When most people hear “NIL,” the acronym for Name, Image and Likeness, a legal framework that allows college athletes to make money off of their personal brand, they picture a college athlete posting on Instagram about a protein powder they’ve never actually tried. A flat rate, a few hashtags and maybe a promo code. Done.
For a lot of athletes, that version of NIL has been a useful starting point. But at SPORTx at Arizona State University, we’ve been focused on something harder to capture in a sponsored post: what happens when athletes stop being the product in someone else’s marketing strategy and start building something of their own.
The difference between a brand deal and a venture is a mindset shift as much as it’s a financial shift. And it turns out that the same discipline, competitive drive and tolerance for pressure that makes someone a great athlete also makes for a formidable founder.
The Problem With “Just Chase Brand Deals”
NIL opened a door that had been locked for decades. Suddenly, college athletes could monetize their platform, and the industry rushed in to meet them. Collectives formed. Agencies launched. Brands lined up.
But the dirty secret of the brand deal economy is that most of it is short-term, unpredictable and tied entirely to athletic performance and social following. The moment your playing time drops or your sport falls out of the news cycle, the offers dry up. You haven’t built anything. You’ve rented your attention to someone else’s brand.
At SPORTx, we asked a different question. What if we helped athletes build things that would outlast their eligibility?
Building the Infrastructure for Athlete Entrepreneurship
SPORTx is the university’s sports innovation engine, anchored within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute at ASU. Our Student-Athlete Venture Studio — built in partnership with GoDaddy, Sun Devil Athletics and the broader ASU entrepreneurship ecosystem — was designed specifically to meet athletes where they are and walk with them from idea to launch.
That means incubation space at Mountain America Stadium, right in the heart of Sun Devil Athletics. It means one-on-one mentoring, access to grant funding through Demo Day pitch competitions and digital infrastructure so that athletes can build a real online presence fast. It also means connecting athletes to ASU’s full entrepreneurial ecosystem, including the Venture Devils program, so they’re not operating in a silo.
In 2025 alone, the studio facilitated the creation of more than 300 websites, over 150 incubator-space mentoring sessions and distributed over $300,000 to student-led ventures through the GoDaddy Empower program. The numbers are meaningful, but the stories behind them are what make this real.
Kate Fitzgerald: From Walk-On to Founder
The SPORTx story starts, in many ways, with Kate Fitzgerald.
Kate walked onto ASU’s women’s beach volleyball team and went on to be part of a squad that made NCAA Championship history. But while she was competing, she noticed a gap in the market. There was almost no quality volleyball lifestyle apparel available for women who loved the sport.
So she built it herself.
VBAmerica started as a volleyball clothing and lifestyle brand, launched directly through NIL licensing while Kate was still a student-athlete. She pitched for funding through ASU’s entrepreneurial programs, won $5,000 from the Global Sport Institute and another $3,000 from the Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute and used that capital to finish licensing and build inventory. At her first pop-up event at the AVP Phoenix Championships in 2022, she sold $6,000 in merchandise in a single weekend.
VBAmerica has since expanded into university merch stores and partnered with other student-athletes. Kate later went on to earn her Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business, and is now and integral part of SPORTx itself, helping other athletes follow a path she blazed.
Her story is about more than a brand deal. She identified a real problem, built a real product and used her athlete identity as a competitive advantage rather than a commodity to be rented.
Sierra Ryan: Bridging Athletics and Technology
If Kate’s story is about the power of starting, Sierra Ryan’s is about what happens when you refuse to wait.
Sierra is a sophomore lacrosse defender at ASU. She’s also been coding since middle school, taught herself to build applications through trial and error, and by age 16 had launched her first business, a software consulting company called Boterra.
But the venture that brought her into SPORTx was FuelWarden, a personalized nutrition app built specifically for high-performance athletes. Sierra’s thesis was simple but powerful. There are thousands of apps that harvest athlete data for betting markets or merchandise, but almost nothing built to actually serve athletes in training.
“From my own struggle with nutrition as an athlete, I realized nothing on the market is made for people competing at high levels with such rigorous schedules,” she said. “So we’re building FuelWarden to help athletes feel smarter so they can train harder.”
Sierra won $13,000 in Demo Day funding in the spring of 2025 and another $11,500 in the fall. FuelWarden entered beta testing with athletes across the country. And Sierra became a peer mentor within the studio, helping other athletes think like founders.
One of those athletes was Brianna Nunley.
Brianna Nunley: Finding the Confidence to Back Yourself
Brianna is a senior women’s soccer player from Chandler, Arizona. Her venture, Dream it!, is a children’s book and empowerment initiative designed to inspire the next generation of young athletes and dreamers.
It’s a venture that lives at the intersection of Brianna’s athletic identity and her sense of purpose. But like most founders, the hardest part wasn’t having the idea. It was walking into a room and asking for money.
Working with Sierra and the SPORTx team, Brianna prepped for the fall 2025 Demo Day pitch. She won $2,550 in grant funding to support Dream it!, but the more lasting outcome was something harder to quantify.
“She helped me become comfortable backing myself and confidently asking for the level of funding truly needed,” Brianna said, “a skill that is challenging but essential as a founder.”
That’s what the studio is really doing in moments like that — not just handing out grant money but also building founders.
The Winning Mindset of Athlete Entrepreneurs
The conventional wisdom in entrepreneurship is that you need technical skills, business training and a network. Athletes often arrive with none of the above, at least not in the traditional sense.
But they bring something else — an elite tolerance for failure, a deep understanding of coaching and feedback, a habit of showing up even when it’s hard and the kind of personal brand that most early-stage founders spend years trying to build. They also arrive with an authentic community of peers who are potential customers, collaborators and early adopters.
At SPORTx, we’re in the business of translating those athletic assets into entrepreneurial ones. That means teaching the mechanics — how to structure a venture, pitch for funding, build online and think about markets — while also helping athletes see that the traits that made them competitors are exactly what makes a founder.
As Brianna put it after her Demo Day experience, “Athletics open doors, but consistency, curiosity and courage are what allow you to walk through them.”
The NIL era gave athletes the legal right to build. SPORTx is giving them the tools, the training and the community to actually do it. Brand deals are fine. But we’re in the business of building founders.
SPORTx is now working with hundreds of athletes across ASU and expanding its reach nationally. The studio is designed to bring this model to institutions beyond Tempe. What we’ve built at ASU is a proof of concept that athlete entrepreneurship, done right, is something the whole college sports ecosystem can harness.
SPORTx at Arizona State University is anchored within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute and is the university’s sports innovation engine. The Student-Athlete Venture Studio, built with GoDaddy, supports hundreds of athletes at ASU and beyond through entrepreneurial education, digital infrastructure, mentorship, and pathways to funding. Learn more at entrepreneurship.asu.edu/programs/sportx.