The new girl set to join the Miami Hurricanes women’s golf team in August already has a trading card deal with Leaf Trading Cards. She has an equipment deal with TaylorMade that pushed her endorsement tally past the million-dollar mark. She has her own clothing brand. And she has an equity stake in an energy drink in partnership with former LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne and Travis Kelce.
She has 3.7 million people following her on Tik Tok and 2.7 million on Instagram. Another 1.5 million people follow her You Tube Channel — she has her own production team helping create content — and 900,000 monitor her on X. She posts high-production weekly videos blending life on the course, family, and the Trump orbit — often pulling millions of views.
You think Kai Trump is about to change things a little bit when she arrives in August for a Miami Hurricanes women’s golf program that operates in anonymity. Trump is going to blow the doors off of NIL and exposure for The U.
“All of the girls are excited,” Miami Women’s Golf Coach Janice Olivencia said. “It will be a great experience that we are about to go through. We are excited to have Kai on the team. All of us, myself and all nine girls, are trying to do something special at Miami.”
She was the President’s granddaughter long before she morphed into the Million-Dollar Freshman who will almost certainly be the most-wired newcomer in college sports this fall.
Every practice clip, road trip vlog, tournament appearance, locker-room moment, product placement and Miami-branded post has the potential to reach an audience that for sure dwarfs the normal exposure for college women’s golf, probably just about anything at the college level.
Trump burst onto the national scene with a touching speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention and then the White House became her stage. She is seen everywhere with her grandpa, from golf tournaments to UFC fights. And every time she throws up The U, more than 10 million people see it.
This is NIL and ROI on steroids.
She’s a Trump with access to the best marketing agents in the business and corporate partnerships that not surprisingly look less like basic sponsorships and more like mature venture plays. For example, her TaylorMade deal is with a brand that has Rory McIlroy, Nelly Korda, Collin Morikawa and Tiger Woods on its roster. No big deal, right. By the way, as an aside, her mom is Woods’ girlfriend.
Apr 11, 2026; Miami, Florida, UNITED STATES; President of the United States Donald Trump talks with granddaughter Kai Trumo after the fight between Curtis Blaydes (red gloves) and Josh Hokit (blue gloves) during UFC 327 at Kaseya Center. Mandatory Credit: Sam Navarro-Imagn Images
Kai debuted her KT Clothing brand at the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage, wearing a $130 sweatshirt as she stood next to Grandpa, her KT Logo and signature on the sleeve. She also did a photo shoot launching the brand at the White House. You have to take advantage of your assets in business, right?
Leaf Trading Cards is believed to have been her first NIL deal. The autograph card packs sell for $199.99, each containing one random signature card.
And the Accelerator Active Energy drink deal is her best to date because she has ownership, not just paid appearance fees. She launched her signature flavor, Blue Raz Slush, this month. The product was made available through Amazon and select retailers and quickly sold out. The flavor for the popular natural caffeine beverage was inspired by her childhood love of blue raspberry movie theatre slushies. Perhaps we can expect the ladies on Miami’s women’s golf team to be walking around campus with blue lips.
“Kai had a very clear vision on what she wanted throughout the process,” Accelerator CEO Andrew Wilkerson said. “Her genuine enthusiasm to work together on every aspect of this collaboration has resulted in a great addition to the Accelerator product line.”
GREG LOVETT/PALM BEACH POST / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Miami women’s sports benefitted in recent years from the great awareness of the Cavinder twins – Haley and Hanna, identical twins out of Gilbert, Arizona — as NIL exploded onto the scene and the girls masterfully turned their basketball careers into a business platform.
After starting at Fresno State, they transferred to Miami in spring 2023, where they led the Hurricanes to the 2023 NCAA Tournament Elite Eight before they retired to pursue other ventures, and then returned to use their remaining eligibility.
The Cavinders signed with Boost Mobile on July 1, 2021, the very first day name, image and likeness legislation took effect, making them among the first student-athletes to land a high-profile deal. At their peak, each carried an On3 NIL valuation in the high six figures, placing them among the top-earning female college athletes alongside names like Dunne and Paige Bueckers, with an estimated $2 million earned in 2022 alone and a joint TikTok account that pushed past four million followers.
Boost Mobile was the beginning as they later signed deals with Under Armour, Victoria’s Secret PINK, Intuit TurboTax, Raising Cane’s, Slate Milk, Champs Sports, Ghost Nutrition, the WWE, and Dick’s Sporting Goods, along with a deal with Miami booster John Ruiz’s LifeWallet. They had equity deals together like the Baseline Team streetwear line and Haley holds equity stakes in Seoul Juice and Betr Media. Now that their college careers are finished, they’ve leaned fully into building the Cavinder brand as full-time creators and entrepreneurs across their millions of followers — the clearest proof of concept that a college athlete’s NIL success can become a durable post-eligibility business. Haley also married Dallas Cowboys tight end Jake Ferguson last week, which doesn’t hurt. Hanna’s maid of honor speech was shown on social media.
But Kai Trump, with her model mother’s smile and beauty and her access to all corners of the business world, just might start making that Cavinder enterprise look like amateur hour after she arrives on campus in August.
The Hurricanes won’t just be adding a golfer.
The University of Miami is about to become thrust into the middle of a personal brand managed by GSE Worldwide, a New York–based athlete representation and sports marketing firm.
Trump has already become one of the most commercially powerful incoming athletes in college sports, and certainly one of the most unusual NIL cases Miami has ever seen.
NIL was supposed to reward athletes for market value. Trump arrives with market value already established and a University that is about to be rewarded from that.
She committed to the Miami’s women’s golf program in August 2024 and never wavered, formally signing her National Letter of Intent in November 2025 during a ceremony at The Benjamin School near Mar-a-Lago.
It was a spotlight the Miami golf program had never had. Olivencia isn’t running from it and the rest of her girls are more than ready for the attention that is coming.
“We view any potential exposure as positive for Miami golf,” Olivencia said. “We are looking for certain players with certain abilities and skills in all aspects. We went through the same process with Kai as all of our players. There were a lot of things that fit, a lot of things that aligned.
“She was very interested in being involved in a program that is up-and-coming. I was looking for players that will buy into what we are striving for and win championships and put Miami on the map. We are looking for people who are competitive, who love the game of golf. That was one of her attributes and it’s the same for all nine of them.”
Olivencia makes sure that she makes it clear that adding Trump is not a publicity stunt and she stresses over and over during a 30-minute interview that Kai is coming in as a member of a nine-woman team.
The coach is focused on bringing back to life a program that is one of just 17 to win a women’s title (1984) since the NCAA began tracking stroke-play champions in 1982. Trump is expected to become an asset toward that goal on the course as well as off it.
She already has tournament reps against top competition, including an LPGA debut at The Annika at Pelican Golf Club by special invitation last year, and real junior golf credentials. While in high school, she was runner-up at the 2025 Major Championship at Village Golf Course, third place at Lost City Golf Club, second at the 2024 Martin County Junior Open, had top-10 finishes at the 2025 Cognizant High School Invitational and 2024 Martin Downs Medalist Tour event, and was part of four straight district team titles at The Benjamin School.
But there is no doubt her business career is far in front of her competitive one. Entering her LPGA debut last fall, she had played in just three official junior golf tournaments and those were state or local events. Most top juniors play a couple dozen events a year.
The LPGA invite last year showed the raw nature of her game. She opened with a 13-over 83, the highest score of the day, bogeying her first four holes in a birdie-less round. She backed it up with a 5-over 75 the next day to finish at 158 (+18), missing the cut and placing last in the field.
But that second round is where the projectable talent showed. She rolled in her first LPGA birdie and got to one-under through three holes. Her drives were right there with the best players in the world on some holes.
“Her composure. She’s very competitive,” Olivencia said. “She has a lot of athletic ability. She has a lot of fire in her. She wants to win, she wants to do good, she wants to work at it.
“She is a great kid. She has a great head on her shoulders. She’s very mature. That’s the entire team to be honest. She is going to fit right in. I am very lucky and grateful to surround myself with nine individuals that bring something special to the program.”
The top players on the team will be Scarlet Schremmer, a Top 100 National Player who is No. 55 in the World amateur golf rankings, Olivia Gronborg, a Grad student from Denmark who was part of a Division 2 National championship team at Nova Southeastern and Ashleen Kaur, a senior from Houston who posted the second lowest score in school history last year with a 64 at the Red Sky Classic in Colorado.
So for a Miami program hungry for relevance and a school investing big on attention, Kai Trump may be a project on the course but she certainly will not be a distraction to a team happy to have more sizzle. That does not mean Miami women’s golf will become a circus. It means the team will get a spotlight it would never have otherwise thanks to a freshman who arrives with an audience ready to follow her story.
“This is the University of Miami, the Miami golf program,” Olivencia said. “The nine players are excited to play for Miami and give everything for the Orange and Green.”
And with one that may just do it a bit louder.