Alabama Paralympian Bailey Moody Shows NIL Isn't Only for NCAA Athletes

The University of Alabama wheelchair basketball standout reached new levels of fame as she secured her second paralympic medal in Paris

Mar 9, 2023; Tuscaloosa, AL, USA; Bailey Moody and coach Ryan Hynes participate in a video interview during media day for the Women s Wheelchair Basketball National Championship Tournament at Stran-Hardin Arena. News Alabama Host Women S Wheelchair Championship / Gary Cosby Jr.-The Tuscaloosa News / USA TODAY NETWORK

Bailey Moody’s life has been defined by second chances. She attends class like any other University of Alabama graduate student. Now entering her fifth year in Tuscaloosa, she, unlike many fellow Crimson Tide athletes, had no help from fancy tutors to assist her in getting to her Master’s studies in Clinical Mental Health Counseling –– even though the demands of her competitions require much more involvement than other college athletes.  

Raised in an athletic household in Alpharetta, Georgia, both her parents were Division I athletes. Her father played baseball at the Citadel, and her mother played soccer at Auburn. Unsurprisingly, the athletic aspirations were hereditary, and Moody fell in love with sports at a young age.  

Moody took up many athletic pursuits but quickly excelled at basketball; even at the age of five, it was clear that she had the interest and the natural aptitude to succeed at the sport. But sometimes, life has other plans for us. Twelve years ago, at only ten years old, Moody was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare and life-threatening form of pediatric bone cancer. Deeply rooted in her faith, Bailey knew then and continues to know now that God has put her on her unique path to achieve great things. 

Since that fateful diagnosis, Moody has become a four-time collegiate wheelchair basketball national champion and a two-time Paralympic medal winner; her struggles have come with silver linings. 

For a long time, the Moody family’s focus was not on sports but rather on survival. Osteosarcoma comes with a high morbidity rate, and beyond the intensive chemotherapy required to combat the disease, Bailey was forced to make very adult decisions before she hit middle school. The Moodys discovered her condition as a result of pain in her knee, initially thought to be natural fatigue from her active lifestyle; the pain became more severe, and doctors discovered a tumor in her right knee. 

The prognosis for such a tumor is grim and, at the very least, requires surgical intervention to remove the mass. The Moody family let Bailey have the ultimate say in how to proceed. She had three options: a total knee replacement that would alter her mobility for the rest of her life, an above-the-knee amputation, or a rotationplasty, a rare procedure that removes the middle part of the leg and attaches the foot to the femur backward, allowing the ankle to function as a knee. 

Moody opted for the unorthodox roationplasty as it was the best pathway to get her to what she cared about, continuing her active lifestyle and playing sports after her recovery. The surgery was successful, and after her recovery from chemotherapy, Moody impressively continued to play non-adaptive sports until high school. 

It was at this age when her lower extremity held her back from competing at the level she wanted; soon after, she found wheelchair basketball, and well, the rest is history. Moody has played worldwide, secured four national Championships with the Alabama Crimson Tide team, and represented her country at the highest level.

There were many times when Moody could not picture herself playing in front of thousands of screaming fans; no stranger to international competition, her most recent trip to the Paris Paralympics changed her perspective: “I was in a huddle during the semi-final game, I don't even think it was the gold medal game, and they were playing music and getting the crowd all riled up, and I stopped listening to what my coach was saying and looked around because I could feel it in my chest, and it was just the coolest feeling ever.”

Unbeknownst to many stateside, wheelchair basketball has a devout European following. During the Paralympics, Paris’ Bercy Arena routinely held crowds of over 10,000 fans to watch the wheelchair basketball competition. For those talented para-athletes in the United States who look to continue their careers after graduation, professional teams in Europe offer an opportunity. 

At the Paris Paralympics, Moody secured a silver medal, getting foiled by the same Dutch team that bested the U.S. in the semi-finals at the previous games. While Moody and company could not enact their revenge against an insanely talented Netherlands roster, she avenged a somewhat disappointing first Paralympic experience: “I was in Tokyo in 2021, and with that came all the COVID stipulations and regulations. We didn't have fans, and we had to spit in a tube every morning for the COVID test, and it just wasn't a true Paralympic experience. So, it was great to go again and have the full experience.”

Moody did a great job documenting that true Paralympic experience on social media. She did such an excellent job, in fact, that she went viral. One of her videos, which showed off her ability to walk on her leg, which underwent the roationplasty surgery, garnered tens of millions of views and over 589,000 likes on Instagram. Moody’s influencer potential changed drastically: “I ended up with 6,000 new followers in two days, and I'm now at 11,700. I went into Paris with 3,900 followers. So just within the span of a few days, it blew up.”

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Now, Moody is not only a championship athlete but a bona-fide influencer. During Moody’s freshman year in 2021, the NCAA changed its NIL policy, removing restrictions that prevented college athletes from monetizing their publicity rights and appearing in marketing campaigns. In the years since college athletes have become a fixture in influencer marketing partnerships and have made considerable money doing so. Athletes with the largest followings in the college ranks can often pull in millions of dollars annually in sponsorships alone. 

Moody does not fall under the regulations of the NCAA, and para-athletes have never been subjected to the restrictions of the governing body of able-bodied college sports. However, this policy change has positively benefited all athletes. From Moody’s perspective,  “Now that it's wide open, brands are less worried about breaking the rules.” Without the NCAA’s rules making all college athlete partnerships taboo for brands, more companies have been interested in jumping into the space.

NIL deals featuring athlete-based partnerships brands have quickly seen solid ROI, and brands are noticing. NIL investment works, and college athletes inside and outside the NCAA ranks are seeing the fruits of a growing marketing tactic. 

Moody’s journey, athletic skill, and bubbly personality make her a phenomenal candidate for any brand partnership. Undoubtedly, the financial incentives of being an influencer are great, but Moody is more concerned about what her growing virality can do to inspire meaningful change for the philanthropic causes she cares about –– mainly pediatric cancer. 

During all of her championship performances, Moody wore the number 43 on her chest –– an homage to her friend and fellow Alpharetta native, Philip Lutzenkirchen, who took notice of then ten-year-old Bailey’s story and supported her during chemotherapy during his storied career as a Tight End for Auburn. Ultimately, his visits gave her the confidence to undergo her rotationplasty surgery. Tragically, Lutzenkirchen passed away young in a drunk driving incident, but his philanthropic spirit and emphasis on community lives through Bailey. 

As many know, September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and the Alabama grad student was sure to use her burgeoning fame to support the cause closest to her heart. Moody has partnered in a campaign with the American Cancer Society to inspire others and raise awareness: “It's nice to get to fight for a cause bigger than myself and tell the cancer side of my story, and not just always talk about the basketball side, but also talk about what brought me there.”

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Beyond ACS, Moody has had several one-off partnerships that existed before her newfound fame, including Truvis and Snickers. Now, she is looking for a long-term commitment in her graduate season. Moody aspires to partner with companies on campaigns that can help her raise awareness for pediatric cancer research: “Outside of September being Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, I think there are opportunities all the time for Childhood Cancer Awareness, that is my niche. That's where I want my philanthropy to be focused, and I want to be involved in that and try to raise funds and do something that makes a difference and gives back.”

When I asked Bailey what her dream brand partner would be, her eyes lit up, “I love Coca-Cola, I want Coca-Cola to sponsor me. I'm a Georgia girl; Atlanta is Coke's hub.” I am admittedly biased, but I believe a Coca-Cola and Bailey Moody partnership to support pediatric cancer would be an instant hit. 

It only takes one conversation with Bailey Moody to feel her magnetism. Like other college athletes leveraging NIL endorsements, her ties to one of the most iconic athletic programs in the nation give her a built-in fan base of rabid University of Alabama fans. Yet, even with this tribal fanbase advantage that all athlete influencers have, para-athletes, like Moody, have not been given similar opportunities to their NCAA peers. 

This starts at the institutional level. Adaptive athletics programs like Alabama are not run through the school’s athletic department and receive little funding compared to the massive budgets that Power 5 athletics programs have at their disposal. 

During the 2022-23 academic year, Alabama’s football team earned roughly $87,000,000 in non-donation football revenue. The basketball team generated roughly $18,000,000 in non-donation revenue. This eight-figure revenue generating machine that is Alabama athletics goes towards subsidizing NCAA sports that traditionally hemorrhage money: golf, soccer, tennis, etc. However, none of these funds are used to subsidize the adaptive athletics programs at the University of Alabama, nor are any other generalized student-athlete resources like tutors, training, or specialized nutrition shared between the departments. 

These resource gaps put para-athletes well behind their peers in NCAA sports. Colleges nationwide have spent tremendous amounts of money hiring NIL specialists to help monetize athletes’ brands and secure NIL opportunities for their NCAA student-athletes. Those resources don’t extend to adaptive athletics programs. Moody sees a need from her peers for the same education NCAA athletes receive, “Outside resources to help athletes with media training… how do you pitch yourself to brands? What does it look like to create your brand? These are all things that athletes just haven't been taught before.”

It isn’t hard to see what exposure can do for athletes’ wallets, but beyond that, what it can do for their sport’s growth. Over the past two years, women’s basketball has experienced exponential growth at the hands of a very talented crop of college athletes, including the likes of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, Cameron Brink, and more. Is NIL the sole reason for the sport’s growth? Assuredly not. However, to say that NIL was not a significant factor in expansion would be equally incorrect. 

The ability and incentivization of college athletes to become influencers and, by default, ambassadors of their sport feed into expansion and fan interest. The monumental all-time scoring record broken by Caitlin Clark was set only seven years prior by Kelsey Plum. Outside of NIL, it is hard to find why Plum received a fraction of the intrigue less than a decade ago as Clark. The restrictive nature of the NCAA’s rules did not allow Plum and other transcendent talents, like even more recent star Sabrina Ionescu, to permeate national discourse while in college.

In recent years, commercials and national advertising campaigns featuring Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, and Angel Reese have made women’s basketball a prominent fixture of American culture. These advertisments have created a positive feedback loop of increased fan interest leading to even greater desirability of brands to women’s basketball players for endorsements. It is easy to see that the benifits of increased exposure and marketing could be replicated with para-athletes like Moody and sports like wheelchair basketball. 

Following in women’s basketball’s footsteps, para-athletes could soon see a future where they won’t have to travel overseas to play the sport they love. One day, an arena full of 13,000 screaming fans cheering for wheelchair basketball could exist in the United States. But to get there, schools must provide resources to adaptive athletics programs to help their athletes and their powerful stories reach brands that can put them in the spotlight.