How Olivia Dunne changed college sports forever as an NIL pioneer (2024)

DULUTH, Ga. — There are hundreds of teenage girls screaming, and thousands of rabid fans waving pompoms, and club music playing at a volume that could make your eardrums bleed. There are sequin-covered gymnasts pounding their palms on floor pads, and blazer-clad judges looking sternly over their computer monitors, and numbers that look stolen from a math test — 9.825! 9.950! 9.875! — met with approving roars as they pop up on placards in all corners of this madhouse.

It would seem impossible that a single human being could stand out during the two hours of sensory overload that is the SEC Gymnastics Championships, a four-ring circus with no clowns but dozens of the world’s best acrobats. Then, early on the final night of competition at Gas South Arena this spring, that is exactly what happens.

Olivia Dunne, in a white-and-purple leotard with her blond hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, steps onto a mat and stares up at the uneven bars. She is not the most accomplished athlete on her Louisiana State team, but it feels like every neck in the building cranes in her direction as she tightens the strings on her wrist supports.

The gymnastics diehards want to see how the New Jersey native will perform with a much-coveted title on the line at the end of an injury-plagued season. But plenty of casual fans who have come to this suburban Atlanta venue don’t know the difference between a salto and a split.

They are here just to see her — period.

Livvy, as she is known on social media, is the rare athlete who transcends her sport thanks to a rule change that allows NCAA athletes to cash in on their name, image and likeness. In a three-month span this year, she commanded a spot on the cover of Sports Illustrated and a multi-page spread inside fashion magazine Elle.

She is everywhere. That was her standing with boxing legend Mike Tyson on the red carpet at the ESPYs, riding a white horse at the Country Music Awards and posing on Puerto Rican beach during a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition photoshoot. That was also her in a white suit discussing her business prowess with Forbes magazine, describing a social-media presence that has helped her earn a reported $3.5 million a year in endorsem*nt deals.

“She is the equivalent of the five-tool player in baseball,” said Darren Heitner, a Florida-based attorney who helps college athletes navigate this altered landscape in college athletics. “She has the following. She has the engagement. And she has the prowess — she is very good at what she does as an athlete.”

The fame, though, has come with a cost. A threatening message on Instagram, she told NJ Advance Media, contributed to her decision to stop attending classes in person out of an abundance of caution. LSU had to increase its security presence at matches when an unruly crowd on a road trip last winter sparked safety concerns.

Then, some critics have taken aim at her success, wondering if she is doing more harm than good to the women’s sports movement. She was a self-made millionaire before her 21st birthday for finding a way to monetize the harmless 30-second videos that appeal to teenagers, but somehow, there are people out there who think she’s controversial.

None of this is on her mind as the public address announcer introduces her to the crowd here. This is the one place, with her teammates looking up from the edge of blue mats, where she can tune out the noise and put a lifetime of training to use. She rubs her chalk-covered hands together, takes a deep breath and stares up at the uneven bars.

Then she bounces off the springboard and soars into the air.

Dark side of celebrity

Most spectators at Gas South Arena are diehards who have traveled hundreds of miles to see their favorite teams compete. A sign outside the arena features the SEC’s haughty logo — “IT JUST MEANS MORE” — and, from a gymnastics standpoint, that is undeniable. Nowhere else in the country does the sport garner this much attention on the college level.

But, when Dunne is competing, it is impossible to not look around the arena and wonder: Who else is watching?

The teenagers who hold up signs asking her to marry them are harmless enough, as are the fans who want her to stop for a quick photo. Dunne is every bit as friendly and approachable in real life as she is in her omnipresent TikTok videos, which is both part of her appeal and cause for concern.

“I love getting to know the people that follow me and what I do, so I always try to say hi to everybody I can that recognizes me when I’m out in public and I always try to take a picture,” Dunne said in a phone interview last month. “But this past year, it’s been a bit crazy.”

Dunne told Elle this summer that she takes all her classes online for safety reasons. Speaking with NJ Advance Media last month, she said it wasn’t her fellow students who concerned her when she made that decision, but a threat she received on the Baton Rouge campus. She said she no longer felt safe having a schedule that would allow potential bad actors to know where she was at a given time.

“I had a scare once with a message that I got about a class I was going to, and I was like, you know what, it’s not worth it,” Dunne told NJ Advance Media. “It was a threat. It seemed like they knew where I was at and what class, and I just decided better (to be) safe than sorry.”

According to an LSU Police report obtained through an open records request, Dunne received death threats on Instagram on Dec. 2, 2021, from an apparent stalker who threatened to “shoot up” the university’s campus. Dunne blocked the account on Instagram and LSU Police launched an investigation, but no arrest was made in the case. LSU officials did not respond to multiple requests for more information.

“(Dunne) added that due to her large social media following ... she was used to getting strange messages from unknown accounts but has not received a message of this nature before,” the report states.

Two months later, LSU head coach Jay Clark called the police when an unidentified man was seen inside the team’s facility watching the gymnasts, according to a separate police report. Surveillance footage captured three men walking around the exterior of the building on Feb. 9, 2022, prior to the unknown male making entry, but no charges were filed.

LSU officials decided to provide more security for Dunne and her teammates after a road trip to Utah last January. A group of young men holding posters and a full-size cutout of Dunne disrupted the routines of other athletes as they chanted “We want Livvy!” throughout the meet. ESPN analyst Sam Peszek posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the scene outside at the team buses was “so scary and disturbing and cringey.”

Gymnasts usually hang around at the end of competition, taking selfies with young fans or chatting with their friends and family, but the vibe is much more serious with LSU. After the SEC Championships, a man with the build of a professional wrestler made sure the fans didn’t get too close before shepherding the Tigers to their locker room.

“The thing in Utah was weird,” Clark said that night at Gas South Arena. “When I look back at it now, I wonder if it might have been orchestrated because the vitriol behind it was really intense. That’s what alarmed us. It wasn’t a positive thing, just signing autographs on the side.

“We’ve taken precautions since then to make sure (nothing bad happens). We don’t want to deny people access to our kids, but we live in a world where we need to be aware of the environment that we’re in and take care of all these things.”

While Dunne takes her classes online at LSU, she said that she does not fear for her safety at campus events such as football games. Dunne posted photos from a recent game with her boyfriend Paul Skenes, a former LSU pitcher who was the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s amateur draft, but said she never posts while still at an event for safety reasons.

“It’s not about people swarming me — people at LSU are used to me at this point,” Dunne said.

She doesn’t see her fame as a burden, but her family works to make sure that she takes common sense precautions whenever possible and is grateful that LSU has stepped up its security measures. The success, of course, is a blessing.

The rest of it?

“I’m happy for her, that’s for sure, because how many kids come out of college without debt?” her father David Dunne said. “But yeah, absolutely, I worry.”

Homeschooled in Hillsdale

About a dozen rows up from the competition, Team Livvy watches her every move.

Her mother, Katherine Dunne, stops a conversation to study a practice routine. Her older sister, Julz, plots the next social media posts in her role as what Olivia calls the “brains behind the operation.” David will offer moral support but doesn’t pretend to have tips on TikToks or Tkatchevs.

“I’m the dad,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t get any of it.”

He still marvels at his daughter’s success. One day, she was an accomplished but mostly anonymous gymnast training out in Bergen County with her eye on Olympic glory. The next, she is such a big celebrity that security had to move the family’s seats at a Yankees game in 2022 because the autograph and selfie seekers became too much.

Dunne, a 53-year-old lawyer, was a college athlete during a much different era. The Mount Vernon, New York, native punted for Rutgers from 1990-92, once holding the school record with a 75-yard boot. He met Katherine, a 48-year-old Pascack Valley High graduate from River Vale, when one of his teammates started dating her sister.

The couple married in 2000 and settled in Hillsdale, which is where their younger daughter’s gymnastic career began. That origin story is now part of Livvy lore. She was an active 3-year-old girl who wanted the sparkly pink leotard that her cousin was wearing, and Katherine told her that she had to sign up for a preschool gymnastics class to get one of those.

She started taking classes at ENA Gymnastics in Paramus when she was 5 years old, and right away, co-owner Craig Zappa could see she had talent. “We gave her some advanced training above and beyond what other kids would do,” he said, “and she just kept getting better and better.”

She broke the New Jersey all-around record for her age group when she was 7, and when her training requirements reached 30 hours a week as an elite-level gymnast in the seventh grade, the family began homeschooling her. Those sacrifices are often glossed over in the telling of Livvy’s rise, but she said she “100 percent” came close to quitting when the demands became too much.

“Doing elite gymnastics comes with costs,” Dunne said. “I pretty much give up a lot of normal high school/middle school opportunities, like school dances, field trips and football games to go represent the USA. But it was definitely worth it.”

In March 2017, she was named to the USA Gymnastics Junior National Team and started training at the controversial Karolyi Ranch in Texas with her eyes on the Olympics. It was a turbulent time for the sport, with high-profile scandals and coaching changes. Larry Nassar, the team doctor for the U.S. women’s national team, was arrested for using his position of power to exploit and sexually assault hundreds of young athletes.

“All the bad, negative things that happened in USA Gymnastics, she was right in the thick of that,” Zappa said. “It’s hard. Every day you’re wondering, ‘What’s next?’”

She managed to escape the abusive culture of youth gymnastics that made victims of so many of her high-profile peers. But she had to overcome a series of injuries and competitive setbacks, including what Zappa called “a very dark time” when she failed to qualify for the USA championships when she was 14.

The dream of sliding a gold medal over her neck in front of a worldwide audience had faded in her mid-to-late teens. Still, she earned a scholarship to her dream school, LSU, in a part of the country where college gymnastics attract massive crowds. She also found a new social-media platform that would change her life.

TikTok was, in her words, “kind of cringey” when she posted her first video in April 2019. She is almost unrecognizable with her natural brown hair in that short clip, dancing to “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X in an oversized Rolling Stones T-shirt and a silly hat.

Her gymnastics videos would increase her following to over 100,000 within eight months, and that number would build exponentially during the pandemic.

“Making videos has always been something she’s been very good at, and then during quarantine when (LSU) and the gyms were all closed, she was like, ‘Okay, what am I going to do? I’m going to do this,’” Katherine Dunne said. “She zeroed in on it and she focused on it, and it grew. It grew really fast.”

The Dunne Family rode out the first weeks of the COVID-19 reality in Jensen Beach, Florida, with Livvy’s grandparents. With Julz working the camera and Livvy flipping effortlessly on the sand, they shot daily “beachnastics” videos that helped create an unrivaled social media presence for a college athlete.

This, in 2020, meant little. The NCAA prohibited athletes from accepting a cheeseburger while on scholarship, much less cold, hard cash. Finally, an antitrust lawsuit reached the Supreme Court, with justice Brett Kavanaugh writing on June 21, 2021, that the governing body of college sports could no longer rake in millions “on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated.”

The NCAA changed its rules just a week and a half later, and from the beginning, no athlete was better positioned to take advantage of this new world than Olivia Dunne.

Headline-creating pioneer

It isn’t just the members of Team Livvy who are watching her as she grabs the bar with both hands and begins her routine. It isn’t just the 9,554 fans at Gas South Arena, either, who are eager to see how she’ll perform in just the third competition of her junior season.

Dunne’s rabid following includes her clients, and while they might not be in the crowd, they have a vested interest in her success.

And Dunne chooses them as much as they choose her.

“Her brand is her image,” Zappa said. “She is very careful not to align herself with something that will tarnish her image.”

A month after the NCAA’s about-face on NIL, Dunne hired the powerhouse WME agency to represent her and started signing business partners. Those companies — the list includes Vuori (sports apparel), L’Oreal (makeup), American Eagle (clothing) and Grubhub (food delivery) — know that Dunne can deliver an audience that has abandoned the TV remote for the smaller screen in their pockets.

These are not athlete endorsem*nts from a different generation, when Steelers great “Mean Joe” Greene grabs a bottle of co*ke from a young fan. When Dunne slides down the polished floors of her apartment in one eight-second video, her 7.8 million TikTok followers might not even notice that she’s mouthing the words to Justin Bieber’s “Maria” into a can of the energy drink Accelerator.

“She reaches 12 million people,” Katherine Dunne said. “There are people who want to reach that 18-24 demographic, and that demographic doesn’t want TV with commercials anymore. They watch TikTok. They click through Instagram.”

When the NIL started, most college sports observers believed it would simply take the under-the-table payments to football and basketball stars and bring them into the open market. Rutgers football coach Greg Schiano joked that the three letters really stand for “Now It’s Legal.” That has happened.

But NIL has also opened a path for female athletes to cash in, too, although, unlike the star quarterbacks, they aren’t getting handed deals from collectives just for showing up. Heitner calls it “real NIL,” because while Dunne’s videos might look effortless, many of them are mapped out with her clients’ wishes in mind. If the lighting or the sound isn’t just right, she will record it again, and again, and again.

Everything she creates becomes viral content. Few will notice that she effortlessly opens her bars performance at the SEC Championships with a Tkatchev and a perfect pak salto. Scan a random sample of stories about her on Google News on a typical day, and you’ll find precious few that have anything to do with her chosen sport or, really, sports at all.

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Dunne knows what’s out there about her. She said she never googles herself, but as someone who makes a living online, the endless aggregations of her own social-media feeds are unavoidable.

“I’ll only see stuff like that if it’s sent to me,” Dunne said. “I get random clickbait of myself on Snapchat. It’s so funny, I’ll see random Snapchat news articles. I try not to click on them because I know they’re not true, but every now and then the headline is so outrageous that I get click-baited by my own self.”

When told that some outlet probably will turn that quote into clickbait, Dunne lets out a loud laugh. “Exactly!”

It isn’t Dunne’s fault that, in this click-driven media landscape, everything she posts becomes a “story.” But all that attention has led to backlash from some who believe that the focus on Dunne’s appearance instead of her athleticism is harmful to the women’s sports movement.

Dunne was the centerpiece of a New York Times column last November that wagged a disapproving finger at the female athletes who “post suggestive images of themselves that seem to cater to the male gaze.” Tara VanDerveer, the longtime Stanford basketball coach, called it “a step back” for the women’s sports movement.

The criticism surprised and angered Team Livvy. Dunne fired back, tagging The New York Times in an Instagram post of her in a leotard with the question, “Is this too much?”

“Honestly, it made me a stronger person,” Dunne said. “I mean, they took a picture of me in my leotard by the beam and they used that photo as clickbait with the headline ‘sex sells.’ I was in my team-issued attire! Being able to brush it off is important — and to keep succeeding. The best revenge is success.”

It isn’t the only time Dunne has taken shrapnel from a national outlet. The conservative website The Free Press lumped her into a story about Haley and Hanna Cavinder, former college basketball players at Miami who also have raked in millions thanks to NIL. The headline: “The NCAA has a ‘Hot Girl’ Problem.”

But what, exactly, is the problem?

Dunne and the Cavinders make more in endorsem*nts than more accomplished athletes, but this is not exactly a new phenomenon. This is also true with many high-profile male athletes — former Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez wasn’t on the cover of GQ years ago because he was good at football — with far less outrage or scrutiny.

The criticism ignores a simple reality: If it was easy to build an eight-digit social media following and rake in millions off of it, nearly everyone would do it. Dunne has never claimed to be the best gymnast in the world, but as a pioneer in the landscape of modern college athletics, she is unchallenged.

“Here’s this young woman who’s empowered,” said Rutgers gymnastics coach Umme Salim-Beasley, who has followed Dunne’s career from the beginning. “She is utilizing the fact she’s a gymnast, the fact that she’s a strong, beautiful person, to be able to capitalize on being a collegiate athlete. I think that’s something that we should be celebrating.’’

Future in sports business

Twenty-one seconds.

That is how long it takes for her to complete her bars routine at the SEC Championships, and when she sticks the landing, she claps her chalk-covered hands before giving her coach, Clark, a two-handed high-five to celebrate. Her score is a season-best 9.850 as LSU finishes the event in third place.

Her teammates greet her at the edge of the padded platform like a conquering hero. The crowd roars its approval as this four-ring circus continues with the next performer.

It would be the final time she would be in LSU’s lineup as a junior, bringing her total time competing during an injury-plagued season to just over a minute. Clark wonders if the “NIL thing,” as he calls it, has only added to the challenges that high-level college athletes like Dunne have to overcome.

“This is uncharted territory,” Clark said. “It’s hard for her to manage. You’re trying to be a student, you’re trying to be an athlete, and you’ve got all these other obligations going on. And I know she’s technically an adult, but she’s still a kid to me.”

Clark no doubt prefers the old days in which the college team was the center of an athlete’s universe, and everything — even classes — fell in line. But in 2023, those so-called “other” obligations are what enable many star athletes to stay on campus.

For years, the NCAA has aired commercials celebrating the fact that most of its athletes will be “going pro in something other than sports.” Those ads conveniently left out the part about college administrators and head coaches making a small fortune off the teenage competitors they buried under a pile of unnecessary restrictions.

Dunne is unlikely to make a dime after college as a gymnast. That she has parlayed her athleticism, her social media prowess and, yes, her good looks into a lucrative career before she hangs up her leotard for good is not a problem. It is, for many college or even high school athletes, an inspiration.

When Rutgers soccer player Riley Tiernan found herself dubbed “the next Olivia Dunne” in a headline this summer, she wasn’t embarrassed or angry. She has signed small NIL deals with apparel giant Adidas and even her orthodontist, who traded Invisalign braces for her work as a spokeswoman.

“I hope I’m the next Livvy Dunne because she’s extremely successful,” said Tiernan, who has never met Dunne. “She’s pretty smart with the type of posts that she makes, based on the audience she has.”

What will Dunne do with that audience next? This was one of the big topics when she sat for an interview with Forbes recently as “Business Livvy,” as she calls this side of her personality, and discussed her spot on the magazine’s “Top Creators” list.

“I do feel like I have an entrepreneurial background so I want to put that to good use,” Dunne said in that Forbes interview. “Have my own product, my own thing … I’m not exactly sure what that is yet.”

Dunne told NJ Advance Media that she wants to “do something in the sports world,” and said that she is in talks to have a media role at the Olympics next summer. She wouldn’t elaborate because the details are being finalized, but given that Paris is regarded as the world’s fashion capital and gymnastics is among the most-watched Olympic sports, that seems like a no-brainer.

Jason Belzer, a Rutgers professor who helps universities run their NIL collectives, wonders if her success in college will translate to a career that will carry her through the next phase of her life. If she’s not competing, does that change the dynamic with her corporate partners?

“The big question becomes, what happens when she’s done being a student-athlete,” Belzer said. “Is she going to leverage this? Can she become a singer? Can she become a movie star? I don’t know if she’s invested in that.”

Zappa, though, isn’t worried.

“She is so good at marketing herself and putting herself in the perfect spot at the perfect time, I don’t even know what’s next,” Zappa said. “I don’t think there’s anything this kid can’t do in this environment right now.”

Dunne is trying to stay in the moment for her final season in college, and that means focusing on what brought her to Baton Rouge in the first place. She wants to help LSU win its first NCAA team title in gymnastics, and individually, stay healthy enough to remain a fixture in the lineup unlike last season.

She also wants to have fun. Those Instagram stories of her having a blast cheering on the LSU football team with Skenes, the mustachioed minor-league ballplayer, are not staged. She also has adopted a golden retriever named Roux — “a little light in my life,” she calls the puppy — that requires a bit of attention (and, not surprisingly, has her own Instagram page).

“This past year has been a bit crazy,” she said. “I deserve to enjoy this last year.”

Dunne will leave behind a legacy. She created the Livvy Fund to provide future LSU female athletes with the NIL funding, industry tips and business connections that she didn’t have when she started this journey. Will she stay in Louisiana when she’s done? Will she move back to New Jersey? She doesn’t know.

“You can just have it all in Jersey, and that’s something I definitely miss sometimes when I’m down here,” she said. “I do love Louisiana as well, but I love Jersey.”

LSU will begin its season in early January, and once again, thousands of crazed SEC gymnastics fans — and more than a few spectators who know nothing about the sport — will fill arenas in hopes that they can catch a glimpse of her.

Dunne will step onto the mat in the one place where she can tune out all the noise. She’ll eye those uneven bars and leap onto that springboard.

How high will she soar? The world will be watching.

Staff writer Keith Sargeant contributed to this report.