$190K and a Free Protein Powder: The Two Very Different NIL Realities of College Volleyball
One player is the 19th most marketable female athlete in college sports. Everyone else is posting for free sneakers. This is what NIL actually looks like in volleyball.
Let’s set the table with the number that started a thousand conversations this spring.
Harper Murray: $190,000. Number one NIL valuation in college volleyball. Not just volleyball, among all women’s college athletes, she’s in rare air, the only NCAA volleyball player to crack the Top 20 Female College Athletes by NIL valuation list in 2025, coming in at No. 19.
Now here’s the number nobody puts on the graphic: the No. 10 player on the volleyball NIL rankings tops out around $54,000. The players just outside the top 10? Lower. The Division I setter who put up a career season last fall at a mid-major program and has 4,200 Instagram followers? She’s probably trading posts for protein powder and a discount code.
This is the NIL era in college volleyball. It is not one story. It is two. And the gap between them is growing.
The Top of the Board
The current On3 volleyball NIL rankings, which estimate player valuations based on social media following, engagement, and deal activity, tell a story in numbers. Here’s how the top five shake out as of May 2026:
- Harper Murray (Nebraska): $190,000
- Lexi Rodriguez (Nebraska): $180,000
- Madisen Skinner (Texas): $172,000
- Laney Choboy (Nebraska/NC): $123,000
- Ally Batenhorst (now pro, Omaha Supernovas): $117,000
(Source: On3 NIL Valuations, updated May 10, 2026. These are estimates, not disclosed contracts.)
Notice anything? Three of the top five are or were Nebraska Cornhuskers. One is from Texas. These aren’t coincidences. They’re the product of two things: program visibility and social media reach. Murray was the only NCAA volleyball player to crack the Top 20 Female College Athletes by NIL valuation list in 2025, coming in at No. 19, per On3’s rankings, which track estimated valuations across all college sports.
The brands have noticed. Murray has deals with Avoli, the volleyball-exclusive athletic brand, and has been featured in national marketing campaigns. Texas junior setter Ella Swindle filmed a Dove commercial after practice. Raising Cane’s, a fast-growing sports marketing company, has strategically built out a volleyball NIL roster that spans LSU, Texas, and Nebraska.
These are real brand deals. They involve production, contracts, usage rights, and money that actually shows up in a bank account.
Everyone Else
For the other 99%, the landscape looks completely different.
The reality for most college volleyball players is what researchers and NIL industry insiders call “in-kind” deals — a partnership where the currency isn’t money but product. A supplement company gives you three months of protein powder in exchange for two posts and a story. A local sportswear brand sends leggings in exchange for a tag. A nutrition app offers a free premium subscription for a shoutout to your 2,800 followers.
These deals aren’t nothing. But they’re not $190,000 either.
The structural reason is brutally simple: brands pay for audience. A national car commercial exists because a company wants to reach hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously. For that to make financial sense, the athlete needs to actually command that reach. Most college volleyball players, even very good ones, don’t. The sport, for all its growth, still operates in a niche. And within that niche, the visibility is aggressively concentrated at the top programs, the top players, and the top social feeds.
This creates a paradox that anyone who follows volleyball closely knows firsthand: a player can be dominant at the Big Ten level — truly elite — and still have 6,000 Instagram followers and zero brand interest beyond a sunscreen company with a discount code. Meanwhile, a player at Nebraska or Texas with comparable stats but 10x the following lands a Dove commercial.
The sport’s best-kept secret is that NIL rewards virality as much as it rewards talent. Sometimes more.
The House Settlement Makes It More Complicated
Just when the in-kind tier started to look like it might improve, the landscape shifted again.
The June 2025 House settlement — which now allows schools to directly pay athletes through revenue sharing — has added a new layer of complexity. The money is real: schools can distribute up to roughly $20 million annually to their athletes. But how that money gets allocated is almost entirely up to each school.
The blunt reality: most of that revenue-sharing money is expected to flow toward football and men’s basketball. Schools that prioritize equitable allocation can meaningfully expand what women’s volleyball players earn. Most schools are not leading with that priority.
The result is a system where the official expansion of athlete compensation has, in practice, mostly widened a gap that already existed. The Harper Murrays of the world have more earning paths than ever. The player at a mid-major with a 4.0 GPA, a 3.79 hitting percentage, and 5,000 followers is still posting for protein powder.
What It Actually Takes to Break Through
The players who have cracked through the mid-tier ceiling share a few things in common, and it’s not always the things you’d expect.
It’s not just winning. It’s not even just stats. The players who command real NIL attention have usually built something off the court that amplifies what happens on it. They have a content angle. A personality that translates through a screen. A story, an origin, a journey, a cause that makes someone stop scrolling.
Murray’s grief work, her mission-driven persona, her polish in front of a camera: these aren’t accidents. They’re why she has 374,000 followers as a junior in a non-revenue sport. The volleyball got her to Nebraska. Everything else got her to number one.
The players who are collecting supplement deals aren’t missing that memo. They’re missing the infrastructure around it. No NIL collective. No media training. No agent is helping them send pitch emails. Just a player, a phone, and the vague advice to “build your brand” — handed to a 19-year-old in between 6 AM lifts and afternoon film sessions.
The Bigger Picture
Here’s what makes this worth paying attention to beyond the scoreboard: NIL inequality in volleyball is a mirror of a broader problem in women’s sports economics.
Women’s college athletes’ NIL deals actually outpaced men’s in total money distributed among the top 100 most-endorsed athletes in 2023 — women earned 52% of those dollars, per a SponsorUnited report. But zoom out past the top 100 and the picture flips. Per Opendorse data, 73.5% of NIL compensation across all Division I athletes goes to men. The remaining 26.5% gets divided among every women’s sport — basketball, gymnastics, softball, soccer, volleyball, all of them.
Volleyball’s top earners are genuine success stories. They’ve built something real in a sport that didn’t always get the respect it deserved, and the brands following them there are, in their own way, validating what the sport has been saying for years: this fanbase is loyal, engaged, and growing.
But the version of volleyball NIL that gets screenshotted and celebrated — Murray at No. 19 nationally, Nebraska’s roster stacked with six-figure earners — is not the experience of the sport. It’s the experience of three programs, the top 10 players, and a handful of social media followings that happen to have hit critical mass at the right moment.
For the rest of the roster? It’s still protein powder and hoping the algorithm shows up.
That’s the tea.
Category: College Indoor | NIL | Women’s Volleyball