NCAA Trademark and Licensing Manager

A Trademark and Licensing Manager at a major collegiate athletic program sits at the intersection of brand management, intellectual property law, and commerce. The job is to make sure that the school's athletic marks — its wordmark, primary logo, secondary logos, mascot, and even specific color combinations — are used correctly by licensed partners, protected from unauthorized use, and positioned to generate maximum royalty revenue.

The practical day-to-day reality of the role revolves heavily around the CLC (Collegiate Licensing Company) relationship. Most major D-I programs outsource the administration of their licensing program to CLC (now operating as Fanatics Collegiate), which recruits and manages hundreds of licensees, runs the product approval system, collects royalties, and distributes them to the school after its administrative fee. The trademark manager is the school's primary contact with CLC — reviewing product approvals, tracking royalty statements, escalating enforcement issues, and working through the annual program review.

Product approval is a volume-intensive function. A major licensing program may have 300–500 active licensees submitting new product proposals across apparel, headwear, drinkware, phone cases, home goods, and novelties. Each submission must be reviewed against the school's brand standards — correct color values, approved logo lockups, no unauthorized character designs — before CLC grants production approval. At programs without robust internal review processes, the brand standards erode quickly as licensees discover that variations slip through.

The school's official apparel partnership — with Nike, Adidas, or Under Armour — is a parallel track. The All-Sports apparel deal covers game-day uniforms, sideline apparel, training gear, and retail replica lines. The licensing manager is the institutional counterpart to the apparel brand's collegiate account team, managing annual product line reviews, uniform change approvals, and co-branding standards. Uniform changes — particularly if they involve alterations to the primary wordmark or logo — must go through both the licensing manager and the Office of General Counsel.

Infringement enforcement is ongoing and has grown more complex with e-commerce. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Redbubble host thousands of unauthorized university-branded products from sellers who either don't know or don't care about licensing requirements. The licensing manager coordinates enforcement through university counsel and services like Red Points or Incopro that automate marketplace scanning and issue takedown requests at scale.

The NIL era added a novel brand management dimension. Student-athletes can now enter personal endorsement deals, and questions arise regularly about when university marks appear in athlete-generated content. The licensing manager develops and maintains the NIL brand usage policy that defines permissible incidental use versus commercial use requiring institutional approval.

Trademark and licensing management in collegiate athletics is a specialized niche that draws professionals from brand management, sport management, intellectual property, and retail backgrounds.

Education: A bachelor's degree in sport management, marketing, business, or a related field is the standard entry point. Some candidates hold or pursue a JD, particularly those with significant enforcement or trademark registration responsibilities. A paralegal background with trademark specialization is also a viable pathway. Graduate degrees in sport management are common among career collegiate athletics professionals who moved into licensing from other departmental roles.

Experience Path: Many trademark and licensing managers spent 2–5 years in adjacent roles — assistant in a licensing office, bookstore buyer or merchandise manager, brand compliance coordinator for a conference or for CLC itself — before moving into a department head role. The CLC (Fanatics Collegiate) organization is itself a talent pipeline: account managers and licensing associates at CLC develop deep program knowledge and institutional relationships before moving to school-side roles.

Other common backgrounds include:

• Consumer goods or retail brand manager who transitioned to collegiate licensing
• Conference licensing office staff (the SEC, Big Ten, and ACC each have conference-level licensing programs)
• Athletic department marketing staff who absorbed licensing responsibilities and formalized into a dedicated role

Technical Skills:

• CLC Vault product approval platform
• Adobe Creative Suite — enough to evaluate product designs against brand standards
• Trademark database navigation: USPTO TESS, WIPO Global Brand Database
• Contract management: understanding licensing agreement structures, royalty calculation, minimum guarantee mechanics
• E-commerce platform familiarity for infringement monitoring (Amazon Brand Registry, Etsy seller tools)

Legal Knowledge: Direct litigation experience is not required, but working knowledge of trademark law — the Lanham Act, likelihood of confusion standards, first-sale doctrine implications for resale — is expected at programs with active enforcement programs. The licensing manager works closely with university counsel on enforcement matters and registration filings.

Collegiate trademark and licensing is a small, specialized profession that has grown in complexity and compensation over the last decade. The Fanatics acquisition of CLC in 2022 consolidated much of the licensing infrastructure and created new strategic questions about the relationship between institutional licensing programs and Fanatics' broader retail ambitions — questions that program-level trademark managers are being asked to navigate.

The NIL era has added a new dimension to the role that didn't exist before 2021. When student-athletes began entering personal endorsement deals, brand usage questions proliferated rapidly. Who approves a student-athlete putting the school logo on a personal Instagram endorsement post? What if a NIL collective partner wants to use the school's fight song in a promotional video featuring athletes? These questions didn't have clean answers, and many licensing managers found themselves serving as the institutional expert on brand governance questions that nobody had fully thought through. Programs that invested in clear NIL brand policies early have cleaner brand standards today.

The broader economic context is positive for major programs. Total collegiate licensing royalties have grown steadily — championships, breakout players, and social media amplification of athletic brands all contribute. The 2025–2026 academic year's revenue sharing context, where schools are distributing $22M annually to athletes, creates some pressure to maximize revenue from all sources including licensing. Programs that are working to grow their licensing revenue — by expanding digital merchandise, adding new event-specific products, and better enforcing against unauthorized sellers — are treating the trademark manager as a meaningful contributor to the revenue picture.

Career advancement options include director-level roles in an athletic department's broader external operations, senior positions at CLC/Fanatics Collegiate on the administration side, brand management roles at apparel companies that work in the collegiate space (Nike Collegiate, Champion), or transition into the broader brand protection and intellectual property sector outside athletics. The combination of licensing administration experience and NCAA institutional knowledge is portable within the collegiate athletics industry and has some value in adjacent consumer goods and retail brand protection roles.

Dear [Deputy Athletic Director / Search Committee],

I am applying for the Trademark and Licensing Manager position at [University] Athletics. I am currently the Licensing Coordinator at [Current Institution], where I manage product submissions through CLC Vault, maintain brand standards documentation for our 14 approved logo marks and 3 wordmarks, and serve as the primary departmental contact for our Adidas apparel partnership.

In the past two years I have reduced unauthorized product listings on Amazon and Etsy by 40% by implementing a monitoring workflow through Red Points that generates automated takedown requests and flags recidivists for escalation to our Office of General Counsel. I have also developed a NIL brand usage policy that has been reviewed by our Compliance office and the conference office and is referenced by six NIL collectives who work with our student-athletes.

I understand the structure of CLC royalty reporting — minimum guarantee reconciliation, quarterly distribution timelines, audit rights — and have presented royalty projections to our Deputy AD twice in the past year when revenue came in above forecast due to our football team's conference championship appearance.

What I want to do at [University] is build on a licensing program that has strong institutional assets — your marks are well-established nationally and your fan base has deep loyalty — and grow royalty revenue by improving licensee quality, reducing leakage from unauthorized sellers, and positioning the program well for the Fanatics Collegiate platform transitions expected over the next two years.

I'd welcome the chance to discuss my background in detail.

Sincerely, [Your Name]