The leaders who built women's sports infrastructure in 2025

Seven months ago, we launched Rising Tide with a simple belief: Executives needed field-tested playbooks from leaders actually building women's sports infrastructure.

We've brought you frameworks from CMOs who negotiated championships to prime time, league founders who built multi-revenue systems from scratch, and platform creators who turned partnerships into mentorship at scale.

You showed up. You read.
You replied asking for more.

Now we want to hear what 2026 should look like.

🤿 Below the Surface

Here's what's on deck this week:

• Signal Strength: The builders who shaped 2025

• Blue Zone: New research to track coaching sports as a pipeline to women's leadership (plus, a special announcement)

• Shark Bite: From the desk of Founder + CEO, Laura Correnti

⚡️ Signal Strength  

Our 2025 Wavemakers 

Stephanie Martin: Building Pathways Where None Existed

Stephanie Martin designed LOVB's WAVES framework to give America's top players a domestic professional pathway. Her athlete-first model made players equity holders, trained pros and juniors in the same facility, and built from youth participation through professional competition. Before their first season, LOVB attracted 30 premium sponsors including adidas, REVOLVE, and SPANX.

Kamal Bhandal: Invisalign Positioning Women's Sports at the Center

Kamal Bhandal’s Confidence Cycle turned Invisalign's women's sports partnerships into business drivers by starting with customers already using the product. Athletes who chose Invisalign and could share authentic confidence journeys, creating measurable engagement and positioning women's sports as core strategy rather than charitable add-on.

Andrea Brimmer: Creating Media Equity From Scratch With Ally

Andrea Brimmer's team at Ally Financial created media equity by funding platforms traditional outlets ignored. Their Triple-B strategy (Build, Bridge, Broadcast) moved The NWSL Championship to network prime time—the first professional women's championship to hit that slot in any sport. A lesson in making the market you want to be in.

Stef Strack: Implementation Over Announcements

Stef Strack recognized that partnership announcements mean nothing without implementation systems. Her IMPACT framework created systematic structure for the VOICEINSPORT-WNBA Changemakers partnership, mentoring 50,000 female athletes with 85% confidence increases. The measured results earned multi-year renewals from brands including Ally, AT&T, and Nike.

Jax Diener: Physical Spaces as Data Engines

Jax Diener opened California's first women's sports bar and built predictable revenue streams using different time blocks so no resources competed. Watch Me! captures audience patterns digital analytics miss, like discovering Long Beach's rugby fanbase or tracking which sports drive 30-40% more traffic. Physical venues reveal behaviors dashboards can't measure.

Ida Zetterström: Turning Funding Pressure into Partnership Advantage

Ida Zetterström spends 70% of her time securing sponsorships. She turned that challenge into direct brand relationships and leaned into authentic product integration. With 227,000 Instagram followers and open-pit access that lets sponsors watch her use products during race prep, Ida built partnerships where brands reach both motorsports enthusiasts and everyday consumers.

Jasmine Caccamo: Weekly Content Beats One-Off Campaigns

Jasmine Caccamo brought fashion-level professionalism to athlete styling, recognizing that athletes generate content every single week through games and tunnel walks. Her work with clients like Alex Morgan expanded athlete portfolios from sport-specific endorsements to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle categories.

In seven months we dished out seven frameworks. All built from the same question: What does the industry need most?

What's holding you back from investing in women's sports in 2026?

Reply with the data, partnerships, or market intelligence you need to build your business case.

🦈 Blue Zone  

One of the most direct pathways to women's leadership sits in plain sight: coaching sports.

Our friends at the Women's Coaching Alliance have teamed up with the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota to examine how coaching sports builds leadership skills that accelerate women's careers.

Women remain underrepresented in executive roles, yet no research has tracked how communication abilities, resilience, teamwork dynamics, and confidence developed through coaching transfer to professional environments.

Women in current or former leadership positions: we’d love to have you participate in this <5-minute survey to capture data that could expand coaching and leadership access across sectors.

And, if you missed it… WE ARE SO BACK.

The 4th Annual Business of Women’s Sports Summit returns April 2026 in NYC.

Stay tuned for details on social @deepbluesportsent!

🌊 Shark Bite

“As we watch and witnessed breathtaking change over the last 24 months in the women's sports industry, we are mindful of just how long that type of supercharged growth can exist at that speed and volume. And so, in the mindset of future-proofing, we look for signals of incremental opportunity. 2025 proved there are many - from adjacent economies (media & content production, merchandise & commerce) to iterative models (Athlos, Unrivaled) - which indicate that we are only on the ground floor of economic potential when it comes to women's sports.” – Laura Correnti

Founder + CEO, Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment

We're grateful you've joined us in building the future of women's sports.

The job is not done yet.

– Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment

Interested in learning what Deep Blue is up to? Have an idea? 
Reach us at [email protected].