Murphy becomes first Banana Slug to sign NIL deal
7/21/2022 11:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Currently, about a dozen UC Santa Cruz have NIL deals, including swimmers and a men's basketball player.
When Murphy first started the process, she was quite surprised.
"Back in January or early February, I got a call from coach Todd Kent and I was really confused," she explained "because I was like 'why is Coach calling me right now?' "
"I answered it and he said 'Hey, Dino (Senior Associate AD Dino Pollock) is about to call you with something really cool, just don't forget me once you go big'. I was so confused. I was like 'What are you talking about?'" Dino then called me and explained 'I have a possible NIL deal for you'. I had heard about that and knew a couple of D1 players that have gotten NIL deals, so I was like 'I'm a D3 player, what the heck? What do you mean?'Â
So I got in contact with Joe Paysinger, who runs the company. We were able to talk, and pretty much I asked myself too like 'how the heck did you find me? I'm just some random girl that plays basketball in the West Coast' and he said 'That's why we wanted you."
Paysinger said he went online and just looked up the best 10 rebounders in the NCAA, and spied Murphy, UC Santa Cruz's top rebounder the past three seasons. "He saw that I went to a West Coast school, and what even intrigued him more was the Banana Slug! He said 'I definitely need to talk to this girl.' So that was pretty cool to hear."
Paysinger was looking for student-athletes to be spokespersons for his company's line of products to help rebounding. "It's meant to teach people to go for the ball when rebounding," says Murphy "which Coach Kent and I talk about this all the time, but that's such a big thing: two-handed rebounding. So it's really cool to see a product that's finally getting advertised for players to begin that whole process at an earlier stage in their career, because I wish I would have known that when I was younger."
"There are 4 of us on NIL deals there that spans from Division 3 to Division 1 schools," Murphy explained "and they also have Jordan Kilganon, who is really famous for dunking; he's a professional dunker. I was able to go out to Louisiana, they flew me out there and my mom, I went to the coaches convention there and go to the Final Four and was able to present the product, so that was super amazing.
"Everyone is super nice, it was really cool to just get out there and experience something new, and I never thought that sports would ever take me to Louisiana to go to the coaches' convention and the Final Four, so that was really fun."
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Murphy said that being a Division III female athlete didn't mean she was taken any less seriously when she was presenting or being the spokesperson.
"I definitely was a little nervous with that, because first of all, there was only 2 of us that were women there and the rest were all men, and I was the only D3 athlete there, so going in I definitely just wanted to make sure my voice was at least heard. I felt like they really respected us, and when I first initially met everyone that was a part of the team, Joe sat us all down in front of each other and just made sure that he spoke of equality in pay and equality in what we're doing, so that was really cool to experience, and he did that in front of everyone because he didn't want to hide anything from any of [us]. That was really cool that I was getting the same thing that everyone else is getting."As far as being a spokesperson there, it definitely was a little scary because these were all men's teams, and being a woman it's a little scary sometimes being around all of these men and trying to be heard, but I thought it went well. I was trying to be outgoing. I was able to step out of my comfort zone a little bit, so I definitely was approaching more people and trying to explain the product and explain what we were doing."
Murphy was also able to see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff at the convention. "I talked to some D1 men's coaches, so that was pretty cool to just kind of see," she said. "They had some coaches doing some exhibits or shows there where they would just talk about basketball, and Joe who was running our stand was like 'if you want a little break, go and listen', so I got to listen to some really high-ranked coaches talk about the game which was really fun."
An Honorable Mention All-American in her recently concluded junior year, Murphy says she will have the deal throughout her senior year and maybe longer.
"Joe said he chose us with the purpose that he thought we would be great people out of college as well," Murphy said. "So he definitely wants to keep tabs on us when we graduate, just kind of as a thank you because we jumped on this product when there wasn't a lot of hype around it and it wasn't really brought out to the public yet, so he's just really respectful and saying 'I want to keep you guys on for as long as I can.' "
