Revenue sharing and transfer portal: How Purdue women's basketball approached the new landscape

Katie Gearlds and the Boilermakers received a percentage of the athletic department’s $20.5 million revenue share, and used it to piece together the current roster

In the first year of assembling the Purdue women’s basketball team armed with revenue sharing, how did Katie Gearlds approach the new landscape?

Building relationships remains a crucial part of roster construction, but everyone has money on their minds, whether they admit it or not.

“ ‘This is the world we live in - what's your number?’ ” Gearlds said earlier this summer. “It's interesting that became the first words out of your mouth. We had to be a little bit more aggressive.

“It was a lot like, ‘Hey, what are you looking for? What is it that you want?’ If the numbers matched up and aligned with what we were thinking, then we continued the conversation.”

The program received a percentage of the athletic department’s $20.5 million revenue share, and Gearlds used it to piece together the current 14-member roster, which includes three holdovers from last year’s team. Transfers and incoming freshmen round out the roster for the 2025-26 season.

The offseason remained chaotic because the new rules surrounding Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) weren’t set until the House v. NCAA settlement was signed in early June.

“People still had collectives, and they were working with the rev share too,” said Gearlds, who is set to begin her fifth season. “For us, we needed the judge to sign the paperwork right away, because we knew we had the rev share money. We didn’t have the collective. When we talked to kids and they had bigger numbers, we just moved on.”

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Chad Krockover Photography

At Purdue, football and men’s basketball account for approximately 90% of the $20.5 million revenue share, leaving smaller percentages for women’s basketball and volleyball. Athletic director Mike Bobinski said around $300,000 will be available for the other sports to share on a case-by-case basis in the first year.

Revenue share began on July 1, and the current salary pool is available until June 30, 2026, but can’t be carried over from year to year. The revenue share numbers are expected to increase by 4% in 2026-27 and continue going up through the next decade.

NUMBER CRUNCHING

Gearlds was the de facto general manager of the program, handling interactions and transactions with agents and athletes. The process was “number crunching and what made sense,” but Gearlds emphasized to everyone involved the importance of adopting a professional attitude in this new environment.

“One thing we told them - ‘You're pros now, right?’ ” she said. “I don't walk around in my office talking to my staff about how much money I make or how much money somebody makes.

“But they’re still 18 to 22-year-old kids, and they have this opportunity, and they should take advantage of it. Take advantage of your name, your image, and your likeness to find a way to profit off yourself.”

South Carolina coach Dawn Staley revealed during a podcast with former First Lady Michelle Obama that her players must sign non-disclosure agreements regarding the money they receive in revenue share.

"Now whether they can stick with that or not, some of them get disgruntled and maybe transfer and just say what 'I was making (amount)' and it can stir up the pot, but I'm very honest," Staley said on the podcast, which was released earlier this week. "I'll tell them, there's a reason why you get paid this, and you get paid that. I'll explain that to them."

PART OF EVALUATION

How well Purdue coaches utilize revenue share will now be part of the evaluation process, Bobinski said.

“It allows us even moreso to say who we award scholarships to … everything is real money at this point,” Bobinski said. “How you allocate it, how wisely you invest it, and how productive those investments turn out to be, all that leads to wins and losses - you already had that scorecard, but now are we spending the money in the right places or are we investing based on the wrong criteria because it’s proven to be that we’re providing resources to folks that aren’t actually becoming productive from an athletic standpoint.

“There's just another level of data that will be available from an analytics perspective and an evaluation perspective, just to make sure that we're doing the things the right way and deploying significant dollars in a productive way.”

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Gearlds remains old school in the recruiting and transfer portal approach but understands what’s required in this new era to maintain rosters. This was a crucial offseason, from a talent acquisition standpoint, to start the process of escaping the Big Ten basement and moving up the conference standings.

“You get in this job because you love young people, and you want to help them chase their dreams, and it's all about relationships, and I think that there's a place for that in today's world,” Gearlds said.

“But it's going to become transactional, and I don't think that really is the Purdue way. We want to make sure we're still doing it the Purdue way, and making sure that this is about young people, but now they just make money. It's the way the world is.”