How Golden Touch Collective Helps Student Athletes Promote Their ‘Whole Person’ with Squarespace Enterprise
After choosing Squarespace Enterprise:
+100 student athlete websites
+100 more athletes who can share their mental health journeys
+1 custom, ready-to-use website template to start dozens of others
Golden Touch is a name, image, and likeness (NIL) collective that helps student athletes at Notre Dame, Holy Cross, and St. Mary’s launch their professional careers and take control of their own marketing. When the NIL collective needed to establish a strong online presence on behalf of students to impress employers, sponsors, and recruiters, they chose Squarespace Enterprise.
“As students transition into real life, websites help them build their personal brands and serve as a different sort of resume,” CEO Karen Phelps says.
Golden Touch focuses on increasing mental health awareness in student athletes and providing related services, and Phelps sees NIL websites as another platform to promote mental health-positive messaging. She encourages students to blog about their personal experiences and hopes all participants in the program will include a mental health dedicated web page.
“It’s a great way to share their stories and help [visitors] get to know them as a whole person,” Phelps explains. “Our partnership with Squarespace exemplifies how we’re supporting the whole athlete.”
Sean Collins, Golden Touch’s director of partnerships, agrees that websites are a platform where athletes can share their individual journeys. “Student athletes deal with unique stressors that other college students don’t,” he says. “[Websites] are a way to show employers, ‘this is who I am, this is what I’ve done, and how far I’ve come to get where I am today.’”
How Squarespace Enterprise simplifies launching NIL websites
Phelps says Enterprise templates provide student athletes a convenient starting point for building striking, personal websites that meet a high visual standard. In cooperation with Golden Touch’s intern, Paige Peltier—a soccer player at Notre Dame—Phelps plans to lead athletes by example and spark their enthusiasm for website building.
With support from Golden Touch’s dedicated account manager, Peltier built a personal website that highlights her academic and athletic achievements, along with her mental health journey. It also doubles as a template that other Golden Touch athletes can use in creating their own sites, providing an aspirational and approved framework.
To further support athletes in website building, Phelps coordinates with the Squarespace Enterprise account manager to schedule group training sessions on getting started with Squarespace and how to effectively use the platform.
“[Our account manager] is knowledgeable and understanding and great at explaining the technology. We talk at least once or twice a week,” she says.
Both Phelps and Collins look forward to seeing how more students will leverage their sites to score more paid opportunities and reach their professional goals.
“These types of offerings create more value for the student athletes who come to us,” Collins says. “We encourage them to do everything they can to make themselves more marketable.”
