Social media makes Jada Williams a face of high school NIL

SAN DIEGO (AP) — It’s the middle of the afternoon and Jada Williams begins a live stream on Instagram. In a heartbeat, more than 1,000 of her 671,000 followers join the broadcast and begin typing in questions and comments.

Williams does her best to follow along as the comments and questions scroll past. She laughs and interacts with fans, whether the topic is her basketball career or what shoes and clothes she should wear on an upcoming trip.

If there’s a face of the bold new frontier of name, image and likeness (NIL) at the high school level, it might as well be the 17-year-old Williams, who is a senior point guard at San Diego’s La Jolla Country Day. Engaging and charismatic, she constantly updates her feed with photos and videos from her 6 a.m. basketball workouts, anything to do with her high school team and women’s hoops and her flair for fashion.

Social media is a big part of NIL, which allows athletes to get paid without jeopardizing their eligibility. There are certainly bigger names in the prep ranks, like Bronny James, the son of LeBron James, and Arch Manning, the third generation of the first family of quarterbacks. James has more than 10 million followers on social media and Mikey Williams of San Diego’s San Ysidro High and a Memphis commit has more than 5 million.

Jada Williams has been a fixture on social media since she was 11 and stands out because of her flair for engagement. With the advent of NIL, she has parlayed her basketball skills and social media presence into six major endorsement deals that bring in a total of six figures a year. Among them are Spalding, Gym Shark and Move Insoles, which was cofounded by NBA star Damian Lillard.

She moved with her mother, Jill McIntyre, and an older sister from a Kansas City suburb to enroll at the same...