“What advice do you have for female athletes wanting to work in traditionally male-dominated fields?” This is what Oregon Women’s Lacrosse goalie, Cassidy Eckert, questioned panelists at the 2025 Oregon Women’s Symposium on Sunday, Jan. 26.
It piqued my interest in how female athletes compete under traditionally male-dominated NIL profit models.
In July 2024, the House v. NCAA antitrust settlement proposed $2.75 billion in damages to athletes over a 10-year span. This elicited the elimination of scholarship caps and new roster ceilings, but times have changed since seasons shifted. At present, major sports have restricted their roster caps. Basketball is capped at 15, football at 105, track and field at 45 for men and women each and softball at 25.
What about volleyball, women’s lacrosse and everyone else?
The Department of Education proposed a new memo, highlighting that Name, Image, and Likeness payments will be considered “financial assistance.” The nine-page memo, which is notably not the law, proposes demands for equity in sports payouts for NCAA student-athletes. Namely, for their personal branding rights by companies that historically seek out revenue-generating sports and their constituents.
“I feel like it’s a good sign of progress being made towards women in sports. It’s a really positive thing to look forward to as we move forward with NIL,” Hazel Baker, first-year on the Oregon Women’s Lacrosse team and who shares an NIL deal with custom merchandise company, Athlete Threads, said.
This is fantastic news for women in sports, who operate in a similar capacity to their male counterparts. Both juggle rigorous academic workloads and enervating practice schedules, accumulating up to twenty hours per week to dedicated training time.
But, there are caveats to these kinds of amendments. By leveraging third-party NIL collectives, which act “independently” from universities, there’s still room for schools to skip the financial requirements imposed by Title IX to ensure athletes still receive the lion’s share of NIL funds while averting the redistribution mandates.
While I remain optimistic that actionable change can be made for women in sports, I’m not yet convinced this new statement will bring about any substantial alterations.
The burgeoning gap between schools has been repositioned such that NIL money will be facilitated through universities first to ensure its compliance with Title IX legislation. Brands can pay institutions, but it’s up to those schools to equitably apportion those funds between its athletes.
Athletes are still legally allowed to receive NIL money if it doesn’t cause a disparity, but more often than not, those sentiments are hamstrung. We’re entering a new tier of revenue-sharing, starring universities as players’ agents.
The proposal to amend Title IX disparities amidst a critical lawsuit will likely have knock-on effects, seeing as the 22% revenue-sharing cap violates antitrust law. As we bid farewell to pay-to-play contracts from NIL, this new model serves as a skeleton for multi-year contracts to alleviate the headache that is the transfer portal and roster caps.
In order to make revenue-sharing payments compliant with Title IX equity standards, this shuffles the budgets coaches have for athletic payment, modifying how they recruit athletes and affecting the organizational structure of these nonprofit institutions.
Historically, the split was fractured by allocating 70% to football, 20% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball and 5% to remaining athletic programs.
Title IX’s requirements extend far beyond the system with which we pay college athletes. It also demands equality when it comes to issues of publicity and social media promotion. This might lead to new outlets for how colleges market and support their athletic programs.
Should Title IX, the landmark 1972 law aimed at promoting gender equity in education, be applied to NIL payments to student-athletes, especially as the NCAA approaches a settlement over antitrust litigation?
Uncertainty looms with regard to operational costs, as investments will continue to shift to meet the requirements of gendered equity compliance. Yes, a lot of work on the backend to ensure programs remain profitable and competitive. It’s hard work, but it’s fair. And at the day’s end, this is a historic milestone for female athletes across the country who have been played by the system for far too long.
This is just my two cents as a female athlete. We are all sitting ducks pending the April 7 House v. NCAA hearing. I’m both curious and excited to see how the fog will settle and if the Trump Administration will play its hand in altering these policies before then.
