There’s the version of NIL that gets all the coverage, and there’s the version quietly working at schools like yours.
The headlines belong to about eighty programs. The opportunity belongs to everybody else. A DII school in a town of forty thousand, a DIII program where the whole roster is there for the love of it, a midmajor sharing a media market with a bigger brand: each has something advertisers actively want and can rarely buy at the top of the sport. Local attention, real community, athletes people recognize at the grocery store.
Where Things Actually Stand
Athletes at DII, DIII and midmajor schools are signing real agreements in real volume, and the businesses and donors around those programs understand the opportunity far better than they did a year ago. The awareness work is largely done for you.
The NCAA’s own disclosure data puts the median NIL agreement in the tens of dollars rather than the thousands. Read that as an invitation rather than a limit. The price of entry is low enough that almost any local business can say yes, and a good share of activity comes as value in kind on top of it: meals, apparel, gear, a share of merchandise. The food category shows how far that reaches, with brands structuring programs that cover entire rosters rather than individual stars.
That’s the whole strategic insight. Small college NIL rewards volume rather than size. A program running four hundred small activations a year is doing more for its roster than one built around a single large deal, and it keeps working season after season regardless of who is on the roster.
Jack Betts is the clearest illustration of what that looks like for one athlete. A wide receiver at Amherst, he signed more than 35 NIL agreements as a Division III player, worth roughly $7,500 in cash and product between them. That averages a little over $200 apiece. No single one of those deals was worth writing about, and together they added up to real money for a student with no athletic scholarship and no national profile.
Play 1: Build a Book
The most durable thing you can build is a standing list of local businesses that are open to working with athletes, kept somewhere any athlete on the roster can see it. Twelve regional partners at $2,500 each is $30,000 of annual, renewable activity available across your program rather than tied to one recruiting cycle. The athletes decide which ones fit them and pursue what they want. Your job is making sure the options exist, stay current, and are easy to find.
What that book is made of:
- Regional financial institutions. The most reliable category in the market. Credit unions have gone all in on NIL because the fit is close to perfect: they need younger members, they have community mandates, and financial wellness education is something they can genuinely offer an athlete earning money for the first time. The range runs from a $293 million Idaho credit union signing a hometown player up to institutions competing at the very top, so there’s an entry point at nearly every budget.
- Grocery, convenience and restaurants. Lower dollar, high volume, easy to spread across a roster. Their trade area and your athletes’ audience are the same map, and groceries get bought weekly rather than once a decade. A regional chain can price a roster wide program at a level a national brand never would, and treat a Division II athlete exactly like a Power Four one.
- Consumer health and wellness. Dental and vision practices, pharmacies and fitness businesses market locally and want visibility with exactly your audience.
- Agricultural, industrial and trade employers. Massively underused. In a lot of small college towns they’re the largest employers in the county.
Start with the in kind tier and let it mature. Forty in kind partners and eight cash partners is a healthier asset than two cash partners, and it gives everyone on your roster somewhere to start.
Play 2: Sell Density
An athlete with 8,000 local followers is often worth more to a regional advertiser than a Power Four athlete with 200,000 scattered nationally. The local audience converts, and almost nobody quantifies it.
Do the work. Pull the geographic concentration of your athletes’ followings, cross reference it against your season ticket base and local trade area, and walk into the meeting with a number. “Sixty one percent of this athlete’s audience lives within thirty miles of your three locations” is a pitch a marketing manager can take to her boss.
The local story wins even at the top of the sport. Look at the first wave of jersey patch deals: a custard chain in Wisconsin, a shipping company in Memphis, an energy producer in West Virginia, tribal nations in Oklahoma and Washington. Outside a handful of national names, those went to partners with roots nearby. Same logic as yours, different scale.
The same runs toward your fans. Programs at this level tend to have unusually dense communities, and fan funded NIL fits that shape naturally, with many people contributing an amount that works for them. Where a collective already exists this runs alongside it well. Collectives do real work, and broad fan support and organized donor support complement each other.
Play 3: Every Sport Is a Front Door
At the top of Division I, money concentrates in football and men’s basketball. At DII and DIII that hierarchy doesn’t exist. There’s no revenue pool to divide and no obligation to feed one sport first.
The grocery category is the clearest proof. Look at who signed those campaigns and it’s softball players, gymnasts, volleyball players, track athletes and swimmers, the athletes the national market was built to skip. Sprouts alone says it has partnered with more than 165 female athletes at over 30 universities since 2022. The demand is commercial rather than charitable, because the people doing the grocery shopping are exactly who these retailers want to reach.
Your golfer isn’t worth less per activation than your quarterback. She’s simply doing fewer of them, which is the easiest problem on this list to solve. Midmajors have a real allocation choice, and it’s worth weighing Olympic sports heavily, since they compete for local attention against almost nobody.
Play 4: Win on Speed and Specificity
Your size is an advantage. A decision that takes a Power Four department a month takes you an afternoon, which shows up in how fast a partner gets signed and an athlete gets working.
Put that in public. Publish what your program has actually built: which businesses you work with, the kinds of activations athletes take part in, how an athlete gets connected to an opportunity, and who runs the process. Most programs have a vague reputation. Almost none have a specific, public record of what exists, and that record is something a small department can put together in a season.
It does its work in every direction at once. Recruits and their families find it on their own. Local businesses see a program that’s organized and worth calling. Your current athletes learn what’s available to them. Specificity is persuasive, and small programs can be more specific than anyone.
Play 5: Make Your Athletes Findable
This is the largest untapped opportunity at most schools, and the cheapest to fix. A regional marketing manager with a modest budget and a mandate to look local wants to work with athletes like yours. Give her an obvious way in and she’ll take it.
Cody Wheeler, a national champion javelin thrower at Whitworth, described the athlete’s side of this exactly. The big brands chase the big names at the big schools, so at his level the athlete has to do the reaching out, and in his experience most don’t, because they assume a company will come to them first. That assumption is the whole gap. Athletes at your school are waiting to be found, businesses nearby are willing to look, and nobody has built the place where those two meet.
- A real public profile for every athlete who wants one, with their sport, their story and their actual reach.
- Audience data kept current, somewhere a person outside the building can see it.
- One inbox, one form, one person who answers.
- Tell local businesses the door exists. Many assume NIL is a Power Four thing.
Follower count matters far less than people assume. A small audience that actually lives in the advertiser’s trade area is worth more than a large one scattered everywhere, and small advertisers know it. New categories keep arriving too, with digital asset companies among the most recent to enter college sports.
Worth noting the institutional route has a ceiling everywhere. SponsorUnited counted nearly 95 percent of jersey patch inventory still unsold as of July 2026, and fewer than half of Power Four schools had sold a stadium naming deal. Athlete level partnerships don’t carry that constraint. Nobody has to sell a stadium first.
The First 90 Days
Days 1 to 30. Inventory what exists. Current deals, existing department relationships, every season ticket holder who owns a business. Most schools find thirty warm leads already in their donor database.
Days 31 to 60. Build the audience density deck with real follower geography, attendance data and trade area overlap. Then take ten meetings, each with a specific proposed structure rather than a general ask.
Days 61 to 90. Sign the first cohort and get every athlete who wants a profile online with real numbers attached. Then publish what you built. Recruits read it, and so do local businesses.
Where RallyFuel Fits
RallyFuel is built for programs and athletes like these. Fans back an athlete by name, the athlete gets a profile in a place where people are already looking, and the support goes to the athlete rather than through anyone else first. There’s no risk for the fan, and no brand or agency has to notice an athlete before anything can happen.
That matters most at this level, where the athletes are genuinely beloved locally and simply haven’t had an easy way for that to turn into support.
More than 1,200 programs are covered, and the list runs the real breadth of both divisions rather than the famous corners of them. In Division III, the NCAC, the CCIW, the WIAC, the NESCAC, the SAA. In Division II, the PSAC, the NSIC, the PacWest, the SSC, the CIAA. Find your school and see what’s there.
Whatever your current setup, the programs that do well are the ones that got very good at the game in front of them. At DII, DIII and the midmajor level, that game is wide open.
