The WNBA All-Star Game in Chicago two weeks ago was a spectacle. I’ve been to the last three WNBA All-Star Weekends, and somehow the hoopla and dizzying schedule surrounding the weekend keeps getting bigger and busier.

At the skills challenge and All-Star Game, loud boos rained down on commissioner Cathy Engelbert as she presented trophies to Azzi Fudd (Three-Point Champion) and Jonquel Jones (All-Star Game MVP) on Friday and Saturday night. The boos were deafening and uncomfortable.

I won’t give a full account of Engelbert’s tenure; Candace Buckner and Annie Costabile have both covered that ground well.

What I will say is that Engelbert has a tough job, and I would argue that we haven’t done a good enough job defining what the role of a league commissioner is and how they should be evaluated.

As a commissioner, you’re never going to please everyone, and it’s hard to know if you’re doing a good job apart from whether people like you or say good things about you. So let’s set aside the “will Cathy survive” question for a second and actually dig into what the commissioner’s job is: what it’s for, how it’s grown, and how I’d evaluate a commissioner’s tenure.

History on the Commissioner Role

When I was a student at Harvard Kennedy School, I took a popular course on the American presidency. The central tenet of the class that I remember: only crazy people want to be president. The role of the president has ballooned over the past 250 years, from primarily military commander-in-chief to administrative to regulator to fiscal and monetary steward to an executive overseeing a staff of four million employees. As the role has grown, presidents have to make increasingly difficult tradeoffs about how to spend their most precious resource: time.

I see a similar arc in the growth of the commissioner role. The earliest commissioners were hired to make sure the games were played fairly. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (side note: what a name) took the MLB commissioner job in 1921, in the wake of the Black Sox gambling scandal, with a single mandate to protect the integrity of the game.

Now the role is far broader, covering governance, administration, finance, and expansion. The commissioner’s office looks less like a referee’s booth and more like the headquarters of a fast-growing conglomerate.

Zoom into the last 20 to 30 years specifically, and the job has picked up new layers:

• 1990s. David Stern globalizes the NBA off the back of the 1992 Dream Team, building international broadcast markets and licensing deals from scratch. The job starts requiring a brand-builder.

• 2000s. Broadcast rights become the dominant revenue lever across every major league, and commissioners spend an increasing share of their time as chief negotiators with networks.

• 2010s. Roger Goodell comes down heavy-handed on the NFL’s personal conduct policy. Ray Rice, Deflategate, and concussion litigation push discipline and crisis communication into the core of the role.

• Last five to ten years. Leagues start raising institutional and private capital directly (the WNBA’s 2022 league stake sale, the approval of private-equity ownership stakes into various leagues), turning the commissioner into something like a capital markets operator courting fund managers as much as broadcasters.

• Now. Every disciplinary ruling and every press-conference answer is instantly public and endlessly replayed on social media, which raises the stakes on communication and public trust-building far past anything Landis, or even a 1990s-era commissioner, had to manage.

The WNBA’s version of this arc has its own specific wrinkle. For its first 23 years, the top job in the league wasn’t called commissioner, but rather president, and was held by Val Ackerman, Donna Orender, Laurel Richie, and then Lisa Borders. When Borders resigned in 2019, the league renamed the job and Cathy Engelbert became the WNBA’s first-ever commissioner. NBA commissioner Adam Silver, explaining the change at the time, said the league wanted “to signal to the broadest possible audience that the WNBA is a major league” and that its leader would carry “the same status as the heads of other U.S.-based sports leagues.”

Breaking Down The Commissioner Role

Fundamentally, what is the role of a commissioner? Here’s what the job includes:

1. The ceremonial flag bearer. Handing out trophies, informing players of their All-Star selections, presiding over draft night.

2. Governance and rules. Setting the policies that govern competition and conduct. Officiating is a great example, and probably the one that has gotten the most attention during Engelbert’s tenure.

3. Dispute arbiter. Handing down a suspension, or deciding not to.

4. Securing the league’s financial future. Building a commercial engine that allows the league to grow, and in turn, player and staff salaries to grow.

5. Hiring and managing an exceptional team at the league level. Building a leadership team to complement the commissioner’s skills and the league’s priorities.

Why This Generation of Commissioners Has It Harder

Being a commissioner in a women’s sports league has its own unique set of challenges:

• Media rights negotiations are higher stakes. There’s no comp set and no prior deal to benchmark against, so every negotiation is also a valuation and sales exercise, with reporters and rival leagues watching the number in real time.

• Sponsorship categories are being invented, not sold off a shelf. Categories that are settled and mature business lines in the men’s game (title sponsorships, jersey patches, category exclusivity) still have to be built and priced for the first time in the women’s game, often deal by deal.

• Several sports are professionalizing at once, on the same clock. The WNBA is competing with the NWSL, the PWHL, and others for the same pool of institutional capital, cable and streaming carriage, and sponsor budgets, all inside roughly the same three-to-five-year window.

• There’s far less institutional memory to lean on. A new WNBA commissioner can’t call a predecessor from five commissioners back the way a new NFL commissioner can draw on eighty years of prior rulings, comp structures, and scandal playbooks. Val Ackerman, Donna Orender, Laurel Richie, and Lisa Borders each held a version of this job, but the role itself has changed shape faster than any of their tenures could set a lasting precedent.

What Should the WNBA Prioritize Moving Forward?

The WNBA is entering a crucial execution phase. Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia franchises land between 2028 and 2030. The schedule expands toward 50 games. The Toronto Tempo is the league’s first franchise outside the U.S., with more international games on the table. The new CBA secures revenue sharing with players.

Given that, here’s where I’d tell a potential search committee to focus:

• Operating chops over deal chops. The next five years reward someone who can run a large, complex, global organization. I’d look for CEOs who have managed high-growth consumer companies or global operations.

• Commitment to and deep experience in stakeholder management. “Stakeholder management” sounds like a buzzword, but the commissioner needs to keep strong relationships with team owners, sponsors, broadcast partners, media members, players, the union, fans, potential investors, and the NBA league office. That’s exhausting. The commissioner needs to be excited about and have an appetite for constantly being on the road and in conversation with people.

• A steady hand on precedent. The WNBA’s rulebook and disciplinary standards are still being written in real time. Every ruling on conduct, officiating, or discipline sets precedent the league runs on for the next decade. Consistency matters!

• Ability to drive commercial growth. The $2.2 billion media deal and the current sponsorship book are a good start. The next commissioner needs a real track record of turning attention into revenue: new sponsorship categories, the next media-rights cycle, streaming and direct-to-consumer products, ticket and merchandise growth in new markets like Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

The next commissioner doesn’t need to be anyone’s best friend. They need to run a business that’s bigger, more global, and higher-stakes than the one the league handed off in 2019. Get that hire right, and next July’s boos, if there are any, will be about a bad call, not a bad hire.

I first learned of Lael in late summer 2024 when I read a brief Chicago Tribune article noting that she had just finished her around-the-world cycling quest in Chicago after 108 days on the road (a world record for women).

I started following Lael on Instagram, watched with interest when a documentary about her journey was released in spring 2025, and went to see a screening live last April in Chicago. It was incredible. So incredible that I bought and framed the “Lael Around the World” poster and hung it behind my Peloton for inspiration.

The film showed brutal weather, empty (and sometimes dangerous) roads, and the loneliness of being somewhere unfamiliar and very far from the finish line. But the moments that stuck with me were the small human ones: local families watching her roll through their village in darkness or residents pressing strange snacks and homemade drinks into her hands at the side of the road. Lael, too polite to refuse, ate or drank whatever appeared.

This weekend, Lael starts her second around the world attempt. I’m lucky that she’s starting in Chicago again, so I’ll be there to send her off at 4am on Sunday. She’s trying to finish in 78 days, which would break the men’s record set in 2017. She’ll pedal ~240 miles for each of the days, which she estimates will be 16 hours of riding per day.

A single day of 240 miles of riding is a wild feat. To do it 78 times over is mind boggling. I am all in on Lael, and I hope that you’ll join me in following her.

Lael and humanity vs. the clock and conditions

Most sporting events are organized around a clear separation between the people performing and the people watching. Spectators buy a ticket, sit down, and passively observe the action (though many probably think they’re participants, or at least have some outcome on the game). This is so fundamental to how we think about sports that we barely notice it.

Lael’s ride doesn’t work that way. There’s no opponent to root against. Her enemies are time, terrain, weather, and the internal voice telling her to stop. It’s impossible not to root for her, which means we’re all on the same team. It’s Lael and all of humanity against the clock, against the conditions, against the sheer audacity of what she’s attempting.

And in her case, audience participation is literal. Lael has invited people to join her for stretches of the ride: for 20 miles outside Chicago, an afternoon in a French valley, or the Australian outback. People track her location dot at 2am with the investment usually reserved for someone they know personally. The audience becomes part of the journey.

Lael is going to be riding at a faster clip and making fewer stops this time around, which means she may have to drop riders who can’t hold pace. From the way she talks about it, you can tell she feels genuinely bashful about that.

The best sporting experiences dissolve the line between participant and observer. I’ve seen this most clearly recently with the Savannah Bananas, Unrivaled basketball, and the World Sevens women’s football tournament. But Lael’s ride takes things one step further: she invites people in, and makes them feel like they belong.

The humble badass

When you see Lael in person, it’s obvious: she is full of life. Plein de vie, the French would say. It’s like she can’t quite believe she gets to do this as a job. Even in the middle of a Scottish rainstorm or during hour fourteen of a brutal day. Even while eating something a stranger handed her that she cannot identify. The documentary caught this over and over. She is full of delight in a beautifully refreshing way.

Yet she’s doing something almost no human being on earth could do. Two hundred-plus miles a day, for nearly three months, across multiple continents. The gap between Lael Wilcox and a normal person on a bike is so vast it should feel alienating. But for some reason, it doesn’t. It’s part because of who Lael is, and part because the act of riding a bike is a thing most of us understand. You can trace a line from your Saturday morning ride along the lake to what she’s doing. And there’s a part, however small, of you that thinks, maybe I could do something like that.

Lael embodies the humble badass archetype, and women’s sports is full of them right now. Courtney Dauwalter wins impossibly long ultramarathons while smiling, wearing basketball shorts, eating candy. Jasmin Paris became the first woman to finish the Barkley Marathons, running for 59 consecutive hours through the Tennessee wilderness. Kristen Faulkner won two Olympic golds in road and track cycling in Paris, and somehow still comes across as the most approachable and brilliant person in any room she enters.

It’s no accident that mass participation endurance sports are booming right now - Hyrox, ultra running, gravel cycling, long-distance bikepacking. They offer something that’s gotten harder to find: a shared hard thing, done together, where the only opponent is the version of yourself that wants to quit. The elite and the amateur suffer the same course. The record holder and the first-timer cross the same finish line. To be fair, not many amateurs will be trying an around the world cycle. But I think Lael has challenged us all to think bigger and dream bolder.

I’ll be rooting for Lael the way you root for someone who’s on your team - because she is, and so are you.

Go Lael!!

WNBA All Stars played Team USA at Radio City Music Hall?! How had I never heard of this?

Further research revealed that the WNBA All Stars played Team USA in August 2004 before heading to the Athens Olympics, similar to what happened in 2021 and 2024 before the Olympics. The NY Liberty also played a stretch of six regular season games at Radio City in 2004.

I began noticing other instances of women’s sporting events in unexpected places. On her “A Touch More” podcast, Sue Bird mentioned that she played an outdoor WNBA game in 2010, when the LA Sparks hosted the Seattle Storm at the Home Depot Tennis Center. During her podcast, Billie Jean King talked about the WTA Finals returning to the US and recalled that in her playing/coaching days the tournament was held at Madison Square Garden. Women’s tennis at MSG?! Brilliant!

Meanwhile, the NWSL is holding games at MLB stadiums and Wrigley Field is hosting women’s college volleyball this fall. Athlos, a women’s track exhibition, took over Times Square last year.

These tentpole moments are crucial to the growth of women’s sports, and I would argue, should be expanded upon.They’re moments built around scarcity and spectacle rather than the rhythm of a regular season. The best ones have something at stake, usually prize money, an attendance record, or a championship on the line. When the setting is extraordinary and the result actually matters, you get the kind of event people plan their lives around.

Tentpole events also make real commercial sense in a way that doesn’t get talked about enough. Media rights for a truly special event can look a lot more like pay-per-view boxing than a mid-week league game, where novelty is the value. Premium in-person experiences command premium prices when people feel like they’re part of something that won’t happen again. And the merch alone from a well-branded one-time event can be significant; people want something to prove they were there. For women’s sports leagues still building their commercial infrastructure, a single tentpole done well can accomplish things that fifty regular season games can’t.

So, the question is, how can we add more tentpole events to the women’s sports calendar?

Here are six events I want to put on the table:

1. Athletes Unlimited Softball at Field of Dreams

I’ll admit upfront that I’m an Iowa native, so maybe this one was a bit predictable. But the case basically makes itself: MLB came to Dyersville, Iowa a few years ago for a regular season game, built out the infrastructure - stands, parking, broadcast - and proved that people will travel to a cornfield in eastern Iowa for the right event. MLB and Athletes Unlimited now have a formal partnership, which means the relationships are already in place. I think the ideal is a weekend festival format with all the AUSL teams, under the lights, with the cornfields sitting just beyond the fence. The movie’s iconic line, “If you build it, they will come,” also feels pretty relevant to women’s sports’ current chapter.

2. Unrivaled 1v1 Tournament at Mount Rushmore

Every basketball conversation eventually arrives at the same question: who’s on your Mt. Rushmore? It’s the shorthand used to force people into picking their four greatest players of all time. Some might argue it’s Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Sheryl Swoopes, Maya Moore, A’ja Wilson, or Lisa Leslie.

The beauty of using Mt. Rushmore as a tentpole concept is that the venue does most of the work. Unrivaled, which has already shown it understands how to stage basketball as entertainment rather than just competition, should put on a 1v1 tournament at the base of the monument. Let the players answer the Mt. Rushmore question on the court. Unrivaled could also bring legends of the game to the site to honor the history of the game.

3. Women’s TGL (or Athlos) at Red Rocks

Red Rocks is already one of the most electric venues in the country, with the crowd stacked into the natural amphitheater, sound ricocheting off the rock walls, and the Colorado Rockies as a backdrop. The instinct to build a festival day around it and close with a golf simulation feels right, because the venue is already doing the atmospheric heavy lifting that traditional golf venues can’t. The new women’s version of TGL, which is already designed as a broadcast-first, entertainment-driven product, would thrive in a setting that gives it what it otherwise has to manufacture.

I could also see Athlos working at Red Rocks. The track format and the performance energy are a natural fit for an outdoor amphitheater. Either way, the goal is the same: use the venue to make the sport feel larger than it normally does.

4. NY Liberty Running It Back at Billie Jean King Tennis Center

The Liberty played an outdoor game at Arthur Ashe Stadium back in 2008 and over 19,000 fans attended. Now they’re one of the best teams in the WNBA, and New York is paying attention in a new way. It’s time to run it back at Center Court.

Arthur Ashe is already one of the few venues that carries the full weight of women’s sports history — you don’t have to explain why it matters, you just have to show up. Close the roof, make it a night game, serve the Honey Deuces, let Ellie the Elephant have her moment. The Liberty fanbase would sell it out before the court was finished being installed.

5. USWNT Friendly on the National Mall

I lived in DC after college graduation, where playing kickball on the National Mall was a rite of passage. The Mall is one of those spaces that somehow belongs to everyone at once - civic, casual, and grand in equal measure.

The USWNT is one of the few sports properties in the country that genuinely transcends its own sport — the audience for a match on the Mall would include plenty of people who don’t think of themselves as soccer fans at all, which is exactly the point. You’re not trying to convert anyone. You’re putting something great in a setting where showing up already means something.

6. PWHL Game at the Rose Bowl

This one has a full-circle quality that’s too good to ignore. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena is where the 1999 USWNT won the World Cup — one of the defining moments in the history of women’s sports, in one of the most iconic venues in American athletics. Bring the PWHL there, build a rink, play a game under the California sky. The NHL proved with the Winter Classic that outdoor hockey doesn’t need cold weather to work, and they backed that up again this year with a game in Florida. The contrast is actually the story: ice in a sun-drenched stadium, a winter sport in a place built for New Year’s Day pageantry, women’s hockey at the kind of scale it has never been seen at before. The image alone is worth building the event around.

The thread connecting all of these tentpole events is pretty simple: women’s sports are most interesting when they’re willing to be ambitious about the stage. The hat in my fiancée’s closet is proof that this has always been true. Someone decided that basketball belonged at Radio City Music Hall, and they were right. We should keep building on that foundation.

When Hilary Knight scored with two minutes left to tie the game, the bar lost its mind. The goal itself was incredible, but so was the energy in the room - strangers grabbing each other, immersed in the feeling that everyone there had been waiting for exactly that moment and couldn’t quite believe it had arrived. Check the video:

On the plane back to Chicago the next day, I found myself thinking about what that room in Wilka’s represented. A game that was an instant classic and a community that is real, passionate, and ready to be served by something more than what currently exists.

Women’s sports has spent the last decade building the visible layer of the ecosystem: expansion teams, record attendance, media deals, viral moments. That work is real and it matters. But the room at Wilka’s made me think about the invisible layer — the infrastructure powering the industry.

At Bloom, much of my work sits at the intersection of talent, capital, and organizational design. The more time I spend inside the ecosystem, the clearer it becomes: women’s sports still lacks critical infrastructure. These six ideas are the gaps I see most often. Together, they form the beginnings of a more complete system: one that better serves fans, athletes, teams, and leagues.

1. The Women’s Sports Fan Operating System

Defining the problem: Women’s sports fans are different from most sports fans in one important way: they don’t live in a single silo. A serious fan might follow the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, USWNT, and NCAA simultaneously — plus individual athletes across podcasts, Substacks, and social media. They’re cross-league and mission-driven by default. The technology stack doesn’t reflect that. Following women’s sports seriously right now means living in fifteen tabs, with no single place that knows who you are or what you care about. For me personally, I’m in three Slack groups, two Discord chats, countless text threads (including one called WNBA TALK AND TEA ☕), and have countless Substack/podcast subscription.

What the idea is: A fan layer that sits on top of everything, aggregating content across leagues, syncing schedules, personalizing by player and team, integrating ticketing and travel, and building community threads. Less a new app and more an identity layer for fandom. The killer feature is an AI agent that functions like a well-connected friend: “I know your favorite WNBA player is Kate Martin. She plays in DC next weekend. Two of your friends are going. Flights are $150. Want to make it a trip?”

How we bring this to life: The vision is a single home for the women’s sports fan. In practice, it starts narrower: one sport, one city, one deeply loyal fan base. Build the product around WNBA fans first, prove the personalization and community mechanics, then expand horizontally across leagues. The cross-league fan is the target user, but you earn their trust one sport at a time.

The business model: Subscription and affiliate revenue — fans pay for the premium experience, and the platform takes a cut on tickets, travel, and merch transacted through it. As the user base grows, sponsorship and brand partnership revenue follows.

2. The Women’s Sports Creator Network

Defining the problem: The narrative layer of women’s sports is one of its greatest strengths and most underleveraged assets. There are hundreds of podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, and TikTok accounts run by people who cover women’s sports with real expertise and genuine passion. Most of them are doing it mostly alone: under-monetized, signing partnerships individually, rebuilding production infrastructure from scratch. The audience is fragmented across dozens of independent operations that don’t have the scale to attract the brands or the budgets that the collective audience deserves.

What the idea is: A creator network that centralizes infrastructure without swallowing creators whole. Bundled ad sales, shared production support, cross-promotion flywheels, and revenue sharing — while creators retain equity in their own work and keep their voice. The goal isn’t to build one big brand. It’s to make fifty existing brands collectively more powerful than they are alone. Men’s sports solved this with The Ringer, Barstool, and Overtime. The women’s sports version should be built differently — creator-owned, mission-aligned, designed to lift the whole ecosystem.

How we bring this to life: Start with the ten most established independent creators in the space and build the ad sales infrastructure around them first. Prove that bundling their audiences unlocks brand deals that none of them could close alone. Then expand the network, add production support, and introduce the cross-promotion mechanics that turn ten loyal audiences into one interconnected one.

The business model Revenue share on bundled advertising, with the network taking a percentage of deals it sources. Over time, direct subscription products, live events, and branded content partnerships add additional revenue streams.

3 — 6. The Women’s Sports Financial Stack

Women athletes are entering a moment of real earnings growth. Salaries are rising, and NIL has opened new opportunities for high school and college athletes. Yet the financial infrastructure built to support those earnings is almost nonexistent.

When I say “financial stack,” I mean the layered infrastructure that turns earnings into stability, stability into ownership, and ownership into generational wealth. In mature industries, that stack is invisible: insurance products, credit access, investment vehicles, and wealth architecture all sit quietly beneath the surface. In women’s sports, earnings are rising — but the stack beneath them is still underbuilt. The next four ideas are four layers of that stack: stability, capital, ownership, and wealth.

Layer 1: Stability — The Athlete Insurance & Income Platform

Defining the problem: Most professional women athletes are living with significant financial volatility even as the industry around them booms. Non-guaranteed contracts, bonus-driven income that can vanish with an injury, NIL revenue that’s branding-dependent, and sponsorship deals structured for optics rather than career planning. Maternity decisions intersect directly with peak earning windows in ways the current system doesn’t accommodate at all. Traditional insurance markets aren’t built for any of this — they’re calibrated for stable W-2 earners, not athletes with position-specific injury risk, international income, and compressed career windows.

What the idea is: An athlete-focused platform offering injury income replacement, maternity bridge coverage, NIL revenue protection, career interruption policies, and bonus smoothing across earning windows. Not a traditional insurance product with athletic branding on it - I envision a platform built from scratch around the actual financial profile of a women’s athlete, with underwriting models that reflect position-specific injury rates, league CBA structures, and career length distributions.

How we bring this to life: The vision is a world where every professional women’s athlete has access to the same financial floor that makes risk-taking possible — the ability to sign a shorter deal, take a year for maternity, or walk away from a toxic situation without financial ruin. In practice, you start with one league, one product, and tight distribution through a players association. Build trust with athletes first. Expand products and leagues once the underwriting model is proven.

The business model Premium-based insurance revenue, with the platform acting as either the carrier or a managing general agent distributing through existing insurers. Employer and league partnerships are a second revenue channel, because teams and leagues have an interest in athlete financial stability too.

Layer 2: Capital — The Athlete Bank

Defining the problem: Many female athletes are treated by traditional lenders the way banks treat gig workers: short-term contracts, variable income, overseas earnings, and injury risk all get underwritten as red flags rather than as features of a structured professional career. It makes mortgages harder, business loans harder, and credit more expensive — even for athletes whose contract value would clearly support it. As salaries rise across leagues, the gap between what athletes earn and what the financial system will recognize becomes harder to ignore.

What the idea is: A specialized lending platform — or niche financial institution — that underwrites against league contracts and historical earnings, offers contract-backed lines of credit, supports international payment complexity for players going overseas, and provides injury-protected lending products. The goal isn’t to replace traditional banking entirely, but rather to build the capital infrastructure that treats a WNBA contract like structured, predictable professional income.

How we bring this to life: The clearest starting point is mortgage lending — it’s the most visible and frustrating gap, and a solved product in every other market. Build the underwriting model for league contracts, close the first cohort of mortgages, and use those stories to build distribution through players associations and agents. Expand into business loans and lines of credit once the core credit model is established.

The business model: Interest income on loans, fee income on financial products, and over time, a broader suite of financial services for a captive, underserved, and growing customer base.

Layer 3: Ownership — Micro-Investing Collectives and SPVs

Defining the problem: Women’s sports has extraordinary investor energy right now, but the ownership infrastructure doesn’t match it. Women’s sports has interested capital floating around, looking for a home. We are leaving money on the table!

Investing in a team still requires large minimum checks, insider relationships, and long holding periods. That structure concentrates ownership in a narrow set of hands and keeps athletes, fans, and smaller aligned investors on the outside — exactly the people who most understand and care about the asset they’d be buying.

What the idea is: A structured platform for smaller investors to participate in minority stakes, for athletes to co-invest in expansion teams, and for family offices to syndicate more efficiently. The underlying instruments — SPVs, participation notes, pooled vehicles — already exist in other asset classes. The work is building the infrastructure that makes them accessible and legible in the context of women’s sports team ownership, where deal flow, diligence, and holding structures all have their own quirks.

How we bring this to life: The vision is a women’s sports ownership class that looks like the fan base: diverse, mission-aligned, and financially committed to the long-term. The first step is identifying the expansion moments — new NWSL or WNBA franchises, stadium development deals — where minority stakes are available and the SPV structure can be applied. Build one clean, well-documented deal. Then build the platform around the repeat behavior.

The business model Management fees and carried interest on investment vehicles, plus transaction fees on deal flow. As the platform matures, advisory and structuring fees on the deals it helps originate.

Layer 4: Wealth — The Multi-Family Office for Women Athletes

Defining the problem: Many female athletes are about to make meaningful money for the first time — but in windows that are shorter and more compressed than most wealth management infrastructure is designed for. Most financial advisors aren’t equipped for international tax complexity, career-length investment horizons, or the specific post-career transition challenges women athletes face. The athletes who most need sophisticated wealth architecture are often the least well-served by the existing system, which was built around clients with longer earning windows and more conventional income profiles.

What the idea is: A multi-family office built specifically for women athletes, offering tax planning across international play, investment strategy calibrated to career length, private market access, estate planning, philanthropic structuring, and real pathways into post-career board and advisory roles. Not wealth management with athletic branding on it — a firm that has built genuine expertise in the specific financial complexity of a women’s athlete’s career arc.

How we bring this to life The vision is a generation of retired women athletes who are owners, board members, and investors — not just brand ambassadors. That starts with getting to athletes early, before peak earnings arrive, and building relationships that last through retirement and beyond. Distribution through agents and players associations again; the trust networks in women’s sports are tight, and reputation travels fast.

The business model Assets under management fees, financial planning retainers, and over time, carried interest on private market co-investments the firm helps source for clients.

Who Wants to Be a Women’s Sports Entrepreneur?

These six ideas are a start, not a complete map. Some of them will attract venture capital. Many of them won’t — and that’s fine. Not every important company needs a unicorn outcome to matter. What women’s sports needs right now is builders who care about moving the ecosystem forward, not just capturing the upside of a hot market.

The infrastructure layer doesn’t get built in one moment. It gets built company by company, product by product, by people who looked at a gap and decided it was worth closing. If you’re one of those people — or you’re thinking about becoming one — I’d love to talk. This is the work I care most about, and I’m always up for the conversation.

Players like Megan Rapinoe and Trinity Rodman are ceiling raisers; with their explosive play and bold personalities, they blow the roof off our conception of what’s possible. Floor raisers like Tierna Davidson and Sauerbrunn herself set training standards, anchor culture, and are the heartbeat of the team.

I would argue that the ceiling and floor analogy is applicable to the entire women’s sports ecosystem.

Ceiling raisers are the New York Liberty building a new $80M practice facility or Kansas City Current’s purpose-built stadium or the Golden State Valkyries $70M in partnership revenue in Year 1. These are all incredible signs of progress that are changing the trajectory of women’s sports and driving investor and fan interest alike.

But for the health of the entire ecosystem, we need more women’s sports floor raisers. We need more of what I think of as “the middle class of women’s sports.”

What the middle class means

To be clear, building a stronger middle class is not about lowering standards or revisiting the mistakes of failed leagues from the past. Many of those efforts left battle scars defined by frustration, instability, and unmet expectations.

Building the middle class is about two things:

1. Setting clear, realistic expectations. Not every team needs to be a global brand, and not every league needs to chase a high valuation; many can succeed by offering stability, development, and meaningful competition within a defined scope

2. Understanding where investment has the biggest marginal impact, and executing accordingly. This means prioritizing essential inputs: reliable salaries, consistent scheduling, and basic operational stability.

A healthy middle class serves:

• Athletes, by extending careers and widening pathways

• Cities, by creating durable community assets in more markets

• Staff, by offering real, long-term careers

• Fans, by making women’s sports local, habitual, and accessible

• Media, by increasing inventory, stories, and continuity

So what’s required to build the middle class?

In a previous post on women’s sports Premium Minor League, I mentioned many of the considerations that are the same when building a robust middle class.

Those five pillars are:

1. Athlete employment through local partnerships, not to be confused with side hustles

One of the defining features of the middle class is that athletes are able to build futures alongside their playing careers, without being stretched thin or forced into constant side hustles.

In practice, this could look like structured partnerships between teams and local employers. Athletes work limited, predictable hours in roles that build skills across marketing, operations, community engagement, data, and partnerships, while maintaining rigorous but accommodating training schedules. Teams and local employers can jointly contribute to an athlete’s total compensation.

For athletes who will not play at the very top level indefinitely, this model provides continuity. It allows them to stay in the sport longer, remain financially stable, and transition more smoothly into post-playing careers, many times within sports itself.

2. Facilities that are shared and monetizable

Middle-class women’s sports relies less on iconic facilities and more on high-usage ones. The most effective teams are often those whose training fields, stadiums, or clubhouses double as community assets, hosting youth programs, pickup games, camps, and local events when the team isn’t using them.

It’s a common complaint in the WNBA that teams practice in public recreation centers or lack dedicated locker rooms. But for the middle class, shared facilities, when done well, can actually be an advantage.

When facilities are shared and accessible, they justify their existence more easily, attract more partners, and create daily touchpoints between women’s sports and the communities they serve.

3. Mission-aligned investors with patient capital

At the middle-class level, the most important role investors play is underwriting stability. These are investors who understand that success may look like steady attendance, controlled costs, and a team that exists year over year, rather than a rapid push toward national relevance and a certain valuation.

In many cases, the return shows up in community impact, brand alignment, civic pride, and the long-term option value of being early in a growing ecosystem. That’s why finding investors with local roots and a genuine stake in the city is crucial.

4. City engagement that treats teams as community assets

Cities and local governments must be active stakeholders in a middle class team’s story. Women’s teams thrive when they are integrated into city life: partnered with schools, universities, local nonprofits, and employers; visible in civic programming; and recognized as part of a city’s cultural fabric.

This is also where geography matters. A healthy middle class means that professional women’s sports is not concentrated in a few coastal hubs. The long-term vision should be simple and ambitious: every metropolitan area in the top 100 by population has at least one professional women’s sports option. This past summer, Bloom Sports Partners intern Henry Deriso mapped the top metro areas to existing sports teams in that city. Looking at the spreadsheet, the gaps were immediately visible. Markets like Baltimore, Memphis, Nashville, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis stand out as clear contenders. The list could go on.

5. Shared competition structures

Finally, none of this works in isolation. Teams do not survive on their own. They need to be part of leagues or federated systems that provide consistent competition, shared standards, and cost discipline. These structures allow expectations to be set realistically and enforced collectively.

Leagues coordinate competitions, make participation viable, and provide shared services for their teams. It’s easy to dismiss the value of a strong league office, until you see what happens without one.

Raising the floor

The middle class of women’s sports is, at its core, a floor-raising project. It’s about building enough teams, in enough cities, with enough structure, that participation doesn’t depend on being exceptional or lucky. A robust middle class gives more athletes a reason to stay in their sport, more cities something to invest in, and more fans a team that feels like it belongs to them. Building the middle class is about creating the conditions where excellence can show up again and again, across generations and geographies.

As part of the sports management program planning process, I had the chance to assemble a syllabus for a future class on The Business of Women’s Sports.

Building a women’s sports syllabus dovetails perfectly with my work at Bloom Sports Partners, where I lead executive search processes across teams, leagues, and adjacent organizations, a majority of which are in women’s sports. Every day, I’m thinking about and evaluating the skills, experiences, and competencies that future women’s sports leaders will need.

The syllabus became a natural extension of those conversations: a place to articulate what leadership in this space requires and where the next generation should be focusing now.

Making an Opaque Path More Clear

A career in women’s sports is far more feasible today than it was even five years ago. Roles are more established, salaries are more competitive, and pathways are more clear. And the women’s sports industry itself, from leagues to facilities to brands, has matured into a place where someone can build a career for the long haul.

There are still challenges, though. The industry remains relatively opaque and there are far more interested people than available roles. Future leaders need to be prepared for the realities of a fast-moving ecosystem, one that combines traditional sports structures with the entrepreneurial energy of an emerging industry.

Learning Objectives: The Business of Women’s Sports

When I sat down to structure the course, I started by asking: What would I want every rising leader in women’s sports to know before stepping into the industry?

The result is a set of learning objectives that anchor the class and serve as a roadmap for what it takes to lead effectively in this environment.

Understanding the Ecosystem

Leaders must understand how the industry actually works:

• How the NWSL and WNBA operate, govern, and grow

• How growth leagues (Athletes Unlimited, PWHL, Unrivaled) and tour-based models create value

• How various ownership structures, like single-entity, franchise, and community-owned, shape decision-making

• The economics of expansion, facilities, staffing, and collective bargaining agreements

• Facilities development and venue management as differentiators in women’s sports

Building Commercial Acumen

The commercial infrastructure of women’s sports is improving, but still largely in its nascent phase. Future leaders must be fluent in the revenue engines of women’s sports:

• Media rights valuation and what drives pricing today

• Sponsorship packaging and pricing strategies

• Ticketing, premium experiences, and demand modeling

• Stadium monetization and community-integrated venue concepts

Refining Leadership and Management

Women’s sports leaders must build great working environments and chart both a long-term vision and short-term priorities for the organization. In practice, great leaders do a few things exceptionally well:

• Set clear priorities and stick to them

• Manage up to ownership and leadership

• Build and manage a P&L that reflects both long and short-term priorities

• Hire and retain exceptional talent

• Provide regular feedback, support, and stability

These fundamentals are often overlooked - and they seem a lot easier on paper than in practice. But this is where great leaders stand out.

The Course Structure (the syllabus itself!)

Once the learning objectives crystalized, the next step was designing a course that would allow students to explore each of the objectives in depth. The result is an eight-week experience that mirrors the rhythm and complexity of the industry itself. Each week tackles a different facet of the ecosystem, creating a layered, cumulative understanding of the space:

Week 1: The Business Case for Women’s Sports

Week 2: Established (10+ Seasons) Women’s Sports Leagues

Week 3: Growth Women’s Sports Leagues

Week 4: Media Rights and Women’s Sports

Week 5: Brand Investment in Women’s Sports

Week 6: Purpose-Built Facilities and Stadium Monetization

Week 7: Managing a Women’s Sports Front Office

Week 8: Creating the Future of Women’s Sports

Each week blends instruction, case work, live roleplays, and conversations with industry leaders.

Live Simulations

To mirror real-world decision-making, the course includes role plays and simulations based on actual scenarios:

• A mock WNBA draft, with students playing the GM and AGM of a franchise

• A role-play where you’re a team president deciding whether to fire your GM

• An exercise advising ownership on how to vote on a proposed NWSL salary cap change

These scenarios are pulled directly from interview questions I’ve asked or live decisions I’ve seen leaders wrestle with in my work at Bloom.

Assignments

To round out the experience, the coursework pushes students to synthesize what they’ve learned and apply it to industry-relevant problems. Students complete three individual assignments and one group project:

• Growth Leagues Analysis: Choose one women’s sports growth league and make a case for its commercial and sporting potential.

• Ownership Model Comparison: Analyze single-entity, single funder, franchise, and fan/public ownership models across these factors: governance, commercial opportunity, expansion, staffing, competition scheduling, and player contracts.

• Brand Investment Memo: As Coca-Cola’s VP of Sports and Entertainment Marketing, allocate a $10M annual budget across women’s sports. Identify target leagues, customer segments, activation strategies, and athlete partners.

For the group assignment, groups of three students will prepare a 15-slide expansion bid for an NWSL or WNBA franchise in a city of their choosing, covering:

• Ownership group and capital

• Market demographics

• Financial projections

• Stadium and practice facility plans

• Community engagement

• Youth development

• Player experience

Building the Pipeline on Purpose

An eight-week course can give students the mental models and vocabulary to understand the industry. I hope this course is the first part in building something even bigger: a deliberate women’s sports leadership pipeline. As I finished the syllabus, I found myself thinking both about the students in the classroom and the future executives that women’s sports will depend on. If we want women’s sports to flourish, we need structured, intentional pathways for developing the leaders who will guide the next decade.

I want to build and cultivate that pipeline.

That means creating environments that accelerate preparation:

• Cohort-based programs for rising stars

• 1:1 coaching for operators preparing for VP, GM, President, and Commissioner-track roles

• Interview and case preparation tailored to women’s leagues

• Skill-building modules on media rights, expansion, analytics, culture-building, and crisis management

• Live simulations that mirror real executive pressure

• Exposure to investors, brand partners, agents, and operators

• A trusted network that grows into a future leadership class

Women’s sports deserve a deep, diverse bench: leaders ready not just to manage growth, but to shape it. If we build the pathways intentionally, we’ll shape the trajectory of an entire industry.

Now who wants to enroll in the course?!

AND1 Mixtape was my first foray into fun-first sports properties: ones that took an existing sport, broke the rules (literally or figuratively), and created something that people love to watch, even if purists rolled their eyes.

Traditional sports work because they feel serious. There are stakes and consequences. If you lose, it matters. They showcase the best athletes in the world, and fans buy in because they’re watching a pure meritocracy: skill, discipline, and pressure colliding in real time. That sense of awe and consequence scratches something deep in the human brain: What happens when everything is on the line?

Fun-first sports are different. They strip away that tension: there are no championships, no careers on the line, no heartbreak montages. On paper, they shouldn’t work at all. And yet… people love them.

That’s because they fill a different set of human needs. They deliver belonging instead of rivalry. Laughter instead of anxiety. Surprise instead of precision. They let fans feel like participants rather than spectators. Fun-first properties tap the part of us that fell in love with sports before we cared who won: the joy of play itself.

In this article, I’ll give a framework for thinking about what makes fun-first sports properties successful and offer some ideas on how these concepts can be applied to women’s sports.

Spoiler alert: I think there’s a huge opportunity here.

A Matrix for Alternative Format Properties

To get a better grasp of the elements of alternative format properties, let’s consider this 2x2 matrix, split according to two factors: rule/format fidelity and the mainstream status of the athletes.

X-axis: Mainstream status of the athletes

• Left: Recognizable or mainstream athletes (Olympians, pros, or current stars).

• Right: Cult or niche athletes with potential to be sensations

Y-axis: Rule / format fidelity

• Top: Close to the competitive structure of the original game (same scoring, refereeing, but smaller teams, shorter games, a few rule changes).

• Bottom: Loosely based on the sport, heavy on entertainment, gimmicks, or showmanship.

Together, this creates four quadrants and four archetypes:

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to analyze five alternative format, fun-first sports properties (though dozens more exist). Here is a quick summary of each:

Note: World TeamTennis might be the least well-known of the options above. I’m partial to the league because my first job in sports was working for the St. Louis Aces, a franchise in WTT, in summer 2011. Below is a grainy picture of the Aces staff working Duck Hunting theme night.

WTT is no longer in operation, but it was a co-ed professional league founded by Billie Jean King in 1973 that reimagined traditional tennis into a fast-paced team format, with top men and women’s players competing side by side for cumulative points rather than individual sets. I always say that WTT was 50 years too early!

If we were to chart the five properties according to the matrix dimensions, we might come up with something like this:

So, what makes fun-first properties successful?

The properties above cover different sports and different decades, but have the same underlying playbook: a kind of anti-seriousness that’s actually very intentional.

Here’s what else they got right:

1. They made the audience the star

The Globetrotters didn’t just play basketball - they played with the crowd. The Bananas dance with fans on the field. Dude Perfect’s trick shots land better when a dad in Idaho can recreate one in his driveway.

2. They break rules on purpose

The Bananas ditched traditional scoring and banned bunts. AND1 rewarded showtime. WTT rewrote tennis so men and women played together for a single team score. These changes weren’t gimmicks; they were product design decisions.

3. They sell feelings, not formats

Nobody watches Dude Perfect for athleticism. They watch because it feels good. The Globetrotters sell nostalgia. AND1 sold swagger. The Bananas sell belonging. Fun-first properties build emotion into the product.

4. They use scarcity as strategy

The Bananas tour. The Globetrotters tour. WTT’s season lasted only three weeks. Every competition feels rare and distinctive. Scarcity creates demand.

5. They build characters, not just rosters

Every fun-first property has unforgettable characters: Meadowlark Lemon, Hot Sauce, the Savannah Bananas guy in the yellow tux. Characters lean into a role and become beloved for it. In a fun-first format, you can use the team to build stars, rather than the stars to build a team.

How are these concepts already showing up in women’s sports?

To be clear, women athletes have been included in the five properties mentioned above: softball icon Jocelyn Alo and women’s baseball star Kelsie Whitmore have suited up for the Savannah Bananas; multiple women’s basketball players have played for the Harlem Globetrotters; and the entire premise of WTT was promoting gender equity through co-ed, team-based competitions. But none of them are women’s sports-specific.

Some women’s sports properties have have shown flashes of rule/format creativity: think the WNBA’s four-point circles at the All Star game, Athletes Unlimited’s individual and team scoring systems, and Unrivaled’s target score ending. But the experiments often stop at “slightly different” or teeter too far into nerd alert.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for a women’s sports-specific, fun-first property that leans into an alternative format.

What could that look like?

Women’s sports have spent the past five-plus decades proving their legitimacy. The joy has mostly come from the intensity of the games, with the novelty reserved for timeouts, the Jumbotron, and the halftime show: Red Panda on the unicycle, the Flex Cam, the T-shirt cannon.

But what if joy was the strategy? What if a women’s property leaned into entertainment without apology, showcasing elite athletes in a format built for delight?

Here’s how I would approach it:

The game / format

Choose a sport that thrives in short bursts and tight spaces. Keep the core of the game recognizable but inject rhythm and spectacle:

• Games under an hour

• Music during play

• Mic’d-up players

• Fans become participants

• Bonus points for creative celebrations or trick plays

• Stoppages in play to add spontaneity and creativity

• Rotating teams so every event feels new

Think of it less as a league and more as a traveling festival.

• A six-city summer tour.

• 3,000 to 5,000-seat venues.

• Night-game lighting.

• Each city gets a theme

It’s the energy of a concert combined with the authenticity of a sport.

The athletes

Recruit from three pools:

1. Recent college stars with huge social followings who aren’t playing professionally (think Cavinder twins, Livvy Dunne, etc.).

2. Former pros with name recognition who want to compete without the grind of a full season.

3. Crossover creators with specific skills (dribbling, trick shots, etc)

Let them bring their full personalities: celebrations, rivalries, humor, and flair.

The business model

This wouldn’t replace leagues like the WNBA or NWSL; it would complement them, giving players another stage and fans another entry point. Think of it as a more accessible way to win over the casual fan.

A shorter touring calendar reduces costs. Scarcity drives demand. Sponsors shift from corporate logos to lifestyle brands: Red Bull, Celsius, Spotify, Glossier.

Content lives first on TikTok and YouTube, where every mic’d-up moment can become a viral clip before the next tour stop.

Bringing it all together

When you look at the sports that break through culturally, they rarely do it by being the most technically sound. They do it by making people feel something.

The AND1 Mixtape Tour did that. The Savannah Bananas do that. Even the Harlem Globetrotters still do it, nearly a century later. Women’s sports have earned the right to do the same—to create their own version of joy, not just mirror the seriousness that once excluded them.

The next leap for women’s sports will be a traveling, joyful, personality-driven show that blurs the line between sport and theater.

Something that makes the crowd laugh, dance, and care. Something that reminds us why we fell in love with sports in the first place—not because it was serious, but because it was fun.

Over the past five years, investment in women’s sports has exploded, with team valuations skyrocketing to match the interest. It is truly beyond anything I could have imagined when I wrote and delivered a talk called Women’s Sports Should Give You FOMO as a second-year MBA student at Stanford GSB in early 2020.

But lately, I’ve been wondering: how can we make it as easy as possible for more people to become investors and owners in women’s sports properties?

Family offices, institutional investors, and high-net-worth individuals are all ready to write checks into women’s sports. And it’s not just investors in the obvious major markets like New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. I’ve spoken with people who want to bring professional women’s sports to places like Burlington, Madison, Charleston, and Des Moines - cities with civic pride, disposable income, and fans hungry for something of their own.

The challenge is that the lowest-hanging, most traditional routes (buying into the NWSL or WNBA, for example) are difficult to penetrate. As recent expansion processes have shown, the capital requirements are steep and the governance process is complex.

If we want the women’s sports movement to keep growing, potential investors need right-sized, purpose-built inventory to consider.

Enter premium minor league.

What is “premium minor league”?

“Minor league” hasn’t always had the best connotation. The term conjures images of half-empty arenas, long bus rides, and rosters full of athletes chasing a dream rather than living it.

But a new generation of organizations has started to change that story, setting a powerful example for what a premium minor league could look like.

Take the Portland (Maine) Heart of Pines, Vermont Green, and Oakland Roots. These soccer clubs have built passionate communities through storytelling, design, and values-based identity. The Dayton Dragons in High-A minor league baseball have the longest active sellout streak in pro sports at 1,600 games and average over 8,000 fans per game. I recently read a fascinating article about how minor league baseball teams like the Rocket City Trash Pandas and Durham Bulls have turned clever branding and local humor into national merchandise success.

But here’s the catch: these examples are almost exclusively in men’s leagues. It’s hard for me to think of a minor league women’s sports example that has caught fire like the Lehigh Valley IronPigs or Savannah Bananas. The Minnesota Aurora women’s soccer club is probably the closest (they are community-owned and have epic merch), but they compete in a pre-professional league. Our best comparison point is in smaller-market women’s college teams, like South Carolina or Iowa women’s basketball and Wisconsin or Nebraska volleyball.

Herein lies the opportunity: what makes a premium minor league great are the exact same things that make women’s sports great: purpose, community, and FUN.

Here’s my definition of premium minor league: professionally run, community-rooted sports properties that deliver major-league standards in a right-sized package in markets ripe for an anchor.

Five core principles define the premium minor league model:

1. Professional Standards, Scaled Intelligently

Players are treated and compensated as professionals, but budgets are lean and efficient. It’s about sustainability and fairness, not flash.

2. Community as Strategy, Not Marketing

Fans are co-creators in the club’s identity and purpose. They have a hand in creating the team name, crest/brand, and traditions. Fans become known entities to each other - and form genuine connection over a shared interest in the club. The club becomes part of the civic fabric through supporters’ groups, youth programs, and local partnerships with small businesses.

3. Premium Fan Experience in a Small Setting

Stadiums are intimate (3,000–8,000 seats), the experience is curated, and the energy is consistent. A packed, joyful crowd makes for can’t miss live entertainment.

“Premium” is great food from local favorites, solid acoustics, clear sight lines, and proximity to the action. Pregames are electric, chants are unifying, and experience is not contingent on the game’s outcome (though winning never hurts!)

4. Authentic Branding and Merch That Travels

The brand tells a story that resonates locally and sells nationally. The crest looks good on a hoodie; the merch becomes a signal of identity.

5. Player Access and Personality

Fans know the players and their stories. They see the players at the grocery store and the farmer’s market. Access, transparency, and connection turn casual attendees into lifelong supporters.

How to Build a Women’s Sports Premium Minor League Ecosystem

A premium minor league can’t rely on vibes alone. For this model to thrive, several things have to go right by design. Media rights revenue will be limited at first, so gameday, merch, and local partnerships must carry the load. And those depend entirely on one thing: getting butts in seats.

Getting butts in seats comes down to five things.

Local owners with commitment and connections

Ownership is everything. The investors who will succeed aren’t chasing vanity projects, but rather see ownership as stewardship. They live locally, hire locally, and make decisions through the lens of community impact. The best groups will blend local energy with operational experience. My vision is to open women’s sports majority ownership opportunities for civic-minded, entrepreneurial women in 50 US cities.

Stadiums

Vibe beats size. Stadiums in the 4,000–6,000 range feel electric when full and flexible for other events. Ownership groups should pursue stadium renovations and builds that open up opportunities to collaborate with local school systems and youth clubs, as well as unlock other revenue streams for events.

Grassroots engagement that’s fan-led

Community-building isn’t an event; it’s an operating system. Premium minor league clubs will win through consistency: being visible every week, listening to fans, and empowering supporter culture. Whether it’s partnerships with local craft breweries or jerseys created by local artists, everything ladders up to belonging.

Player access and care

In this model, access to players is the differentiator, but care is the prerequisite. Fair pay, safe housing, predictable schedules, and professional travel matter deeply. Fans can tell when players are treated right; it shapes the culture from the inside out.

Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs)

It might sound bureaucratic, but collective bargaining agreements create stability. Minimum pay, benefits, and grievance mechanisms make leagues credible and sustainable. CBAs aren’t just good for players; they de-risk investment by clarifying expectations.

The Opportunity in Premium Minor League

If the top leagues are the skyscrapers of women’s sports, the premium minor league is the main street, or the middle class, if you will. It’s approachable, walkable, and full of character - a place where ownership is personal and fandom feels human.

Building this middle class isn’t about competing with the majors. It’s about creating a sustainable bridge: more teams, more investors, more players, and more stories that belong to more people.

The future of women’s sports will be built in the stands of cities that believe, led by local owners who see sports not as spectacle, but as shared identity. Markets like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Providence, and Boise have scores of women’s sports fans who are not currently being fully served. I have strong conviction that these fans will show up and show out if given the chance.

That’s the promise and the opportunity of women’s sports premium minor league.

I’ve been fascinated by the CoS role since I read Gatekeepers and have paid close attention as the role has proliferated in the private sector, from massive Fortune 500 companies to Series A startups. Whenever I see a CoS role posted, I always take a look at (and download!) the job description to see what’s under their remit. The role can take many different forms, and it’s often misunderstood.

I now work in the sports industry, with an emphasis on women’s sports. I’ve seen more and more sports organizations hiring for a chief of staff in the past three to four years. It makes sense: sports organizations, especially women’s sports teams and leagues, are increasingly complex and multi-layered.

Inspired by Gatekeepers, I spoke to five sports CoS across teams, leagues, events, and adjacencies to better understand their backgrounds, experiences, and role. A big thanks to my interviewees, who were generous with their time and reflections:

• Saara Hassoun, Minnesota Aurora (women’s soccer team)

• Lauren Esrig, Golden State Valkyries (women’s basketball team)

• Jess McEntee, League One Volleyball (women’s volleyball league)

• Ben Tenbrink, Kansas City ‘26 World Cup (men’s soccer event)

• Kelsey Smith, Greenfly (Series B short-form media company with a sports focus)

Understanding the Chief of Staff Role

The sports CoS responsibilities will vary based on the size, structure, and purpose of the organization. A CoS at a team is preparing for a weekly (or multiple times per week) gameday, while a CoS at a sports adjacency can have oversight into product, customer success, and engineering teams.

That being said, there are five pillars that are largely consistent across all sport CoS roles:

1. Strategic thought partner and right hand to the CEO / Commissioner / President. The most important ingredient for success in a CoS role is trust and communication between the CoS and the principal. A CoS should act as a force multiplier and make a principal’s life easier, full stop.

As detailed in Gatekeepers, that looks like serving as a buffer to protect and prioritize the principal’s time and energy, helping them organize their decision-making, and ensuring they are prepared for all meetings and that follow ups are executed appropriately. The principal is likely bouncing from back-to-back-to-back meetings to a cross-country flight to a conference to a media appearance. The CoS acts in the background to make sure the principal is prepared and making the best use of their most precious resource: time.

The CoS should work with the principal to:

• Shape priorities; turn vision into a sequenced, resource-aware plan.

• Prep decisions (one-pager with context, 2–3 options, tradeoffs, recommended path, owners, next steps).

• Anticipate and get in front of reputational and political ripple effects across owners, athletes, media, and partners.

Ben Tenbrink from FIFA World Cup ‘26 Kansas City told me that he looks at his CEO’s calendar 3-4 weeks in advance to understand high-stakes moments (e.g., governor/mayor meetings) and start pre-briefs, stakeholder maps, and follow-up plans.

2. Board and leadership team communication and alignment. In an organization with multiple C-level executives and a Board of Directors or Governors, the CoS can act as a connective tissue between parties. The CoS has visibility into each of the organization’s functional areas and can ensure each area is represented, while balancing transparency, momentum, and politics.

The CoS should:

• Build the annual meeting cadence (board meetings, committee cycles, budget, strategy offsites).

• Ensure one narrative: strategy → plan → metrics → risks → decisions.

• Prep principals and functional leaders for the Board (storyline, likely questions, red flags).

• Collect, prepare, and disseminate materials well in advance of all meetings, as well as prepare meeting agendas

3. Company-wide Operational Effectiveness. The sports CoS can build and instill a company-wide operating system, including meeting cadences, KPIs, and cross-functional execution. The CoS should turn strategy into OKRs/KPIs, and run a lightweight business review that teams respect. A good CoS doesn’t add bureaucracy but quietly streamlines. They create clear decision-making processes, clarify owners, and eliminate redundant meetings or reports.

At the Golden State Valkryies, Lauren Esrig ran a process in early 2025 to help identify the expansion organization’s mission and values, and build internal and external OKRs for the team’s first season that rolled up to the broader mission and vision.

4. Special projects / long-term initiatives. Many chief of staffs come from a background in management consulting, and this part of the role is most similar to a consulting project. A sports CoS will be tasked with conducting analysis or building a strategy for longer-term projects like practice facilities / stadium builds, season ticket holder engagement, community engagement, youth sports strategy, and fan insights. It’s not just about strategy, though. A CoS should define the scope and resources required, and then manage the project all the way through to completion (contracts signed, resources allocated, benefits measured).

This year, Lauren Esrig has leaned into learning about the merchandise side of the Valkyries’ business, mapping fan insights across existing merch offerings and working with licensees like Fanatics to build a business case for more/different merch offerings.

5. Catch all - “other duties as assigned”. The CoS is the organization’s glue. As the first line of defense for all inbound inquiries, the CoS should be prepared to serve as a mix of a conductor and deflector. It’s not uncommon to find the CoS organizing the company holiday party, building a template for annual performance reviews, or making sure an invoice has been paid. These tasks can be thankless, but if someone didn’t step up and own them, fans/players/media would notice.

The best “catch all” example I heard from my interviews was Saara Hassoun defining and managing the process for community partners to rent/hire Minnesota Aurora’s mascot for local events. On the surface, mascot contracting and scheduling might not sound glamorous. But the mascot is an underrated part of a team’s identity and connection to the community, and an important conduit to new fans (Exhibit A: Ellie the Elephant).

Pros and Cons of the CoS Role

A sports CoS role is one of the most dynamic in an organization. It’s intense, but an unparalleled learning experience for someone earlier in their career with strong leadership potential. Because of the intensity and “always on” dynamic, the CoS role isn’t for everyone, and it’s likely a shorter-term runway (three years is probably the upper end).

Let’s start with the great things about the CoS role.

• As the chief of staff, you get to see everything! You’re likely going to be the junior person in the room during the most consequential meetings, but early career exposure to board interactions, executive level collaboration, and high-stakes decision-making is a learning accelerant like no other.

• You’re going to be touching a lot of different things, from marketing to product to gameday operations. The CoS role is far from boring or repetitive.

• You can see the direct impact of your work. Whether it’s implementing a new meeting cadence or unblocking a cross-functional team, you have countless opportunities to make a real difference each day.

Now for the downsides…

• The CoS role can become administratively heavy. There’s a fine line between being “too good” to send the calendar invite or book travel and understanding that, at a sports organization, it’s all hands on deck all the time. When administrative work starts to crowd out the strategic parts of the role, it’s easy to become disenfranchised.

• The CoS role can be lonely; it’s 1 of 1. If you’re in your mid to late 20s or early 30s, your peers in age likely aren’t going to have the same access that you do. A CoS should be very selective about venting to coworkers.

• A CoS is involved in everything, but may lack authority to execute. The CoS is probably not going to have a distinct budget or a team under them.

• The CoS can turn into a perpetual firefighter. The CoS needs to find a way to balance addressing short-term fires with long-term strategy and broader thinking.

Advice to organizations considering a CoS

If you are considering adding a CoS, it’s important to define how the person could be most impactful and the skillset that would add the most value to your organization. It sounds easy on paper - doesn’t every busy principal need a CoS? But hiring a CoS without a clear vision for what they will accomplish in their first 90 days / 6 months / 1 year is likely to leave all parties frustrated.

Organizations should follow these guidelines to make the most of their CoS:

• Set and communicate monthly goals for the CoS, complete with clear outcomes and priorities.

• Balance serendipity and structure. Make sure the CoS isn’t just a dumping ground for things that don’t fit anywhere else.

• Continually communicate to the rest of the organization what the chief of staff should be used for. The rest of the organization will value the CoS if they observe the principal valuing the CoS.

• Carve out time to provide regular feedback to the CoS. Separate these development conversations from task-related meetings.

• Invest in external opportunities for them to grow and connect with CoS peers.

• Say thank you!

Advice to candidates considering a CoS role

I talk to many talented people considering a pivot from consulting / finance into sports. The CoS role is a great landing spot for MBA students and “swiss army knife” pivoters. If you are considering a sports CoS role, I would recommend the following:

• Be intentional about skill-building. Do a self-audit of your strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas that you’d want to flex as a CoS. Write these down! Keep a running list that you can come back to as you grow in the role.

• Define the career path. CoS roles are designed to be shorter-term and there isn’t a natural role progression. Some sports CoS have moved into Chief Strategy, Operations, or Commercial roles. You don’t have to have your next steps perfectly mapped, but make sure to have 2-3 ideas about where you want to grow so you can shape the CoS role to lead you in that direction.

• Seek out others in the same role in similar organizations. Jess McEntee from League One Volleyball and Kelsey Smith from Greenfly have a biweekly check-in to run things by each other and compare notes. These peer support networks are invaluable.

• Use industry-wide resources available! You don’t have to rewrite the CoS playbook. Groups like Ask a Chief of Staff, Nova, and The Chief of Staff Association provide templates and thought leadership.

• Don’t be afraid to offload administrative tasks. Work with an existing EA or ask for other resources to help ease low value tasks that eat your time.

The five CoS that I spoke to actively sought and shaped the CoS role during the interview process. Many times the CoS role isn’t publicly posted and a candidate will have to “pitch” the opportunity to the principal. Kelsey Smith recommends that candidates ask these questions to a potential future principal to better understand their vision for the role:

• Where are you spending too much time? Where do you wish you were spending more time?

• What is your approach to coaching your employees? Can you commit to regular feedback / development?

• Do you have an executive assistant? If so, how do you delegate to the EA vs. CoS?

At its best, the sports CoS is an honest broker; a force multiplier; a bridge; and a culture carrier. With a bit of shaping and intentionality, both a CoS and a sports organization can use the role as leverage for accelerated impact and improved outcomes.