Her Campus Athletic Club: Vetted Athletes, Local Loyalty, and the 200-Campus Model Brands Are Missing
Her Campus Media is building athlete partnerships without legal teams, internal expertise, or compliance headaches
Her Campus Media, the #1 portfolio of Gen Z media brands, has a structural advantage most brands don’t. They’ve spent years building trust with the exact audience brands are trying to reach: college women. But reaching Gen Z women and activating them as athletes are two different things.
That's what the HC Athletic Club was built for. Unlike traditional influencer platforms, the Athletic Club taps into something more specific: student-athletes who are both campus peers and people their classmates genuinely look up to.
Julianne Skrivan has spent over seven years at Her Campus Media navigating that intersection, and is now helping brands actually execute there. When NIL rules changed in 2021, she watched brand enthusiasm for athlete partnerships evaporate the moment legal teams asked who was tracking state-by-state regulations. That gap between wanting to work with athletes and knowing how to work with them is exactly what she's been building infrastructure to close.
And as Her Campus's audience turns over every four years by nature, they're already watching the next wave come into focus: Gen Alpha.
Key Takeaways:
Her Campus Athletic Club creates brand value through:
Compliance infrastructure that absorbs legal complexity so marketing teams execute athlete campaigns like standard influencer activations
Pre-vetted athlete communities combining athletic credibility with peer proximity rather than dispersed celebrity follower bases
Integration-focused campaigns where athletes test products before creating content, generating authentic peer recommendations instead of transactional posts
The compliance barrier sidelining brands
Women's sports receive only 10% of sponsorship dollars despite surging fan interest, according to Deloitte research cited in Her Campus coverage. Most brands lack the infrastructure to execute these partnerships safely.
When NIL rules changed in 2021, brands rushed toward college athletes, then hit a few barriers:
State laws varied
University athletic departments enforced different policies
Contract structures that worked for traditional influencers triggered NCAA violations
Legal teams quoted six-month timelines for deals that should have taken six days.
Traditional influencer marketing people couldn't solve this. They understood content creation and engagement rates, not NIL compliance or NCAA regulations. The infrastructure problem ran in both directions: brands needed a partner who could absorb legal complexity, while student-athletes needed business education alongside brand opportunities.
"A lot of brands want to work with student-athletes, but they don't necessarily know how to do it in a way that feels authentic to the athlete and also feels compliant and legal and safe," says Skrivan.
Her Campus built the infrastructure to bridge that divide. Their legal team provides weekly updates on shifting NIL regulations at state and institutional levels, which Her Campus translates into guidance for both athletes and brand partners, handling contract review, university policy compliance, and ongoing regulatory monitoring.
Athletic credibility meets classroom proximity
Her Campus knows that student-athletes deliver value in distinct and unique ways that differ from traditional influencing. A Division I soccer player recommending recovery slides carries different weight than a fashion influencer making the same recommendation because the player is using the product functionally, not aspirationally. That play also isn’t some handle your customer follows on social media but someone they sit next to in class.
"These are college students who are also athletes, so they have this dual identity of being a peer on campus but also being someone who is looked up to because they're an athlete," Skrivan says.
OOFOS became one of the Athletic Club's early anchor partnerships, revealing something counterintuitive about what makes the model work. Most Athletic Club members are microinfluencers with under 10,000 followers.
For most brands, this would signal a problem. For brands targeting college women, this represents the entire value proposition.
These athletes have geographically concentrated audiences creating fiercely loyal local followings with higher engagement rates than dispersed follower bases.
Her Campus targets sophomore and junior athletes because these years produce the highest engagement because students have established themselves as campus leaders that have had time to build meaningful brand relationships.
The HC Athletic Club operates as a vetted community, not an open marketplace. Athletes apply and undergo evaluation on multiple criteria including campus leadership, content creation capability, athletic achievement, and cultural fit with Her Campus brand values. Vetting happens twice—first when athletes join the Athletic Club based on overall fit, then again when brand campaign opportunities arise for brand-specific alignment.
From send-and-request to test-and-recommend
Here’s a classic influencer campaign:
Send product → request posts → measure engagement → next campaign.
This works for fashion and beauty products where aspiration drives purchase, but that fails for products targeting Gen Z women who, according to Her Campus research, are 45% more likely to buy from brands that invest authentically in college sports rather than brands that simply pay for posts.
Her Campus gives athletes the product before they give them the brief. Use it, form an actual opinion, then talk about it.
That model is why their content doesn't feel like ‘content’.
After the gifting period, campaign execution follows. Athletes create content based on prompts from Her Campus and brand teams, but they have creative control over how they integrate products into their existing content style.
Her Campus amplifies athlete campaigns beyond individual social posts. When HC Athletic Club members post sponsored content, Her Campus often features those athletes in editorial coverage on the main Her Campus site, creating a halo effect that reaches the site's millions of monthly readers.
Brands get amplification across Her Campus's owned media properties and social channels reaching hundreds of millions of Gen Z women annually, not just athlete posts on personal accounts with 5,000 followers.
Brands approaching women's sports partnerships face a build-or-buy decision: develop internal NIL expertise, compliance infrastructure, and athlete communities from scratch, or plug into platforms that have already done that work.
As NIL matures, that choice only gets more consequential, the brands that move now are the ones who will have the relationships, the data, and the playbooks when the wave of Gen Alpha athletes start making their way into the collegiate scene.
