On Monday at the WNBA Draft, the future stars of the league took the stage just as an historic Collective Bargaining Agreement will reward them with real wealth. It’s a clear signal of how far the game has come. We can celebrate the progress and ask the bigger questions: How are we building differently?
I've spent the better part of a decade inside women's sports, getting closer to it, helping tell the stories that deserved to be told, building platforms to push it forward.In many ways, it started with The Players’ Tribune, believing that if you gave athletes the platform, they would change the narrative themselves.
More recently, I worked alongside the 85ers, the original USWNT, the women who built the foundation of US Soccer. They created an entire legacy and never got the recognition they deserved. Helping change that was important to me.
So yes, we're making progress. More stories are getting out. The appetite is real.
We've all seen the numbers. Attendance is exploding. Global women's sports revenues are projected by Deloitte to reach at least US $3 billion in 2026 marking a 340% increase in four years. Media rights are increasing in value.
And yet, the model is still broken.
Less than 10% of total sports media investment flows to women's sports. And even within that narrow slice, most of the money is moving toward leagues, teams, and rights, not toward the women who built this game, carried it through the lean years, and made this moment possible.
When real wealth arrives, those athletes shouldn't be left behind.
The next phase isn't about proving women's sports matter. That case is closed. It's about building the ecosystem correctly, investing beyond the field of play, creating real infrastructure around storytelling, community, and commerce. It's about ownership, not just participation. Converting visibility into something that actually lasts for the athletes who made it worth watching in the first place.
That's personal for me. It's what we're building toward with Storied Sports, turning legacy into livelihood, and making sure the women who built this game have a real stake in what it becomes.
The data backs this up too: fans of women's sports are more engaged, more loyal, more likely to support the brands that show up authentically. The opportunity is real. But it demands a different kind of thinking.
We should celebrate the progress. But we can't confuse momentum for arrival.
This isn't the finish line. It's the starting line.
That's why we're building. Because if this next chapter is done right, it won't just grow the business of women's sports, it'll finally align the value with the people who created it.
