Putting Athletes First: An Empirical Examination of the Hedonic Well-Being of College Student-Athletes in Response to NIL

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the expressions of hedonic emotions for student-athletes participating in NCAA Division 1 athletics during the period preceding the implementation of the NIL policy to the period succeeding the implementation of the NIL policy. The study obtains data from the Twitter profiles of 370 student-athletes participating in NCAA Division 1 athletics from January 2021 to December 2021 to examine the expressions of joy and anger as indicators of hedonic emotions. By leveraging a natural language processing-based emotion decomposition analysis coupled with difference-in-differences analysis, findings indicate that student-athletes competing in women’s sports express marginally more joy and anger compared to student-athletes participating in men’s sports after the NIL policy implementation. Findings reveal a double-edged impact, with a decrease in expressions of joy indicating concerns about the NIL policy’s potentially detrimental effects on student-athletes and a decrease in expressions of anger indicating optimism about opportunities presented by the policy.