How NIL is transforming college gymnastics and attracting Olympic stars

When former gymnast Jordyn Wieber won the all-around world championship ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, she faced a difficult dilemma.

She could gamble on Olympic success and become a professional athlete or refuse the financial opportunity of the fleeting Olympic spotlight and retain her NCAA eligibility.

With no guarantee she would make the Olympic team, Wieber opted to go pro. Her bet paid off.

She won an Olympic gold medal with her "Fierce Five" teammates and graced the front of a Corn Flakes box, but she still mourned the loss of her collegiate athletic career.

"At the time, the lifespan of a gymnast didn't seem to be very long," Wieber said. "Thinking back to being a 16-year-old making this decision, it's insane."

Now the head coach of women's gymnastics at the University of Arkansas, Wieber's athletes won't have to choose between Corn Flakes and SEC crowds.

Her current seniors were the first group of collegiate athletes to benefit from NIL, or "Name, Image and Likeness," enabling them to earn money from sponsorships, endorsements and social media deals while competing as collegiate athletes.

The framework of gymnastics, at both the collegiate and elite levels, immediately shifted.

The gymnastics performed by the U.S. national team at world championships and the Olympics is called elite gymnastics, which is considerably more difficult than college gymnastics. The two systems are governed by separate rule books.

The new NIL rules not only enabled college gymnasts to reap financial rewards, but eased the boundaries between elite and collegiate gymnastics and enticed big names like Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey to compete in the sport at both levels.

All three gymnasts excelled in NCAA gymnastics between the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, enabling them to stay in shape and compete more frequently than most elite gymnasts.

After helping Team USA to a gold medal in Paris, Chiles and Carey are returning to their college teams for the 2025 season.

"What a cool thing for the sport of gymnastics," Wieber said. "It's getting so many more eyes, so much more exposure and it's allowing some of these athletes who want to do both college and elite to help grow our sport."

She added, “NIL is giving them the permission to experience both worlds at the same time.”

2008 Olympic silver medalist and NBC Sports gymnastics analyst Samantha Peszek said that gymnasts benefit uniquely from NIL, even among their fellow top-earning college athletes. Gymnasts compete in one of the most popular Olympic sports, but generally do not have the financial future of a college football or basketball player.

“For sports like gymnastics, where most gymnasts retire when they graduate college, there wasn’t an opportunity to reap the rewards of our sport financially or opportunistically when you graduated,” Peszek said. “So for them to allow them to do that while they’re working hard, while they’re still an athlete, it’s a huge benefit.”

Before NIL, the primary financial opportunities in the sport were reserved for the handful of gymnasts who thwarted the odds every four years and made the U.S. Olympic team.

Even then, the ephemeral nature of Olympic visibility wasn’t always lucrative enough to entice some gymnasts to forfeit their NCAA eligibility.

Kyla Ross, Wieber's 2012 Olympic teammate and assistant coach at Arkansas, opted to retain her amateur status and compete for UCLA's storied gymnastics team in lieu of accepting prize and endorsement money.

"I definitely think that my parents helped me a little bit with that decision," said Ross, who won her Olympic gold at 15 years old. "My dad was a collegiate athlete, and so he always told me that when he competed in college, those were some of the best four years of his life."

Turning down the financial rewards for her London success, however, was "sacrificing a little bit."

Ross went on to become the first female gymnast to ever win Olympic, world and NCAA championships, but she could not profit from her success until she retired from the sport.

As gymnasts use NIL to build their online presence, appear on cereal boxes and blur the lines between elite and NCAA, interest in watching NCAA gymnastics is increasing.

“Gymnasts have always been really great role models for young athletes,” Ross said. “But I feel like now that they’re able to connect even more through NIL, do more community engagement and show that business side, they’re able to grow that fan base even more.”

Finding time to balance it all, however, is easier said than done.

Leanne Wong, a senior on the University of Florida's gymnastics team, is not only a Division I athlete, but a pre-med student, an Olympian, an author and a business owner.

"I definitely wouldn't have been able to run a business and earn money while getting a college education before the rule change," Wong said.

She sells handmade bows that gymnasts can pair with their leotards, a signature accessory she popularized while competing for the U.S. national team.

This year, Wong did an entire elite season on the heels of a successful collegiate season. While most of her fellow Olympic hopefuls took the season off to focus on elite gymnastics, she was the 2024 NCAA uneven bars champion and traveled to Paris as an alternate for the U.S. Olympic team.

"It was definitely a lot to balance, getting ready for competitions on Friday nights and having the Olympics in the back of my mind," Wong said.

While many athletes like Wong have benefited from NIL, college coaches nationwide have had to reconstruct their programs to accommodate its inevitable challenges.

Wieber makes sure her athletes know academics remain the priority, followed by athletics. Once those responsibilities are met, they can shift their focus to NIL.

NIL resources at each university, from help securing deals to assistance with taxes, have become part of the conversation at the recruitment stage as well.

"Especially for athletes that get a lot of different offers and a lot of opportunities, we help them think about how to say no to things," Wieber said. "How to do their due diligence in the process of evaluating, 'Do I want to work with this brand? Do their values align with me?'"

NIL is still in its infancy, but as athletes earn their dues, Wieber and Ross would like to see college sports maintain its values too.

"Things are going to look a little different than they ever have before," Wieber said. "Our perspective is to continue to be flexible and maintain the core foundation of what makes college athletics so great."

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

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