Southern Illinois Promoting Swimmers With Social Media On Swim Caps

Southern Illinois University (SIU) has created special caps allowing its swimmers to put their social media usernames on their caps. The goal is to help create more name, image, and likeness (NIL) opportunities.

“Here at SIU we do not have a large sports information/marketing department like Power 4 schools do to promote their programs, so all of our social media content currently comes internally from my team and staff.  The initial idea for the social media handles on practice caps was floated by my former assistant, Johno Fergusson, and we implemented it this fall with our graduate assistant, Celia Pulido, producing the all of the content and putting together the recent post to highlight the caps,” said head coach Geoff Hanson. Fergusson was hired as an assistant at Wisconsin this past summer.

The team announced the caps this past week on Instagram and will wear them in practice to allow the athletes to publicize their social media presence. The swimmers will not compete in the social media caps.

“We hope to see some benefit for our student-athletes moving forward, but the post we made about it recently was really the first time we’ve publicized the idea so nothing has happened yet,” Hanson continued.  “Even if it helps a small number of our swimmers or divers to capitalize on their NIL opportunities it will be worth it.  Currently we have just one or two athletes with small NIL deals, so continuing to keep this content coming and getting our team more exposure will hopefully increase that number.”

A year ago, the NCAA released that the median amount an NCAA swimmer made from NIL during the 2023-2024 season was $191. Just yesterday, DeBoer announced a “Team Elite” NIL program for collegiate swimmers. For the most part, swimmers in general have minor deals, but some of the bigger deals seen on social media so far include Hollister, Adidas, and Rhoback. NIL money has also played a factor into NCAA swimming already, with one example being Indiana’s Caspar Corbeau.

SIU finished 2nd on both the men’s and women’s sides at the 2025 Missouri Valley Conference Championships. The women finished 109.5 points behind Indiana State while the men were 128.5 points behind Miami-OH. Both programs were represented at the 2025 NCAA Championships as Pulido, who is now the graduate assistant, scored 15 points on the women’s side and Olivia Herron scored two points. The men were represented by Alex Santiago.