Adidas signed seven high school juniors to NIL deals before any committed to a college, naming them the adizero 7 Class and handing each athlete branded gear, cash, and a direct line to Portland's least favorite building in Herzogenaurach. The Class of 2026 cohort includes five-star quarterback Julian Sayin, four-star running back Harlem Berry, and five basketball prospects ranked in the ESPN top fifty. Dollar figures were not disclosed. The athletes will wear Adidas product through their senior seasons and—if they choose an Adidas-affiliated school—carry the deals into college under revised NCAA rules permitting high school NIL activity since July 2021.
The move formalizes what apparel companies have done informally for decades: identify talent early, build loyalty, and hope the athlete lands at a partner university where the brand already pays $5-12 million annually in apparel rights. Adidas operates 109 Division I partnerships versus Nike's 191, a gap that has widened since the FBI's 2017 college basketball investigation cost Adidas three ACC schools. The adizero 7 structure—public, branded, announced sixteen months before signing day—signals Adidas believes transparency now beats the whisper network. Nike has signed individual high school athletes to personal endorsements (Mikey Williams, $5 million in 2021) but has not announced a formal pre-college class structure.
The intelligence here is timing and optics. Adidas is treating high school juniors like draft picks, knowing the NCAA's September 2023 settlement preliminarily approved $2.8 billion in back-pay to athletes and opened the door to schools directly compensating players starting in 2025. If revenue-sharing becomes standard, apparel deals may be the last pure brand lever before athletes become school employees. The early lock also hedges transfer risk: even if a signee flips schools, the personal endorsement stays with the athlete, and Adidas keeps the visibility. It is cheaper than losing a four-year relationship because a freshman transferred from an Adidas school to a Nike one.
College programs are watching. Athletic directors at Adidas schools—Louisville, Miami, Texas A&M—now know which recruits arrive with existing endorsement relationships, complicating or simplifying collective negotiations depending on whether the school's NIL collective is organized. One Power Five compliance director, speaking off the record, noted the adizero 7 athletes will need separate disclosures if their college deals overlap with the high school agreements, creating a reporting burden schools have not yet systematized. The NCAA's interim NIL policy requires schools to log conflicts of interest but does not define thresholds. Adidas is betting most schools will not care enough to block a deal already in place.
What to watch: Whether any adizero 7 athlete commits to a Nike school (Ohio State, Alabama, Oregon) and whether the personal endorsement survives that choice. Also, whether Nike announces a competing class before spring signing day in April 2025, and whether Under Armour—down to 38 D-I partnerships and bleeding UCLA, Wisconsin, and Cal—attempts a similar play with its remaining $140 million apparel budget. If Sayin picks Michigan (Nike/Jordan) over Texas A&M (Adidas), the structure looks weaker. If all seven land at Adidas schools, the model becomes the model.
Adidas reported €5.3 billion in North American revenue in 2023, flat year-over-year, while Nike's U.S. sales fell 1.7%. Neither company has solved the problem of being interesting to teenagers, but both have noticed that teenagers with 1.2 million Instagram followers solve that problem for them.
The takeaway
Adidas is signing high school juniors to NIL deals before college commits, formalizing early recruiting and hedging transfer risk.
adidasnilhigh school recruitingclass of 2026ncaaapparel deals
Brand your brand — for real
70,000 products · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · imprinted since 1997
Two hundred brands. Eight months on the desk. $0.003 an impression.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — imprinting on real authorized stock for Nike, YETI, Patagonia, The North Face, Carhartt, Stanley, Peter Millar, TUMI, Montblanc, Moleskine, Waterford, and 190 more. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign: The Stash Edge, Markets Edge, Sports Edge, Voyage Edge, Black's Edge, House Edge, the Article Engine, Ramen, and Fending.
$0.003per impression · vs ~$0.007 digital CPM
8 monthson the desk · vs 0.8s for a digital ad
200+authorized brands · Nike · YETI · Patagonia
9 deskspublishing daily · since 1997
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.