said. It’s just like terrifying and personally, I don’t know if the reward for me would be big enough to even have to worry about that kind of thing.”

‘There was just so much fear’

Unless or until the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) provides guidance to some important NIL-related questions or international athletes’ potential U.S.-based NIL opportunities are legally protected, the 20,000-some international athletes who compete at the NCAA level will have to calculate the risks and rewards of their potential marketing opportunities, like Janka referenced.

While several federal bills regarding NIL have been drafted or proposed, including the latest from Senators Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), none have passed. Bulger said she think it will take high-profile international athletes to “take a stand” regarding their limited NIL opportunities for anything to change.

Any potential protest or labor organization movement among college athletes faces significant challenges, given their relatively short college careers, frequent roster turnover and the power dynamics on a college campus, among other factors. Foreign athletes doing so on American soil could add another wrinkle.

“NIL is still so young,” Janka said. “I don’t think there’s gonna be changes made that fast for international students because we are just a small percentage of the student-athlete population. It’s not like a pressing issue, I want to say — at least not for them. I think maybe in a couple years, like five years, there might be a change of the visa and then maybe international students will be able to do NIL just as everyone else.”

Given the number of high-stakes questions and occasional lack of cut-and-dried answers regarding international athletes’ NIL opportunities, the best course of action for a university or athletic department might be to take a page out of Illinois State’s playbook. Acknowledge to your international athletes that you see and hear them, and provide them with the tools to pursue NIL opportunities when they’re not in the U.S.

“I definitely, a hundred percent, think that it’s going to make student-athletes have an uptick in their engagement in this space,” Bulger said of Illinois State’s NIL forum. “There was just so much fear, and as there should be. That’s a big thing when it comes to messing with your visa status and being over here.”

This story has been updated to reflect Janka’s year in school.