For the first time in its nearly 60-year history, Nike will begin selling jerseys of active college basketball players with their names on the back, according to an Instagram post from Boardroom.
The four players pictured in the post include Iowa star Caitlin Clark, UConn’s Paige Bueckers, and Southern California’s Juju Watkins and Bronny James. Selling jerseys with college players’ names on the back was forbidden by the NCAA before the rise of NIL.
Each of these four athletes play at schools sponsored by Nike, allowing this opportunity.
The replica jerseys will be available for $90 each, triple the price point of Clark’s Nike T-shirts, which are sold for $30.
The replica jerseys can be bought on Nike’s website or at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Ahead of the 2022-23 season, Clark signed an NIL deal with Nike along with James, Watkins, DJ Wagner, and Haley Jones.
“Obviously, I’m very honored and blessed to have that,” Clark said about the deal with Nike at last year’s Big Ten Basketball Media Days in Minneapolis. “Obviously, [as] somebody who grew up loving sports, I played a lot of different sports growing up. A lot of the athletes I loved were part of the Nike family, so to become one of them is truly an honor.”
In September, Clark, who led the Hawkeyes to their first national championship game, appeared on a brand new Nike Tech ad with the saying, “Before you build something new, you have to break some ground.”
Clark’s partnership with Nike is not her only big-brand deal. This fall, she signed a deal with State Farm and appeared in one of the company’s well-known “Jake from State Farm” advertisements.
