UH volleyball finished its final season in the AAC as co-champions and is headed to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2000. | Sean Thomas/The Cougar
The UH volleyball team became the University’s first female sports program to sign a team-wide name, image and likeness deal.
Ryan Galvez, who graduated from UH in 1996 and currently serves as the president of 10 My Eyelab franchises in the Greater Houston area, worked with LinkingCoogs, an NIL collective, to create a historic deal that emphasizes increasing opportunities for female student-athletes.
“This is the first team-wide NIL for a volleyball program that we know of in the country,” said LinkingCoogs co-founder Troy Kyle. “Everyone participates in it and it sets them up for success of being able to prove that in the future you can actually get more return on your marketing dollar by using women’s sports than you can out of the men’s sports.”
With UH’s volleyball’s success throughout the 2022 season, Galvez saw the program as the perfect fit to put together his first NIL deal.
“Really, it was just (about) an opportunity to work with the UH volleyball team,” Galvez said. “I’ve been watching the feeds come in (showing) another win, another win and another win. It’s exciting.”
The structure of the deal will require UH volleyball student-athletes to do a meet-and-greet at some point after the season as well as make two different posts on their personal social media accounts.
Each meet-and-greet date will take place at two different My Eyelab locations across the city and feature four student-athletes from the UH program, according to Kyle.
