Whether it is practice or a game, successful athletes always have a strategy to make sure they achieve their goals. Preparing for NIL success by developing an athlete brand is no different―it requires a game plan to get the best results. Athlete Brands: How to Benefit from Your Name, Image & Likeness is a four-step process to help student-athletes manage their brands like a pro. Short, easy-to-read chapters guide you through a series of exercises that enable you to set goals and then design, activate, and monetize your brand. Examples of real student-athletes show how the four-step process yields NIL success. Athlete Brands is the perfect resource for student-athletes to learn to make NIL decisions that serve their biggest goals. Athletic directors, coaches, athletes, and parents have seen first-hand how Athlete Brands can be transformative. This book is a great resource for our scholar athletes to learn how to build an athlete brand that is worthy of monetization. Becoming a high value athlete and achieving long term goals means more than just performing on the court. It means creating a consistent athlete brand at practice, in the classroom, in media interactions, via social media, and so forth. This book “connects the dots” to help players understand how to develop their athlete brand in a way that helps them achieve their goals. --Johnny Carpenter, Director of Player Development, University of Virginia Men's Basketball Team For me, NIL is an opportunity to be able to build my own brand and to continue my professional career throughout my studies in USC. It is being able to take ownership of my own persona and use my image for my own benefit. I would recommend this book because it clearly offers advice how to build my own brand while I'm still a student-athlete, which is a very specific situation that needs specific guidance. --Tina Graudina, NCAA Beach Volleyball, Two-time AVCA All-American, DiG Magazine National Player of the Year, First NCAA Beach Volleyball Player to Qualify for the Olympic Games This book empowers athletes to understand how to build their “athlete brands” in a way that helps them achieve their goals. It teaches them to think about brand activation – or how their choices can help them reach their goals. In the past, being late for practice or being unprepared was simply a mistake. This book helps highlight that choosing to be early to practice or to ignore an incendiary tweet or to post a supportive tweet are all actions that lead to a stronger, more positive brand. And building a stronger brand can provide significant advantages in their sport and career. --Peggy Martin, Head Women’s Coach and Director of Volleyball, Spring Hill College, and college volleyball’s overall career leader in wins by a head coach with over 1,400 victories Kimberly A. Whitler is the Frank M. Sands Sr. Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. She is a senior contributor at Forbes, has published in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and is the author of Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value. Whitler previously worked for companies including Procter and Gamble, Aurora Foods, David’s Bridal, and PETsMART, holding positions such as general manager and chief marketing officer. Jay P. Hodgkins specializes in thought-leadership content and content marketing, with clients including Siemens, ICF International, NRG Energy, C-Power and UVA’s Darden School of Business. He has served as editorial director at Darden, lead speechwriter for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and as a journalist for Gannett newspapers. He is an author of fiction and nonfiction. Hodgkins earned an M.Sc. in creative writing with distinction from the University of Edinburgh and a B.Sc. in commerce from the University of Virginia.