Can niche athletic brands sneak into the college sports market?

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

I’ve inspected over a hundred college sports athletic apparel contracts while putting the Extra Points Library together, and at the D-I level, they’re mostly pretty similar.

A school signs a deal with one of the three big athletic apparel companies: Nike, adidas, or Under Armour. The apparel company provides a certain amount of free and discounted merchandise, and if the school is really lucky, maybe the shoe folks kick in a little cash as well.

The school then promises to only use products from that company. If you sign an apparel contract with adidas, and adidas makes a particular athletic equipment thing, 99% of the time, the school is obligated to use that thing.

Most of the time, that works out just fine. The huge athletic apparel companies are pretty good at making most kinds of equipment, and not every school needs every single kind of uniform or equipment type. In exchange for saving money, getting merchandise and having a more predictable cost structure, most schools are just fine dealing with maybe one or two sports that have a less-than-ideal uniform situation.

But that model also makes it very difficult for niche brands to effectively break into the market. It’s expensive to offer products for football, basketball, baseball, track and a gazillion other sports, and usually, it isn’t possible to convince a school to draw up a contract that allows them to get almost all of their stuff with one company. Usually, the only exception is when the major apparel brand doesn’t actually make equipment for that sport.

But one company is trying anyway. SPRHRA is a small outfit that specializes in performance wear specifically for female athletes. And they’re finding a way to establish a foothold in the college sports world, even if they can’t play the same game as the big three.

Want to read the rest of the newsletter? Subscribe today!