Sacramento-based rugby player chosen as national spokeswoman
SACRAMENTO -- Amaya De La Cruz's life was changed by a slice of pizza.
"I forgot my lunch and there was an announcement over the intercom and basically it was like 'our school is starting a rugby team," the Grand Canyon University junior remembers. "If you're interested, come hang out we'll have pizza."
Even though cheerleading had been her main focus since the age of 8, the Capital Christian senior decided to give a sport that could be defined as cheering's polar opposite a try.
"When I found rugby I was like wow this is my opportunity to be aggressive and really be in a contact sport like that," jokes De La Cruz.
The love affair quickly blossomed into something the Sacramento native could see herself doing long-term. Faced with the choice of cheering in college or playing rugby, De La Cruz decided to attend Grand Canyon University and continue with the latter.
Women's rugby is not currently an NCAA or NCATA-sanctioned sport. It competes on the club level and thus anyone can join. De La Cruz has found she likes it that way as she's watched the program grow into 40-plus student-athletes heading into this season. GCU is among one of the best women's rugby teams in the country. In spite of the success, club sports have a hard time gaining exposure in a sports media landscape saturated with NCAA sports. But new rules in college sports have helped to change that.
"One day I was just on a kick and I just started DMing random companies and was like 'Hey if you need an athlete to sponsor your brand I'd love to,'" De La Cruz explains.
In the world of Name, Image and Likeness -- in which collegiate student-athletes can profit off the aforementioned three things -- premier brands have started looking at who can promote products and bring in new audiences. It began with smaller, hyperlocal businesses and has now boomed into a full-blown marketing industry with involvement from Nike, Gatorade, and P&G.
While scanning Instagram, De La Cruz noticed Degree was having a contest to pick four student-athletes to be a part of their Breaking Limits campaign. So she wrote to them and is now a part of this year's four-person class. In addition to the marketing exposure for herself, the GCU rugby player is now one of the sole ambassadors for her sport on a big stage.
"Degree's well known across the nation and rugby's getting there and it's cool to represent the sport in that way," she explains.
One of the biggest winners in the N-I-L saga has been women's sports athletes in particular. From Olympic gymnast Sunisa Lee, who competes for Auburn University, to Paige Bueckers, one of the brightest stars in women's college basketball, valuations for female student-athletes are on par with -- and sometimes ahead of -- their male counterparts.
With more focus on how these student-athletes have long been undervalued, De La Cruz gets to see herself as a champion for three different underrepresented group: As a champion of Sacramento athletes who have long been overshadowed by their counterparts in Los Angeles and San Francisco; as an ambassador for female athletes, many of whom are only scratching the surface of their true value; and finally, as a face of a fast-growing sport that may one day be seen in the same vein as women's basketball and soccer with any luck.
"I feel like I am pioneering the way for rugby athletes and us Sacramento people," De La Cruz says. "Our campaign is called breaking limits and I feel like for a long time women have been confined in a society where there's not a lot of limits that we should break but we can literally do anything."
