Rising Tide 🦈 August 19, 2025

🤿 Below the Surface

Here's what's on deck this week:

• Signal Strength: Stef Strack's on why women's sports needs builders, not buyers

• In the Current: From record-breaking sponsorship revenue to the Valkyries' new mascot

• Blue Zone: Deep Blue launches Be the Shark capsule with Official League, proceeds support Grow Our Game

• Shark Bite: Alexis Ohanian on the women’s sports investors

⚡️ Signal Strength  

The Stef Strack playbook: build the market, don't just buy into it.

The backdrop: After 15 years leading $250M-$3.5B business units at Nike plus CEO experience at rag & bone, Stef Strack built VOICEINSPORT to solve what she experienced as both Division 1 athlete and sports executive.

By the numbers:

• 93% of NCAA schools fail Title IX compliance—even championship winners discriminate against women athletes

• 6% of sports science research focuses on women athletes

• 94% of women Fortune 500 executives were athletes, yet only 1% of $66B global sponsorship flows to women's sports

Why it matters: Most approaches fail because they're built wrong from the start.

• Commercial players chase quarterly wins, can't fund infrastructure

• Impact organizations have mission, lack sustainable revenue

• Both miss the key insight: underserved markets need dual systems

Strack's solution: Build two engines that work together.

• For-profit platform: Delivers measurable impact (50,000 athletes reached, 85% confidence boost)

• Nonprofit foundation: Tackles systemic barriers (Title IX advocacy, research funding)

The result: 15+ Fortune 500 partners plus WNBA Changemakers coalition. That’s partnerships pure-play orgs can't coordinate.

Three skills that transfer from corporate to impact:

• Stakeholder orchestration — Complex team management → partnership coordination

• Long-term thinking — Patient capital deployment beats quarterly optimization

• Dual measurement — Track financial performance + social outcomes simultaneously

Bottom line: Your stakeholder management skills aren't résumé lines—they're market-building tools competitors can't replicate.

Want the full strategic breakdown from Strack? Read the complete playbook.

📰 In the Current  

We monitor the current so you can ride the wave. Here's what you need to know this week:

• Angel City outperformed 15 Major League Soccer (MLS) clubs and 25 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in sponsorship revenue in 2024.

• The Golden State Valkyries announced their new mascot: meet Violet! 

• Alex Rodriguez’s start-up, Jump, has raised $23MM to become the Shopify for sports teams.

🦈 Blue Zone  

We’re proud to be building partnerships that drive business results across every sector of women's sports:

Deep Blue gets in the Fits game! Our first capsule collection, "Be The Shark," is live, featuring a vintage '90s windbreaker, cropped basketball jersey, and hat in partnership with Official League. A portion of proceeds supports Grow Our Game. Shop the drop.

Ready to dive deeper into the business of women's sports? The latest episodes of Courtside with Laura Correnti podcast on iHeartWomensSports feature Laura sharing how the 2019 Women's World Cup inspired Deep Blue, Andrea Brimmer (CMO, Ally) breaking down her industry-changing 50/50 pledge, and Michael Kassan (CEO, 3C Ventures) discussing partnership strategies—exploring everything from strategic investment to how personal missions become national movements.

🌊 Shark Bite

“Every investor wants to talk women’s sports now. Six years ago, most wouldn’t return the email. That’s the difference between conviction and consensus.” - Alexis Ohanian, Founder, 776