USC WBB’s MiLaysia Fulwiley cashing in on NIL. What goes into making those deals?
South Carolina women’s basketball freshman MiLaysia Fulwiley has solidified herself as one of the sport’s most exciting players.
She has about 189,000 social media followers between her Instagram (@laywitdabutter) and TikTok (@laywitdabutterr) accounts. Both handles were derived from the nickname Fulwiley earned for her smooth, highlight-reel-worthy style of play. She has recently inked multiple high-profile NIL (name, image and likeness) deals with Red Bull and Stephen Curry’s Curry Brand with Under Armour. Fulwiley also has her own signature butter sauce with local restaurant Mr. Seafood.
These deals were made possible by Fulwiley’s agent, Dorian Branch. Branch graduated with a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Houston after a four-year varsity basketball career. She now works as a women’s basketball agent for Excel Sports Management.
The State spoke with Branch about what it’s like navigating the ever-changing NIL landscape and the process of curating deals for South Carolina’s freshman phenom.
(Answers have been edited for clarity and length)
Question: What made you want to become an agent, and what was that process like?
Dorian Branch: Just being a former women’s basketball player on the collegiate level. I graduated during the COVID year 2020, when life changed. I had a lot of time to sit at home and really think about how could I stay in the basketball space, women’s basketball in particular, and be able to help athletes on and off the court. It started with wanting to be a coach, and then I learned more about what an agent is like and how that’s so much less travel and time consuming. So that’s how I really decided on being an agent.
I had to find a mentor (NBA and overseas basketball agent Kevin Martin) to learn in the space, and then I started shadowing and learning more about what’s an agent like. Then learning about agency life, working with multiple people in building players’ profiles.
Then there was a WNBA player I used to play with that wanted new representation. So I kind of dove in head first with her and started really learning on the fly. That was before NIL existed.
Q: Do you mostly work with college basketball players, or do you also have professional clientele?
Branch: Now I mainly focus on the NIL space. But our agency has players that are in the (WNBA), so I just help out if there’s anything needed for them.
Q: What’s it like navigating the NIL space, as rules change every day from state to state and school to school?
Branch: It’s an everyday learning experience. It goes from university to university, and then when you’re speaking on the high school level, it’s from state to state.
So there are some states where you can represent athletes in high school already. And then you have others where you have to wait until all of their high school eligibility is up. Then you can start working with them. In the states where you can represent them in high school once their eligibility is up, you can start working with them before they get onto their college campus.
So when you talk about me and Lay (MiLaysia) specifically, I was recruiting her. And then once her high school season was up I was able to go to the McDonald’s All-American game with her, where they now do a small trading card deal with everybody that goes there. And then from that point on just being able to build her brand, understand the direction that she wants to go in with the brands that she wants to work with. Then the season actually gets here, and we go from us telling brands, ‘Hey, y’all need to know who this person is,’ to them being able to see it with their own two eyes.
Q: Surely it depends on the deal, but how much of your job managing Fulwiley is reaching out to brands versus brands reaching out to you?
Branch: The Curry Brand deal is one that just really makes sense, given she’s been on the Under Armour circuit playing AAU, and then she was on Team Curry her last season. And then obviously going to an Under Armour school. All of those things obviously help.
I specifically targeted Curry Brand versus just Under Armour because of the relationship that she had with Curry. She went to Curry’s Camp back-to-back years before getting to South Carolina. So I thought it was important to continue to build her relationship with him, but also to stand out and be different.
Lay is special. We love for Lay to be the first. She’s a freshman now. She has the followers and the shine that she already has. We say, ‘Imagine that in four years.’ So when you’re talking about certain brands that really want to work with her, Red Bull included, like ‘Hey, this is now, and y’all are catching her early.’ So that’s why those are multi-year deals. Because these brands want to grow and build with her as she’s growing and building in college.
We want to be able to have her with brands that say ‘Hey, we want to work with you in college, but then we also want to continue that as you go into the WNBA, as you play overseas.’ So brands that really want to invest in her, want to be able to get her acclimated with all of the different things that they have. Like, ‘Red Bull gives you wings’ works with a lot of outdoor sports, but then they’re also in the music world. So they tie in culture between indoor and outdoor sports and music. So being able to allow Lay to branch out from being a Columbia native staying in her hometown going to South Carolina.
Q: In addition to those high-profile NIL deals you mentioned, Fulwiley has local deals as well. How do you all balance looking at different kinds of opportunities? Is there an ideal proportion between local and national deals?
Branch: We sit, and we plan, and we talk about certain things.
With Mr. Seafood, it makes sense because he’s a season ticket holder with the (women’s basketball) team. He’s a restaurant that Lay went to before she got to college. So he made sense. And then digging deeper. ‘Well, let’s give Lay her signature butter sauce.’ Her name is ‘Lay wit da butter.’ How can he dig deeper and figure out how to make this deal special for Lay?
And I think that with Lay being the person that she is, wanting to give back to the community as much as she can, we do look at a lot of local deals. see what local companies can make sense. How can we continue to have her out in the community so she still feels attached? That’s really big for her and her family. And that’s something that we really focus on doing. Mr. Seafood just happened to get in first. But we hope to continue to build on that locally and, of course, nationally as well.
Q: Revisiting the creative process that led to the signature butter sauce, how much of making deals “make sense” comes from you pitching brands versus brand pitching you?
Branch: In the NIL space, it’s a lot of brands trying to figure out ‘Hey, how can I get connected to these special athletes?’ But then it takes a lot of brainstorming between us and the brands on what ideas make sense for this athlete.’ So I think it’s more so from the brand side. They’re trying to figure out how to get tapped in because they know that it’s important. They don’t always have the ideas though. So as an agency, we try to say, ‘These are some things that we’ve done in the past with other players with brands similar,’ or we just come up with some just completely unique brand new speaking with Lay and her family. Just trying to see how can we tie all of these things in to make this partnership beneficial for both parties?
Q: That seems like a unique challenge of operating in the NIL space. How do you go about helping her balance school, basketball and business opportunities?
Branch: We try to take as much pressure as we can off of her and be able to just give her like, ‘Hey, firm offer here. This is what you have to do, X, Y and Z. This is exactly how you get that done. This is the exact timing,’ and then let her focus on basketball, training, all that kind of stuff. I try to take up as little time as I can. In the NIL space, it’s important, but we don’t want that to ever be her main focus. We want her main focus to be basketball, the thing that’s going to be able to get her more and more deals.
Q: Fulwiley mentioned during the NCAA Tournament that the Curry Deal was new to the public when it was announced but it had been months in the making, also adding that it was going to be announced before the SEC Tournament, but you all ultimately decided to delay so she could focus on basketball.
Branch: I know that it looks good whenever it comes out. And everybody’s like, ‘Oh, they did this right after the SEC Tournament.’ Crazy to say. Absolutely nuts to say. Because there’s been so much time and so many months put into them. But the final product is what everybody sees. And that’s what we love at the end of the day. It’s not meant for them to know how much work goes in to get it across the line.
But didn’t everybody look like a genius? From our end, that’s always a thing for me. I never want to have deals where Lay is having to post on game days or anything to take her focus off. We try to avoid that as much as possible.
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 8:50 AM.
