The People Who Bet on Her

There is something surreal about finally being able to write this. Today, we announced that Alex Morgan, Trybe Ventures, and TOGETHXR are partnering with Bet On Her as we work together to build what we believe can become the home of women’s sports fandom.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to say when this moment finally came, and I keep coming back to where all of this started. In 2019, I began covering women’s sports because I couldn’t understand why so many extraordinary athletes and stories received so little attention. I didn’t come from sports media. I wasn’t a professional photographer. I taught myself photography and cinematography because I wanted to contribute in whatever small way I could to changing what I was seeing. I believed that if more people could see these athletes, hear their stories, and experience the emotion surrounding women’s sports, more people would care.

That belief took me places I never could have imagined when I first picked up a camera. I’ve had the privilege of covering leagues across women’s sports, sitting down with professional athletes and industry leaders for more than 40 podcast conversations, working alongside some of the biggest brands and organizations in sports, and eventually finding myself photographing the Olympics and World Cups. Throughout it all, I tried to reinvest as much as I could back into women’s sports. I never wanted an athlete to have to pay me to tell her story. Commercial photography and cinematography gave me the ability to fund the work I believed needed to exist, and for years that was enough for me.

But the closer I became to women’s sports, the more I began to recognize another problem. Coverage was improving, audiences were growing, investment was arriving, and more people than ever were paying attention, but the technology available to women’s sports fans was still incredibly fragmented. Being a fan often meant knowing which league app to download, which Instagram accounts to follow, which newsletter had the story you were looking for, where a game was streaming, which podcast talked about your team, or where to find a schedule for a league you had only recently discovered. Men’s sports fans have spent decades surrounded by enormous technology ecosystems designed to make their fandom easier. Women’s sports fans were still being asked to assemble much of that experience themselves.

That frustration became the foundation for Bet On Her. We started asking what the experience would look like if women’s sports weren’t simply another category inside a product primarily designed around men’s sports, but instead were the reason the product existed in the first place. What if scores, schedules, news, podcasts, video, statistics, social conversation, local events, places to watch, and communities could exist together? What if discovering a new league didn’t mean figuring out an entirely new ecosystem? What if technology could finally begin catching up to the extraordinary growth happening everywhere else in women’s sports?

That is what we have been building, and it is why this partnership means so much to me. TOGETHXR understood very early that women’s sports didn’t need to wait for traditional sports media to decide it deserved more space. They built that space themselves. Alex has spent her career doing something similar on an even larger stage, not only becoming one of the most recognizable athletes in the world but using that platform to advocate for women athletes, create opportunities, and push women’s sports forward. For Alex and the team at TOGETHXR to look at what we have been building and decide that they believe in where it can go is difficult for me to put into words.

There is also something deeply personal about the name Bet On Her in a moment like this. This entire journey exists because, at different points along the way, people have been willing to bet on me. Someone gave an inexperienced photographer an opportunity. Athletes trusted me with their stories. Leagues handed me credentials when there were people standing beside me with far more experience. Brands trusted me to create work on some of the biggest stages in sports. Guests agreed to sit across from me for a podcast that we were building from scratch. Fans followed our coverage, watched our videos, downloaded our app, sent us feedback, and believed there was room for something different.

None of those individual bets seemed enormous at the time, but together they changed the trajectory of my life. They gave me opportunities to learn, fail, improve, travel, meet extraordinary people, and eventually believe that maybe we could build something much bigger than the media company I started in 2019. I have never forgotten the people who opened those doors, particularly when there was very little evidence that betting on me was going to lead anywhere.

This one feels different because of the magnitude of what Alex, Trybe, and TOGETHXR are choosing to put behind us. They are investing more than capital. They are attaching their names, reputations, experience, relationships, audience, and belief to the idea that Bet On Her can become an important part of the future of women’s sports. I understand the responsibility that comes with that, and I don’t take it lightly. There are few things more meaningful to a founder than having people you deeply respect look at something you have poured yourself into and say, in effect, we believe this can matter too.

What excites me most, though, is what comes next. Women’s sports is experiencing extraordinary growth, but increased attention alone will not solve every problem that has accumulated after decades of underinvestment. Media has made enormous strides. Rights values are increasing, attendance records are falling, new leagues are being created, brands are investing, and athletes have become some of the most influential people in culture. The technology layer serving those fans now has to grow with everything around it.

I want Bet On Her to be part of building that layer. I want someone discovering professional volleyball for the first time to immediately know when the next match is and where to watch it. I want someone traveling for a WNBA game to be able to find the events happening around it and the bars where other fans will be watching. I want someone opening the app on a Saturday morning to understand everything happening across the sports, leagues, teams, and athletes they care about without needing ten other apps to do it. I want fans separated by thousands of miles to have a place where they can experience those moments together. Most of all, I want the next generation of women’s sports fans to inherit an ecosystem so good that the fragmentation we accepted for years seems completely ridiculous to them.

TOGETHXR has helped prove that women’s sports storytelling can command massive audiences, influence culture, attract the world’s biggest brands, and stand entirely on its own. We have been trying to prove that the same principle applies to technology: women’s sports fans are a large, sophisticated, passionate audience deserving of products intentionally designed for them. Bringing those two ideas together is what makes this partnership so exciting to me.

There is still an enormous amount of work ahead. Bet On Her is young, we are learning constantly, and the product we have today represents only a fraction of what I believe it can eventually become. That is part of what makes building it so much fun. Every week we hear from fans about something they wish existed, discover another problem worth solving, or find another way technology can make following women’s sports a little easier and more connected.

But today, before moving on to whatever comes next, I want to appreciate what this moment represents. What began in 2019 as a personal frustration with the lack of coverage for women athletes eventually became years spent behind a camera telling their stories. Those years gave me a front-row seat to the growth of women’s sports and helped me understand what fans were still missing. That understanding became Bet On Her, and now some of the people who have done more than almost anyone to push this entire industry forward are betting on us to help build its next chapter.

For someone who started all of this simply because she believed women’s sports deserved more, I’m not sure I could ask for a more meaningful vote of confidence.

Now it’s our turn to make that bet count.