McDermott Says NIL Deals Have Added Recruiting Challenges in Key Sports

Harvard Athletics Director Erin McDermott said name, image, and likeness deals have added a “layer of challenge” to recruiting in a handful of high-revenue sports, but maintained that Harvard has largely stopped losing current athletes to the transfer portal over NIL money, in a Wednesday interview with The Crimson.

McDermott said the impact is concentrated in football, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s and women’s ice hockey — sports where power-conference programs can pair full scholarships with significant NIL payments. In those conversations, she said, Harvard coaches are regularly asked to justify the University’s offer against six-and seven-figure packages from rival schools.

A 2021 Supreme Court ruling opened the door for college athletes to profit from their name, image, and likeness, and donor-funded NIL collectives have since emerged at programs across the country. Harvard and its Ivy League peers have not established comparable collectives, and McDermott reiterated that the University will not help facilitate NIL deals for its athletes.

“If you’re interested in NIL opportunities, you’re certainly encouraged to pursue them, but we aren’t going to be the ones that are helping in that,” she said. “We’re not going to have alums who are forming something to give you a bunch of money to do things.”

Instead, Harvard Athletics has built out a “Why Harvard” platform — a collection of videos and articles produced by the department’s communications team — to help coaches reframe recruiting pitches around the flexibility of the Harvard student-athlete experience.

“I think we’ve just tried to be helpful to them, to help them frame all the great benefits — not get caught up on what we’re not doing,” she said. “We’re not going to give you all this money.”

The platform is designed to showcase the flexibility Harvard athletes have to pursue interests outside of their sport — including academics, arts, and research opportunities — that McDermott claimed are less feasible for athletes at larger Division I programs.

McDermott acknowledged that the pitch is hardest for lower-income recruits, who in previous years could be drawn to Harvard because its financial aid packages matched the value of a full athletic scholarship. With NIL money now on the table at other programs, she said, that parity no longer holds.

“Why the element of NIL has even added more challenge is because for a family like that, typically, based on the very generous financial aid packages of Harvard, were likely getting a full financial aid award here at Harvard, so that rivaled the full scholarship,” McDermott said. “Now with additional money potentially being offered to a family, I think it’s gotten harder.”

Still, McDermott said Harvard remains “in the conversation” with those recruits and that the pitch now hinges on longer-term factors — the alumni network, post-graduate career outcomes, and what she described as a fuller college experience.

Harvard has lost several high-profile athletes to the transfer portal in recent years, including basketball players Chisom Okpara and Malik Mack and a tennis player Cooper Williams, who transferred in 2024 to schools offering athletic scholarships and NIL deals.

McDermott said those departures came early in the NIL era, when athletes had been recruited before lucrative deals existed and were reconsidering their choice in light of new money elsewhere.

“We haven’t really lost the ones that haven’t finished, except for those few that we did a couple years back,” McDermott said.

McDermott said current recruits now arrive at Harvard knowing what the University will and will not offer, which she believes has made them less likely to leave mid-career. She also voiced support for graduate transfers, calling it “a great opportunity” when athletes complete their Harvard degree and then pursue scholarship money elsewhere while enrolling in graduate school.

Student-athlete engagement with Harvard’s own NIL infrastructure — the One Crimson Exchange, which launched in January 2025 — remains limited, McDermott said. She attributed the low uptake to time constraints rather than lack of awareness.

”It’s not like a huge percentage of our student athletes are really engaged in this,” McDermott said. “Time is a big factor, because it becomes okay, for the time that I might have to invest, what’s the return on that investment?”

Beyond NIL, McDermott said Harvard Athletics is working to expand corporate sponsorships and facility rentals to diversify revenue as the University navigates federal funding pressure. She pointed to the department’s partnership with Wegmans — which supplies food for student-athletes on Wednesdays — as a model for the kinds of outside arrangements the department is pursuing more aggressively.

“Where can we find more of those kinds of opportunities where we have corporate sponsors and partnerships and relationships that are helping?” McDermott said.

Athletics has also leaned on facility rentals, hosting concerts and drone shows on its grounds over the summer. McDermott said the department is trying to grow that revenue stream without cutting into varsity or recreational programming.

“You may start to notice there’ll be more of that activity, because we’re trying to increase that revenue stream in a way that doesn’t impact our varsity and recreational program as much as possible,” she said.

—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun contributed reporting.

—Staff writer Julia A. Karabolli can be reached at [email protected].