Nicole Lynn became an agent and joined an agency in 2015. Pretty cool, right? Show her the money and all that. Now, all she needed was a client.
So she drove six hours to talk to a football player after a college game.
“I waited out in the rain for him,” said Lynn, who made the rookie mistake of wearing heels and was sinking in the turf as fast as her confidence was.
Let’s have Alabama defensive tackle Quinnen Williams pick up the story from here. Williams is a potential No. 1 overall draft pick in April, and he knows this four-year-old tale well.
“She drove six hours to meet this person on her birthday,” Williams said in a telephone interview Sunday. “The dude turned her down, said she was a female and stuff like that. And then she had to drive six hours back. On her birthday. …
“She could have done whatever she wanted to do on her birthday and she did that. That spoke volumes to me. Imagine how hard she is going to work on my behalf.”
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Lynn, 30, never told Williams that story. He saw it on YouTube, in a speech she gave last September in San Francisco, when she was being honored by Salesforce and The Hustle as a woman of the year.
“I gave this speech about how you persevere,” Lynn said last week. “Quinnen had done a ton of research on me. And he told me that video was what pushed him over to choosing me. He loved the grit.”
That’s been part of the fabric of Lynn since she was a little girl wearing the same clothes to school every day.
“A lot of players come from a similar background that I come from,” Lynn said. “That helps me relate to them. Most of these players are coming from single-parent homes or impoverished homes. I grew up below the poverty line in a very tough situation.”
Williams read every article ever published on Lynn — “Coach (Nick) Saban is all about facts,” he said, “so I wanted all the facts. And I thought Nicole had the best background.” — and Williams liked the idea of going through the NFL Draft experience with someone “that was going to be passionate about it.”
“He didn’t want to be with an agent that had 50 first-rounders,” Lynn said. “He believed in me and said, ‘It’s going to be meaningful for you to sign me.’”
It was. Not only will Williams be Lynn’s first first-round pick, but he will be the first first-round pick represented by a black woman. (Female sports agent Kim Miale represented Leonard Fournette and Saquon Barkley the last two years.)
“That’s exciting,” Lynn said. “But it also shows you where we are in the world of sports.”
Alabama defensive tackle Quinnen Williams — likely a top-3 pick in the upcoming draft — says he hired Nicole Lynn because of her work ethic. (Photo courtesy of Nicole Lynn)Veet’s is a dive bar with a capital D in Mobile, Ala. It’s where all the NFL general managers, coaches, scouts, agents and reporters go after a long day of watching Senior Bowl practices every February. The ratio of white males to everybody else is jarring even to white males.
Lynn has been in there and gets double looks. And triple looks. But that’s true of everywhere she goes on behalf of her clients.
“Every time,” she said. “When I walk in the combine, when I am at the Senior Bowl, they assume that I am a marketing agent or a publicist or a girlfriend or a wife.”
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Last year, Lynn was negotiating an extension for Raiders receiver Seth Roberts when team security escorted her away from the team hotel. She told them she had a meeting with then-general manager Reggie McKenzie and they laughed.
Bengals linebacker Malik Jefferson, a client of Lynn’s, gets questioned all the time about his agent.
Why did he pick a woman?
“Especially an African-American one,” Jefferson said in a telephone interview. “The assumption is that you’re doing something with her. I tell them she is a professional, just like any other agent. I don’t understand why they’re surprised or why there is that concept hanging in the air. She has a great background and she has proven her worth, to get some respect.
“She is a sports agent.”
Lynn takes the funny looks and questions in stride, quick-paced strides as she is too busy getting stuff done to worry about hangups or chauvinism.
“Ninety percent of the people in this industry are men and the majority of them are white,” Lynn said. “So I am used to being in that world. But I have had some help navigating through these confusing waters.”
The Oklahoma grad left a financial analyst job on Wall Street and went to law school because she knew she wanted to work with athletes.
“I was close to a lot of athletes in college (and married one) and I had heard a lot of rags-to-riches-to-rags stories,” Lynn said.
Gabe Lynn was a defensive back at Oklahoma and knew his future wife would work with athletes one day.
“She hadn’t figured out that she wanted to be an agent yet, but she knew that she wanted to manage and help athletes,” Gabe Lynn said. “And she clicks with everyone, not just athletes. She makes people comfortable. Until she is negotiating with you. All of our family members and friends make sure to bring her along when it’s time to buy a new car.”
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Once out of law school, Nicole Lynn got a job with the NFL Players Association “so I could learn everything I could about life after football.” Then she cold-called Ken Sarnoff about a job at the PlayersRep agency.
She knew some of his clients and when Sarnoff gave her a test and had her try to set up a meeting with Texas Tech offensive tackle Le’Raven Clark, she called back in 45 minutes with a time.
How did she get Clark?
“I cold-called him, too,” she said.
Lynn joined PlayersRep shortly after that in 2015 (the agency was acquired last year by rapper Lil Wayne’s Young Money APAA Sports & Entertainment).
“She brought a lot to the table from the first day,” Sarnoff said. “She does well with players because she has a genuine caring for people, let’s start with that. She had a rough childhood, and she understands what a lot of these players have gone through. She can relate to them quickly, and she builds a trust.
“And she is very driven.”
There are a lot of bad days as an agent, as Sarnoff and Lynn don’t sign most of the players that they target and go after. But then there are some great days.
“My best day was last year, when I was in the 2018 draft and I had my very first top-100 player drafted — Malik,” Lynn said. “I had represented a lot of veteran players — that’s kind of been my wheelhouse — and I hadn’t had a lot of rookies.”
Jefferson was taken in the third round and if you look at Lynn’s Twitter account, there is a pinned tweet of the two of them dancing after the selection was made.
https://twitter.com/AgentNicoleLynn/status/990268556465012736
“We were both really happy,” Jefferson said. “That was a really good time.”
Lynn thinks that she got to enjoy that moment because months before the draft, she turned off the noise and gave it to Jefferson straight.
“There were a lot of people that told him he was going to be drafted higher than he was and I was very upfront with him with my spot and analysis,” Lynn said. “I was the only person who told him he wasn’t going in the first round. The other 30 agents told him what they thought he wanted to hear.”
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Jefferson appreciated the honesty. And he thought he had a chance at being a part of something big. And meaningful.
“To see a strong African-American woman do what she does is really, really challenging, so I wanted to be a person that is able to help her kick-start her career and be a part of that process,” Jefferson said. “I wanted to show my appreciation for her and help her out, and have her help me out.”
Thirteen of Lynn’s 22 clients are NFL players (she also has three softball players and ballerina Erica Lall); before Jefferson signed up, all of the football players were veterans. Because she was a good fit for veterans.
“They see a different need than they saw as a rookie,” Lynn said. “They want a more hands-on agent. … It’s more difficult, I think, as a woman and as a younger agent to represent or to get rookies to trust you. Because what I bring to the table beyond contract negotiations, they don’t immediately value — the life after football, the insurance, the annuities, understanding all the benefits of the NFLPA.
“A 21-year-old really doesn’t value that yet, versus a 27-year-old that is married with kids and recognizes that football will end and wants a plan for that.”
Like Raiders safety Erik Harris, who is 28 and has four kids now with his wife, Theresa. The former CFL player started talking with Lynn on social media after he realized she represented his teammate Roberts and signed with her in January, 2018.
“I replied to one of her tweets,” Harris said. “She started talking about my family and not about me. She made it about my family and she was telling me about things that I didn’t know about, about all the programs that the NFLPA offered. How we could set up my family for after football. That was really important to me.
“She is definitely a life coach. We didn’t talk about money or my contract for a long time.”
Raiders safety Erik Harris signed with agent Nicole Lynn after talking to her about planning the future for his family. (Photo courtesy of Nicole Lynn)One of Nicole’s first clients as a life coach was Rachel Lynn, her mother.
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“She was like a young parent,” Rachel Lynn said. “She and I had reversed roles. We’re more like sisters and best friends than mother and daughter.”
Lynn was the poorest kid in school growing up in Tulsa, wearing the same clothes every day and coming home not knowing if the electricity or water would be on or if there would be any food for dinner.
“It was very tough for her growing up,” Rachel Lynn said. “I also have a son who was diagnosed with Tourette’s and I was trying to work two or three jobs to try and make it. And we still didn’t have enough to keep the utilities on, or to provide enough food. She had to help raise her brother.”
Nicole’s father was gone, leaving behind Nicole and Julius, her brother who is three years younger, as well as three other kids from a previous marriage.
“I had no knowledge about how to raise kids,” Rachel Lynn said. “It was a struggle. But Nicole was a hustler, and she would bring back food from the school to help out. My heart was broken many, many times to see them suffer like that. I still cry about it to this day, and I apologize to them all the time. I tried my very best.”
The Lynns outran eviction notices and stayed with Rachel’s parents for a while, until they dropped off the family at the Salvation Army because it was too much for them.
“There were nights we slept in the car,” Nicole Lynn said.
Nicole got her first job selling newspapers at the age of 13. Then she was working the register at the local Chick-fil-A at the age of 14. And then she had one or two jobs throughout high school.
“It blows my mind at all the things that she has tackled, but then again it doesn’t,” Rachel Lynn said. “She was multitasking back in elementary school and was an excellent communicator, always talking to the principal about things.”
Her grandfather would always say that Nicole would grow up to be someone like Dorothy Lamour, a popular actress and singer in the 1940s.
“He would say that she was not a usual kid, but that she was an original.” Rachel Lynn said. “I wish he was around to witness this now. He would always say, ‘Oh Nicky, the sky is yours.’”
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And she took it.
“I feel like I didn’t have a choice,” Nicole Lynn said. “I had to go above and beyond to get out or I could become a statistic. I grew up in an area that was very violent — I went to 11 funerals my junior year of high school. Education was my way out, and I took it very seriously.”
She took Julius to live with her when she went to law school at the University of Oklahoma; one of her half-brothers was killed during that same time.
“We lost him to gang violence,” Lynn said. “One of many people that I loved that I saw go down the wrong road. … I always had my head on straight. I don’t really know where it came from, but I was very determined and motivated, even though I didn’t have a lot of direction.”
She knew that she wanted to represent athletes since she was 18 but learned that “financial advisers don’t make a big impact on the athlete. It was the agent.”
And so the former high school cheerleader set out on a new career path.
“It was kind of like telling people that I wanted to be a rapper,” Lynn said. “They would say, ‘Good luck with that.’ Most people didn’t take me seriously, so that was definitely tough.”
The NFL scouting combine is a week away and Lynn will walk into Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium representing three players there. The tables have definitely turned from 2017 when she walked in with one client, Oklahoma linebacker Jordan Evans, who wasn’t even invited to the combine.
She peppered teams with Evans’ strengths, thanks to a scouting report drawn up by her husband Gabe, the cornerbacks coach at Oklahoma Baptist University.
“A lot of agents don’t know anything about football,” Gabe Lynn said. “She needed a little help at first, but she has come a long way and can talk the game with anyone now. That’s another big plus she has.”
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Evans was drafted in the sixth round by the Bengals, Lynn’s first player to be drafted.
Now, she is busy making sure that Williams, Texas linebacker Gary Johnson and Houston linebacker Emeke Egbule are all prepared for the combine.
“I am prepping them for the interviews, while they are all training at facilities,” Lynn said. “I’m also researching analytics and comps for my players that are entering free agency.”
When she walks into the combine or any meeting, there are things that cross her mind — and the minds of the 38 other female agents — that don’t get a second of thought from the close to 900 male agents. (Thirty-three women did take the agent certification exam last year, the highest total ever.)
Should she wear the heels? And what about the lipstick?
“I am always trying to find that balance, of not being too pretty and still wanting to be a woman and be feminine,” Lynn said. “I still want to be who I am, but I don’t want to be prettier than a wife or mom in the room. Is the lipstick too sexy? Are the heels too high? My male counterparts never have to worry about kind of stuff.”
The daily struggle between wearing five-inch and two-inch heels is very real, not to mention resisting the temptation to change her hair a lot. Luckily, she doesn’t have a lot of time to think about it.
Lynn still works 60 hours a week practicing civil litigation at an international law firm (Norton Rose Fulbright), on top of 30 hours a week she spends as an agent and flying around the country.
“It’s non-stop,” she said. “I can never turn it off.”
At some point, she is going to have to make a change.
“I am still trying to figure that out,” Lynn said. “It’s going to affect my personal life at some point. I have to create boundaries and practice self-care. Those are things I don’t know much about and am trying to get better at. At one point, I will have to make a decision.”
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Obviously, that won’t happen anytime soon. Lynn is riding shotgun on the two biggest months of Williams’ life.
“I am so excited. She’s a grinder, man,” Williams said. “She has been on Wall Street and had all these cool attributes. I had never been a star in college until this last year and I had to work my way up. And to see how she came up in a male-dominated industry was inspiring, that way she worked her butt off and competed with the top dogs.”
One thing they don’t have in common is their fondness for social media.
“He is so humble,” Lynn said. “I can barely get him to post on social media. He thinks it’s bragging. I tell him, ‘Hey, we’re trying to build a brand here.’“
So, what, Williams is shy?
“No, I am not shy,” he said, laughing. “I am just used to staying in my bubble, but she is getting me out of that. I used to only share stuff with my family and friends, but she is having me expand my horizons and post more to the audience …
“I am glad I have someone like Nicole to help me through it.”
Lynn loves Williams’ story and it’s fitting that he is her first marquee draft pick.
“He made the decision last year to switch over to nose guard, a position that he had never played,” Lynn said. “He just wanted to get on the field. So he gained 37 pounds in three months. I loved that he did whatever he had to to get on the field. Then he gets on the field, and the rest is history.
“I am very similar — I will do whatever it takes for my guys.”
(Top photo courtesy of Nicole Lynn)
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