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Cheri Kempf is a Senior Vice President at Athletes Unlimited, a network of professional women’s sports leagues that launched in 2020 featuring softball, indoor volleyball, basketball, and lacrosse. Kempf oversees broadcasting for all four sports, negotiating media rights deals and managing all aspects of production and game presentation. Prior to Athletes Unlimited, Kempf was Commissioner of National Pro Fastpitch for nearly 15 years and was long at the forefront of women’s fastpitch softball, as a player, instructor, an industry marketing representative and a television sports commentator.  

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Athletes Unlimited has a unique structure. Each sport has a condensed season, all in one location, with weekly drafts by team captains. Along with team wins, player earns points during games, creating individual competition. Can you break down the structure of Athletes Unlimited for the uninitiated?

The primary thing I always like to lead with is for each of the four sports, it’s competition as you know it. If you’re watching a softball game, there’s nothing weird or odd or super different. You’re watching a high-level competition of softball. Behind all that is the unique structure. All the players go into one market. So, for softball, 60 players go into one market for the season and all 60 players go on a leaderboard. The top four players on the leaderboard become captains and draft their teams each week. So, the teams switch every week, and that’s kind of new for a fan.

Additionally, an Athletes Unlimited season is a lot more intense. If you look at a baseball season, for example, it spans over half the year with thousands of games. So, if a team loses, it’s not the end of the world. But for us, our motto is every moment counts. And it really does. Because if I get a double, that’s plus 20, for me. That will shift me on the leaderboard, and ultimately, I get a bonus based on that.

I would describe it as competition as you know it with some really fun, nuanced things going on in the background that, once fans understand it, expands their interest and their opportunities to engage with each sport.

Athletes Unlimited was created with a player-centric model. What does that look like in practice?

To start with, you’re not just building a roster at the beginning of the season and then adjusting at a trade deadline. Every single week there’s a strategy of the kind of team a captain is going to put together. And that’s the essence of Athletes Unlimited – empowering the players. There’s no general manager or club president deciding who is going to be on your team. The players themselves make those choices.

The players’ fingerprints are all over the league. We don’t have GMs and also don’t have coaches per se. Each captain has a facilitator the captain can use in whatever capacity they need. It could be helping to draft, or designing a practice, or game management. They work together, but it’s very heavily influenced by players.

Then each one of our sports has what’s called a player executive committee that is made up of five active players. They touch almost everything. Certainly, they touch anything to do with competition. So, if you were going to change the lengths of the quarters or the breaks between or the number of innings or anything like that, it’s going to the player executive committee.

They look at hotels, talk about venues and host cities. They look at virtually everything that has to do with that sport, and that includes, by and large, selecting the other players who are part of Athletes Unlimited. The players drafted out of college into the league are finalized by the players executive committee. They weren’t drafted by the league and handed to the teams.

Really, from start to finish players are playing a very big role in operations, competition, and what the league looks like.

Last year, a number of Athletes Unlimited basketball games were streamed on the WNBA app. That seems to be an example of the culture of collaboration that is a big part of the organization. Can you talk more about that culture?

It’s unique. The very nature of sports is competition and sometimes it’s even more intense, and certainly sometimes uglier, behind the scenes in the business of sport. I was the commissioner of another professional softball league, National Pro Fastpitch, for over 13 years. And so many people came along and rather than contribute and work with the league, they wanted to tear it down or destroy it and have their own thing.

When (Athletes Unlimited Co-Founder) Jon Patricof, first called me I was the commissioner of that league. Immediately, within a minute of talking with him, I knew this guy was different. He’s not here to destroy us. It’s evident that he understands that if we can both exist, the sport will be stronger for the players that play it. We will grow and expand player opportunities for this generation and the next ones. So, I gave him my attention and my time because I knew he was on the right track. There was no reason not to work with him, because the players were going to win, it was very clear.

I think collaboration is at our core. I think that for our co-founders Jon Patricof and Jonathan Soros, it is their nature to collaborate. I think they’re fair to a fault sometimes in terms of really being open and transparent to people and saying, “We’d like to work with you, because this will make the whole space stronger.”

The WNBA relationship is a prime example of that. We had a director initially in basketball, Ilene Houser, who had good relationships with the WNBA. We immediately from my perspective, started talking about broadcast coverage, what that might look like, and if there was space on their app. They were very open to it, very receptive. Our season takes place when their’s doesn’t, so there is no competition. Again, it’s really a way to amplify and magnify the presence of the athletes, and I think we both get that.

I grew up in team sports. It will always feel good to me to collaborate with people, and it feels good to be around people that are like-minded. At the end of the day, women’s sports are in a in a great place, but it’s not all going to flip overnight. If we can, in some way, strengthen what the WNBA has to offer, and they can certainly in ways strengthen what we have to offer, why wouldn’t we do that?

In February 2024, Athletes Unlimited signed a multi-year rights deal with ESPN. How important is that relationship with ESPN?

Visibility is everything. Exposure is everything. It’s a case of “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it…” For years and years and years, women’s sports have been that tree that fell that no one was there to hear. It’s still majestic and huge and has a big impact, but nobody’s there to hear it. I think that television and mainstream media offer you that exposure to start to make your sport and your players interesting.

I was alive and awake and aware when ESPN carried zero college softball games in the regular season and the Women’s College World Series broadcast was only the championship game and it came on at 2 a.m. Now, ESPN is carrying thousands of games and every second of not just the Women’s College World Series, but the NCAA Tournament field of 64.

What affected that, first, was when softball was added to the 1996 Olympics. It was announced around 1992 that softball would be an Olympic sport for the first time ever. So now softball falls under the NCAA’s Olympic sport category, which means more focus and more money, because those athletes now have somewhere to else to go. They are going to be on the Olympic stage.

Then you saw the Southeastern Conference, which is  one of the most dominant college conferences, add softball. Not only did they add it, but they, had an arms race on stadiums and facilities and venues. So that’s your trickle down – it gets added to the Olympics, it falls under the Olympic sport category, and now all of a sudden, television is interested.

So, ESPN tries it. They stick a toe in the water, put one regional on TV, and the numbers are there. It’s captivating. People aren’t changing the channel. People are starting to talk about this. Then it’s more and more and more to the point it is today where the tournament and the Women’s College World Series is appointment viewing for people.

I was an analyst for ESPN when they were saying, “Look, there are people tuning in that don’t understand the nuts and bolts of this game. Make sure you help them understand.” It was a conscious effort by ESPN, and it succeeded. Monumentally, it succeeded. They helped people be exposed to the sport, and by doing that people fell in love with it. They were invested. That’s how it works.

All of a sudden everybody hears the tree crash.

What do you think needs to happen to sustain the current popularity of women’s sports and expand it even further?

It’s no different than it ever has been. We need corporate America to know that our advertising spots are important. The 30-second spots in our shows, our in-game features or in-game mentions are worth spending your time and your money on. That’s for starters,

There needs to be that investment from the networks to say, we’re not going to give you the windows that are leftover. We’re going to give you some good windows. We’re going to give you some primetime and we’re going to give you a good lead-in.

 If you look at the Big Ten Network this year, they had some amazing numbers on women’s volleyball. You know what they did? They’d go to a volleyball match out of a football game. So, you have this audience that’s already watching. The game ends and they toss it to the volleyball game and you retain some of that audience. That’s a big difference than having a taped program, with very few people watching or interested in, leading into your women’s game. TV windows are important and your windows matter.

I also think people cannot say “Oh, we made it,” and ease up. We have to keep going. We have to keep elevating stars. What we should all learn from Caitlin Clark is that all boats rise when a star comes along. I think you have to lean into stars.

We have to keep the pedal down, and corporate America and network television are critical elements.

What advice would you give to young women who want who want a career in sports?

Well, I love this question, because there’s so much going on in sports behind the scenes. As these leagues pop up, guess what, there’s a whole element of management and operations that are coming with these leagues. Everything from in-venue operations to the technical aspects of scoring and operating video boards, to broadcasting and being able to produce. Most people gravitate to on-air talent, but there’s so many opportunities. I think women have a propensity for storytelling, do it well and understand what resonates and how you grow an audience just by telling interesting, touching moving things about people.

We talk about the sports entertainment business, and we talk a lot about the athletes, but I’m telling you television production is also a very male dominated industry. In 30 years of working in broadcasting and production, I can still count on one hand, the number of times I’ve ever had a female director and producer. I’d love to see more of it. I’d love to have the person who’s producing graphics, deciding what’s interesting, what should we have in the lower thirds of your TV screen, be a woman.

I don’t think a lot of people understand the depth of opportunities, career wise, that exist in sports and sports broadcasting, and I love to expose girls to those opportunities.

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The Olympics may happen once every four years, but the work of athletes and reporters never stops. Currently the Olympics reporter for Sports Business Journal, Rachel Axon is preparing to cover her sixth Olympic Games at Paris in 2024. She spent more than 10 years at USA Today as an Olympics reporter and sports investigative reporter, working extensively on an award-winning series on Title IX. She is an avid runner and a graduate of St. Bonaventure University.

The following discussion has been edited for length and clarity:

You were part of a team of reporters at USA Today that produced an award-winning series about Title IX in 2022. What were some of the most surprising things you found in that research?

As reporters, we’re dealing with publicly available data at public schools, but the information that a lawsuit could bring forth, or that the federal government’s Department of Education could bring forth in an investigation, is beyond what we could get. So, if we have kind of this lower level of access and are still finding significant amounts of schools falling short of providing opportunities for girls and women – the scholarship requirement perhaps was the clearest bright line where there were issues – then that really spoke to there being a problem.

The other thing that was surprising was how much schools tried to substitute progress for equity. And by that, I mean, we would go through the data, talk to people, and find schools where [non-compliance with Title IX] seemed like a pretty big issue. The explanation almost always went back to, “we’re doing better.” Fundamentally that’s what they’re saying, but better is not equitable. It’s just not it. We were very cautious about saying if a school complied with, or didn’t comply with, the law, because the Office for Civil Rights may reach a determination that we couldn’t. But I 100 percent believe we raised important issues and pointed out things that have clearly been problems for a long time. 

Some of the editors on this project did not have a background in sports or in Title IX, so we would get questions like, “Why would colleges do it this way?” And the thing I would always go back to explaining is the system was never made for women. We had a system that for decades and decades and decades was made for male athletes. When Title IX came along, it forced athletic programs to make adjustments.

If you were building an athletic program from the ground up, you would do it very differently, right? If you’re starting at zero, and you knew this was one of the mandates on your athletic department, decisions would be different. But the growth of women’s sports came along at a time where priorities were already set and to a large degree, those priorities have not changed.

What do you see as of the biggest opportunities for women’s sports right now? And how can fans and businesses support those opportunities?

I would put it in two buckets – NIL (Name Image Likeness) and Olympic sports.

If we look at where the concentration of investment in women’s sports has been, for decades and decades, it was tennis and golf on the professional level. They are closer to equitable, because they’ve had much longer history, with the caveat being that history is largely based on notions that those are more feminine and acceptable sports. Today, I would say, you have basketball and soccer where the support is concentrated.

Now look at opportunities in the NIL space for college athletes and those are mostly concentrated to male athletes. There’s a looming question about Title IX and how this applies to what schools do, so NIL is an evolving thing. But the money is going to male athletes predominantly. At the same time, there is real growth and popularity around women’s sports. You look at what Nebraska volleyball did to pack a football stadium. There was a recent year where the College Softball World Series had better TV ratings than the College Baseball World Series.

Bridging that disconnect between the real growth and popularity of those college sports and where the NIL money is going is a big opportunity.

The other is the Olympics. And one of the things I like about covering the Olympics is it feels like where Title IX has come to blossom because there’s so much more equity. I would not say this universally. This is not true of every country in the world, and I think Title IX makes the U.S. unique in this regard. Honestly, this is why the Americans have had such an edge. But there’s still a lot of room in women’s Olympic sports, either with individual athletes or with the national governing bodies, where a small amount of investment might make a huge difference. We’re not talking $50 million, but a million dollars might make a huge difference in developing talent and bridging that gap for places that could be cleared and be really super meaningful.

Going to the Olympics is a dream for so many people – from athletes to journalists to marketers. You’re getting ready to cover your sixth Olympics in Paris in 2024. Can you give us a little peek behind the curtain of what it’s like?

Covering the Olympics is the most exciting and exhausting experience I can imagine in sports journalism. There’s literally nothing like it in the volume of what’s going on around you, the volume of work. The demands are for three weeks straight. But what I love is the opportunity behind it.

I’ve done it both ways where I’ve gone with a specific sport to cover and that’s really helpful because you build up sources. You build up knowledge and it helps you to find and tell stories. I’ve been lucky in that regard. I’ve done more winter than summer games and freeskiing and snowboarding were my sports where it’s the X Games kids who are in a halfpipe and slopestyle courses. And those are sports where the Americans are very good, so I was never lacking for good stories about these life-changing moments.

Sometimes, you just get dropped in to cover events. In Tokyo, I covered a lot of gymnastics but also was floating around and was dropped in to cover fencing. I never covered the sport of fencing before in my life and suddenly, I’m taking a crash course. What are the rules? How does this work? Who is good? Who are the medal contenders? You’re trying to find and tell stories and it’s really exhilarating as a journalist. It’s a lot of like adrenaline. You’re on deadline. You’re running around. You’re not sleeping. I mean, 18-hour days are frighteningly common.

In terms of memorable moments, there’s been a ton. My first Olympics was in Sochi, and we worked it out with one of the athletes, freeskier David Wise, to do a story on what the 24 hours are like after you win a medal. He won the gold medal in the halfpipe, and he let me shadow him. So, he got done and I’m going down the mountain with him, going to NBC and other interviews. Then there was a point where we are all in a hotel room – me, his wife, his agent, and some other people – and one of his sponsors had prepared a congratulatory video that was narrated by Morgan Freeman. To see this athlete who’s the best at what he does, but relatively obscure to the rest of the world, have this gold medal moment and then it sinks in, “Oh my gosh, my life is different! Morgan Freeman congratulating me.” I get emotional thinking about it now because you are there at these moments where people’s lives are changing.

Looking at Paris 2024, what are some of the key moments or storylines we should pay attention to?

I think the U.S. women are going to lead that team again. I think just about every Olympics since London, the U.S. women lead the medal count internally and that if they were their own country, would have been about fifth at some of those Summer Olympics. I think Paris will probably be even better if you look at the strength of the team. Women’s water polo has won the last three golds.  Simone Biles has not yet committed but her gymnastics are just beautiful right now. Katie Ledecky is still in the pool. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is the world record holder in the 400 hurdles. As a runner myself, I’m particularly interested in the women’s distance events and the U.S. women improving there after Molly Seidel got a marathon medal in Tokyo. I am sure there will be many memorable moments by American men, but I think the most solid prediction that I could make would be that the U.S. women will lead the way again for them.

In this changing media landscape, what advice would you give to young women looking to get into sports journalism?

Well, first, welcome. It is a difficult time for our industry, but to me, this is always a worthwhile profession because you get the opportunity to tell stories, to reveal things, to uncover things, to entertain people, to share the human condition. That said, there are ample opportunities.

To get those first few jobs, I would say, get the reps early. And there’s no such thing too early. I have high school students who reach out to me because they’re trying to get stories published. If you’re in college, do the internships, do extra outside of class in whatever path you’re going in, whether it’s broadcast, or podcasting, or print. Get as many reps as you can. I think that really helped set me apart and prepared me when I was coming out of college.

I would say be as versatile as you can be. The storytelling will be the same and your ethics and requirements as a journalist don’t change. But I’ve been in this business long enough to see many trends come and go. “We’re going to pivot to video,” or “We’re going to post on Facebook.” Look at what Twitter meant to journalism and what it’s become now as X. Being versatile and able to take your reporting skills and apply them in various media is of critical importance. You need to continue to learn and grow as you’re doing it.

The other thing I would say, don’t be afraid to reach out to people. When I was in college, one of my professors, John Hanchette, had worked at USA TODAY. I was doing my honors thesis, and he said, “Oh, reach out to these reporters.” And I was like, they’re not gonna give me the time of day. Why would they? Why would they talk to me? One of those reporters was Erik Brady, who is one of the most delightful humans on this planet and was so giving of his time and perspective. It really affected me in terms of understanding that we journalists want to help. So, I would say don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for help. If you see someone doing what you want to do, drop them an email. I will also plug the Association for Women in Sports Media, which is a great organization and has nothing but women in this business who are willing to help because as much progress as we have made, we are still a minority. Having those resources to lean on and to help build each other up, I think is one of the best parts about being in this profession.

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Nicole M. LaVoi, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the area of social and behavioral sciences in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota where she is Co-Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. She is program manager for the Tucker Center’s program, Coaching HER which aims to help youth sports coaches tackle unconscious bias. Her seminal research includes the annual Women in College Coaching Report Card which is aimed at retaining and increasing the number of women in the coaching profession, and a groundbreaking book Women in Sports Coaching (2016).

The following interview is edited for length and clarity.

You are one of the leading researchers on women in coaching. What drove your interest into this particular area? What has the research shown about women in coaching?

I was a college athlete in tennis, and then I parlayed my love of tennis into coaching at Wellesley College in my early 20s. I loved seeing that I could make a difference in the lives of the women I coached on my team. That really got me interested in how we can make a difference for millions of girls and women around the world through empowering more women to be coaches, by reducing the barriers and supporting women in coaching.

As a young coach, I experienced a lot of sexism, discrimination and harassment, but at that time, I didn’t know what I was experiencing. I just knew it made me mad or uncomfortable. Now, I have the language to talk about it. From that experience, I became interested in the intersection of gender, sport and coaching science and went to the University of Minnesota to study with Dr. Mary Jo Kane at the Tucker Center when it was just getting off the ground.

When I first started focusing my research on women in sport coaching around 2010, I distilled all the literature around the barriers that women face – whether it was societal around stereotypes, gender bias, homophobia, racism, ableism, or at the organizational level, where it’s about people in positions of power, pay inequities, and family-unfriendly policies. They’re treated differently because they’re women, and that impacts their self-perceptions, their confidence, their choices to coach or to leave coaching. What we also know from the research is that there are not many supports for women coaches.

We now know what the barriers are, so my focus and the focus of many of my colleagues is taking we’ve learned from women who have survived and thrived in coaching and using them to create supports for the next generation.

What do you wish more people understood about the importance of women in coaching roles?

Much of the work that we do in the Tucker Center is to dispel false narratives around women coaching with data, not opinions, because there are a lot of opinions about women and coaching. “They don’t apply for jobs. They won’t move for jobs. They don’t like to coach as much as man. They only get jobs because they’re women.” There’s a long litany of things that we hear about women, which I call “blame the women narratives.”

What I want to stress is that women are just as interested in coaching as men. They’re just as qualified if not more so than their male counterparts. What they need to be given is the opportunity to coach both women and men because they’re qualified, competent, amazing women, who often don’t get the opportunity in a system that doesn’t value and support them.

The biggest message is that if you hire women and give them opportunity, it is a good return on your investment. Women coaches matter. Same identity role models matter. Girls and women want and need that. Opposite gender role models matter too for boys and men because it changes their ideas about gender and leadership and can result in them respecting and valuing women to a greater and different level.

The latest project from the Tucker Center, Coaching HER, notes that coaches’ unconscious gender biases and stereotypes are often a reason girls drop of sport as teenagers. What are some of those unconscious gender biases and stereotypes and how can those be addressed?

Coaching HER is a free online digital platform for coaches of girls to self-guide themselves through an evidence based, research tested curriculum that helps to upskill coaches to recognize girls’ identities, support their needs, and increase their awareness of and reduce their own gender bias stereotypes in their coaching.

A lot of what we know about coaching girls is people think that “coaching girls is different than coaching boys” because many coaches unconsciously, and maybe consciously, have gender bias. They’ll say that girls are moody, girls are more emotional, girls are less competitive than boys. Girls take everything so personally. They’re sensitive. They’re less tough, they’re less aggressive. These are all gender stereotypes, which are not true for all girls.

We also want coaches to realize that if they internalize these gender stereotypes about girls, it probably impacts how they coach and teach. This may lead girls to feeling like they’re not valued, that they’re not competent, that they aren’t as talented, sport is not for them, and they may drop out a sport because of it, which is what we don’t want. What we’re trying to do with Coaching HER is address with coaching science how we interrogate gender stereotypes around coaching girls, and get coaches to realize they may be coaching in ways that are harmful to girls.

You have been part of the Gatorade Women’s Advisory Board. Through that role, how have you seen companies change the way they invest in women’s sports? What can other brands and businesses learn from big-time sponsors that they can apply in their own sponsorship strategies?

One of the other areas in the Tucker Center where we’ve carved out a niche is looking at the academic literature around the business of women’s sport, which honestly, in the last five years has exploded. Nobody was talking about this, except for very few of us. And now every time you get a media alert, it’s around the business of women’s sport, which is amazing.

The good news is that with this most recent data 9% of media spend, has gone to women’s sport in the last year. Now, you might say, 9%, that’s horrible. But it was 1% a couple of years ago. So, we’ve gone a long way in a little bit of time.

What I think that people should know, is that investing in women’s sport is a value proposition. When you invest in women’s sport, the return on investment is far greater than any investment you would make in men’s sport, because of the nature of the fan of women’s sport is highly loyal. They’re digital natives. They’re tech savvy, they’re highly engaged, and they support brands that support women’s sport. The data has proven that out.  I think it’s a very exciting time to be following the business of women’s sport.

What’s next for women’s sports? What’s flying under the radar that we should be paying attention to?

Well, it’s not flying under my radar, but maybe for other people who are not immersed in this in this world, is how brands and private capital and venture capital is now investing in women’s sport. That’s a game changer.

As we like to say, follow the money. And people that are savvy investors and care about women’s sport, are changing the game by supporting, investing and sponsoring women’s sport.

I also think another thing to keep our eyes on is women or former high-profile women athletes and celebrities investing in women’s sport. We’ve had Billie Jean King for years being almost the lone advocate in terms of female athletes’ advocacy and investment. Now we’re seeing other women athletes – Serena Williams, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird, and others – using their social and athletic capital and actual monetary capital to invest in women’s sports in ways we haven’t seen in the past.

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Technology can move quickly, and change dramatically, over the course of a career. When Courtney Jeffries graduated from the University of Washington in 2004, social media wasn’t even part of the conversation for most sports organizations. Building on her own curiosity toward emerging business trends and her resume of experience – including VP of Business Operations for the New York Rangers – she now serves as CEO of VRTL, a digital platform that is easily scalable to connect brands, teams, and fans around the world in creative and meaningful ways.

The following conversation is edited for space and clarity:

Walk me through your company and the cutting-edge ideas that VRTL is bringing to sports marketing, sponsorship, and fans.

VRTL is changing how brands connect with their global fan base. As of late, there’s an over-indexing of focus on putting butts in seats – for selling tickets and driving fans to games, concerts, or events. We’re not going to suggest there isn’t value in that, but it greatly limits exposure to the majority of your fan base. Part of that is because there aren’t any tools to meaningfully engage fans globally.

Social media is really a content distribution channel at this point. There aren’t fan engagement platforms flexible enough for an entire brand to execute across the whole consumer funnel. We set out to build a platform that trends on behaviors we recognize as best practices – things like live autograph sessions, panel discussions, community group experiences – and deliver them on a platform that gives a brand ultimate flexibility.

Traditionally, you might have a basic standard 8×10 table and pipe-and-drape, in-person meet and greet. That’s the way it’s always been done – and that’s the challenge. There are legacy best practices that don’t account for new technologies. We’re trying to be that technology at the intersection of best practice engagement and fan base. It sounds very altruistic because sporting events are becoming less and less economical for many fans to attend live. But really, brands are leaving money on the table. If you’re not properly executing against your business model for the global fan base, you are leaving the lifetime value of most of your fans on the table while also failing to generate future fans since the people who can physically get there are only a small piece of the pie.

How would you describe the current climate for women in leadership positions in the sports industry? And how’s that changed over your career?

It’s better than when I started. I had the benefit of working for the Oakland Raiders in the early 2000s under Amy Trask. She was very rare in her field as a CEO leading a sports team. So, it has absolutely improved in the sense that you can look around and see other female executives, not only in C-Suite positions but also in presidential roles. Even the Raiders have carried on the legacy with their new president, Sandra Douglass Morgan. But we’re still not where we could be.

 What’s encouraging is the greater female representation in revenue-generating roles, as opposed to the typical assumption of women in marketing or customer service roles. These are real strategic business development and business intelligence roles, which is encouraging, but we have a long way to go.

I certainly benefited from the generation that came before me and I’m grateful for those female executives who changed how things were done. I think the landscape now lends itself to including more females at the top levels. It doesn’t feel like, “Hey, there’s only one seat here. So, it’s going to be me.” I’m not going to call it female-on-female hate in the office, but there was something to be said for feeling that this was my spot and I want to make sure I don’t lose it. I think that’s changed quite a bit. It’s no longer about having a woman in the room for the sake of checking a box. It’s having people with experience, who have demonstrated loyalty, and who are trying to bring innovation to the company. We can make more space for women in the room.

Starting with the Raiders and then with the New York Rangers and MSG, what are some of the things that you learned from those experiences that you carried into your own company?

I really undervalued the power of diplomacy; I didn’t really have it. I have to work very hard at being diplomatic. That’s not because it’s not the right thing to do, but I just see a clear path and want to say let’s go do it. What I learned along the way is leveraging graceful and effective diplomacy makes things go so much quicker.

I played softball in college, and I played for some baseball players who explained to me they were trying to put together a winning hand. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to have face cards every time. A winning hand can be made up of a mix of cards. It’s your job as a leader to put together a winning hand with what you have. So, diplomacy isn’t “rah-rah” and “you’ve got to be better than what you have.” It’s more like, “I know that you’re gonna give me X amount. I need to make sure that I get all of that. And I’m going to put that into this into this larger machine and make the whole thing work.”

That was a huge skill set I learned andI think it’s really shaped how I lead a team. It makes room for different types of talent, and different types of experience. It makes it much more of a “we’re in this together” atmosphere as opposed to a table of cool kids or all alphas. It’s a collective effort that everybody can be proud of, which is important.

The more tactical things I learned are how different departments have overlapping goals and they aren’t necessarily congruent with the company’s goals. That can be driven by bonuses and different incentives, and that was a challenge for me to understand. Not everybody sees or wants to see the big picture. It goes back to diplomacy and how I’m going to get you on board.

Here’s a great example. At the time I worked for Madison Square Garden in the sports division, there were three different teams – the Knicks, the Rangers, and the Liberty. I was the vice president of retention for all three of them. It’s the same company, and yet all three teams within the same company had their own culture, style, and individual goals. Anybody who worked across all three units had to morph and adjust. If you’re not into that, it’s probably going to be a short tenure, so to speak.

I’m curious about the virtual experience for fans as it pertains specifically to fans of women’s sports.

Our platform creates a much more economical opportunity for teams to engage in any kind of activation. It allows for repeat, serialized, and constant engagement that you otherwise could not execute in person. So when it comes to sports that perhaps don’t have the deep pockets and funding that maybe an NFL team has, we become a very compelling solution for fan engagement that doesn’t sacrifice the event.

For us, and this is true across sports, it allows for a lot more creativity.  If you are paying to present something in person, you are most likely relying on elements that you know will be successful, drive attendance, and yield the expected ROI based on the KPIs you have set for that event. Our platform allows for you to have that event because it’s not as expensive as hosting an in-person event. It’s a much more economical platform.

It’s fun to watch our clients push the boundaries. For example, we’ve launched an autograph experience with a mystery player. Would you do that in person? Maybe, but would you risk people not coming because they don’t know who is going to be there? That risk is dramatically mitigated when it comes to an online platform.

So, explain for a minute how autograph sessions work on a virtual platform.

It’s a very abstract concept until you experience it.  If you were the celebrity on the platform, while we are video chatting, you would use a touchscreen device, such as an iPhone or iPad, and use a stylus to autograph a pre-selected, pre-loaded action shot. The fan on the other end, sees it coming through in real-time.

Not only that, but we can have the signature over a video clip as well, so it’s not just a static moment in time. We know that sports are very emotional and people remember moments. When Brandy Chastain scored the game-winning goal in the 1999 World Cup, that was a very real moment for me as a sports fan, particularly as a woman witnessing her raw reaction to such an exceptional play and her tearing off her jersey and sliding. That video clip could be autographed and I could now have that moment preserved with Brandy’s autograph on it.

From a consumer standpoint, it also seems to lower that barrier of entry to be a fan.

We’ve had 100 different countries represented on our platform. We’ve had our platform translated into nine different languages. We’ve had translators on the platform to facilitate a conversation on behalf of a player that doesn’t speak the same native language as the fans. It really is reducing the physical gap, all in the name of pulling those fans deeper into your consumer fan funnel. How can brands create opportunities that are representative of the brand not just featuring an athlete, but really pulling the curtain back and bringing fans behind the scenes? That drives more loyalty around the organization and creates generational fans.

For teams and brands trying to build that fan base, how do they turn memorable moments into something sustained?

There is a best practice playbook for fan engagement and the majority of those best practices are based around male-dominated sports – like the NFL and NBA. My recommendation would be to have those best practices, but to create your own best practices playbook, too. You want to follow a path that resonates with your fan base.

An example is there used to be this derogatory motto in women’s sports apparel, “shrink it and pink it.” You take the same men’s shirt, make it smaller, and then just put pink and rhinestones on it. Alyssa Milano changed the game after she basically said she didn’t want to wear that. She created her own line of sports fan wear (Touch by Alyssa Milano) and did a great job of changing fan engagement.

What’s your advice to young women who want to work in the sports world?

I typically dispense three pieces of advice. The first one is that you need to understand in a sports organization there are revenue-generating roles and the rest is overhead. So, if you can figure out how to get into a position that is a revenue-generating role, you’re paying for yourself. You’re extending your lifetime at that organization. It also allows you to infiltrate and understand more about the organization to determine which direction you want your career path to go. That doesn’t mean you have to stay in sales. I’m not suggesting a lifetime of indentured servitude inside a sales room, but it does allow you to get your foot in the door. And sales skills are transferable; use that as a springboard to explore the rest of the organization.

The second piece of advice I usually offer to young people is that your job probably doesn’t exist yet. When I worked for the Oakland Raiders, there was no Twitter. There was no strong engagement on social media. There was Facebook, but nobody really understood how to make that into a sports tool. Today, you wouldn’t think of launching any brand without a social media manager or maybe even a social media director, who oversees that entirely. That’s a big deal to consider how these technologies can progress. Understand that the more flexible or transferable your skill sets are will probably tee you up to take advantage of those new jobs and those new positions.

The third thing I would say is to constantly be curious about things. It goes back to what we were saying about falling into old-school best practices – by staying curious and engaged with new trends, you’re going to be ahead of the game when it comes to what is the next job that might come into play. You can start asking how you can create an opportunity for yourself based on the importance of this new trend.

One last thing – if there’s a position that you have in mind that somebody has, and you think, “that’s my dream job”, see if you can get in front of those people and find out what jobs they said yes to and why they said yes to them, as well as what jobs they said no to. It doesn’t mean that’s the exact path you have to follow, but it’s going to help you navigate the opportunities that might be put in front of you. If somebody has this role that you’re into, and that’s the direction you want to take, find out how they got there and start piecing together your path. That doesn’t mean you have to take it, or that it’s the only way to get there, but it can help take some of the guesswork out of where to start. You want to learn from somebody else’s mistakes.

And by the way, I’m happy to be one of those people. If you’d like to talk to me, hit me up. Other people helped me understand the path to take. I’m happy to pass it on.