Meta Strategic Partner Manager for Athletes Rebecca Wathen joins ADU’s Tai M. Brown at the 2024 NIL Summit in Atlanta to discuss Meta’s new partnership with the NCAA. The partnership features the expansion of Meta’s NIL Empower Program, which seeks to provide female student-athletes with additional NIL opportunities via Meta’s three platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Wathen: “This team didn’t exist three years ago but when NIL passed, we realized internally, this is a big opportunity… this opens up a brand new crop of nearly 400,000 athletes a year that need guidance on how to take advantage of this.” Wathen shares insight into the process for selecting athlete participants for the program and how Meta can help athletes learn about their identity outside the sport they play before reflecting on her own experience as a women’s basketball player at Duke and subsequent WNBA career.
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