Alabama softball players and sisters, Jenna and Lauren Johnson partnered with T-Mobile to bring a web series, spilling the tea of the SEC, highlighting fun behind the scene content of 2025 SEC softball.
Learfield
Learfield, one of college athletics premiere partners for marketing, technology, ticketing, sponsorship, media and digital assets, and data insights is leading in the Name, Image, and Likeness space, and its due to their focus on hiring former athletes.
According to Learfield, 70% of their NIL team members are either former student-athletes or former college administrators.
Jenna Johnson (88), runs out on the field representing the University of Alabama softball program.
Learfield
Jenna Johnson, former Alabama softball outfielder, began her journey with Learfield serving as the NIL Partnerships and Operations Coordinator at Alabama. In just a single year, due to her work with Alabama Athletics, Johnson was promoted to NIL Business Manager at Vanderbilt.
Johnson, like many other collegiate athletes was able to strategically capitalize on the passing of the NCAA NIL legislation in 2021. Johnson, who began with her first NIL deal as a local brand ambassador for Shine Facial Bar Tuscaloosa was able to leverage her social media following (over 10K following on TikTok, 36K on Instagram) to secure national partners such as Squishmallows, Good Molecules, Allstate, NASCAR, Planet Fitness, CBS-Survivor, Lululemon, and T-Mobile.
Now, Johnson is working to secure these partnerships for the athletes at Vanderbilt. According to Johnson, what makes Learfield unique is their “focus on the on-ground NIL personnel, the ones that are at the school, like me. There are so many people around the country that are changing the game and are able to communicate with the athletes, athletic programs, and really get engrained in the university to understand the needs and priorities to change the landscape of NIL.”
Learfield, is one of the few companies in the NIL space that has a proprietary NIL platform in Compass NIL. Compass NIL, an app interface, allows athletes to find deals and brand partners, but also build authentic campaigns tailored to their personalities. The company also has access to college sport fan data in Learfield Fanbase to understand what brands and purchasing behavior will be the most beneficial.
Learfield's NIL Compass platform allows athletes to find brand partnership deals.
Learfield
Johnson expanded and detailed that Learfield’s edge is “the infrastructure in the corporate team”, but also, “the communication between properties [campuses] to communicate updates with NIL, and share ideas and help each other build out campaigns."
Lisa Lewis, Vice President of NIL Growth and Development for Learfield joined the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business class to talk about the work she does.
Learfield
Furthermore, Lisa Lewis, Vice President of NIL Growth and Development with Learfield explained that the company currently has 75 on-campus employees working directly with athletic departments and teams to secure deals for their athletes, with plans to expand to 100 employees next year.
Lewis also clarified that Learfield has “the exclusive rights to IP [intellectual property], the athletes get to wear their jerseys in our campaigns, they get to be in the stadium, locker room, and really show that experience of who they are.”
She continued, “When we put those student-athletes in their gear, in our content pieces, we see that our engagement in our content with student-athletes and their IP gets 40% more engagement and over 39% more views than traditional content.”
Since August 2025 and Johnson coming onboard at Vanderbilt, 146 NIL deals have been signed, with 70 different student-athletes, and eight different teams including a partnerships with Squishmallows, a brand Johnson has worked with herself and was conceptualized by graduate students at the Owen Business school.
Johnson, like many others in the industry also knows the power that women college athletes hold, specifically at this moment. Uber Eats, partnered with Vanderbilt sports, specifically the women’s basketball team to create a “delivering in the clutch” campaign that ran during March Madness centering SEC Freshman of the Year Aubrey Galvan.
According to research from Parity’s 2024 International Women’s Sports Fandom report, women’s sports fans are nearly 3x as likely to purchase a product recommended by a woman athlete than by another type of influencer.
Similarly, Learfield saw women’s sports sponsorships grow by over 40% cumulatively over the last two years. Research from Nielsen shows that viewership of women’s sports overall is up over 16% YoY. Therefore, more eyes are on women’s sports than ever before and this leads to great potential for brands that partner with women college athletes.
Lewis described that women athletes are intentional about building their brands, “Women’s athletics has started to skyrocket across every sport, people are more engaged than ever. I think they [women athletes] are taking the time to really invest, they are looking at their social media, they have figured out what their brand is because they want to go get those authentic deals.”
While at Alabama, Jenna Johnson (pictured here) secured a partnership to work with Planet Fitness.
Learfield
According to data from Learfield, positive brand impression from fans doubles when NIL is included in campaigns, growing from 52% with sponsorship campaigns without NIL, to 104% with student-athletes. Furthermore, purchase intent significantly increases to 65% when campaigns include student-athletes, which is 10% higher than sponsorships without student-athletes.
Johnson, wants fans and others to understand that "NIL is not pay for play. It is a transformational opportunity for the student-athlete. It is an opportunity for the athletes that are on the field every single day to maximize their potential, and really set themselves into a network, that they did not have the opportunity to do before. They have always been athletes on the field, but now they can maximize and monetize their capabilities.”
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