Women’s Sports Has A Data Problem
When we decided to build Bet on Her®, we thought the hard part would be product. The taste questions. The design details. The editorial voice. The work of pulling women’s sports into a single place without flattening what makes each league, each fanbase, each culture feel distinct. We expected the usual startup pain—tradeoffs, scope cuts, the sprint to ship.
What we didn’t expect was that the hardest part would be something far more basic: getting the internet to describe women’s sports in a way software can actually understand.
It turns out, the moment you try to build a modern sports app across 25 leagues—schedules, results, live states, standings, rosters, athlete stats, and the deceptively simple “where can I watch this?”—you collide with a reality that’s easy to miss from the outside. Women’s sports isn’t suffering from a lack of attention anymore. It’s suffering from a lack of infrastructure. The growth is real. The demand is real. The product is real. But the data layer underneath it—the connective tissue that makes everything else work online—is fragmented, inconsistent, and, in many cases, effectively closed.
In men’s sports, this layer is so mature you barely notice it. Games have stable identifiers. Teams and athletes resolve cleanly across seasons. Schedules are structured. Results update predictably. Broadcast metadata exists in the places you’d expect it to exist, in formats machines can consume. Even when you’re not paying for premium feeds, there’s a baseline of standardization that allows developers, media companies, sportsbooks, and fans to build on top of the same shared reality.
In women’s sports, those assumptions break constantly, even in established leagues. Sometimes there’s an API, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the “official” schedule is a webpage that looks clean to a human but collapses the moment you try to parse it. Sometimes the data lives in several different places—one site for fixtures, another for results, another for rosters—and none of them agree on names, abbreviations, or identifiers. A team might be listed three different ways across three different sources, an athlete might appear with a middle initial in one place and not in another, and a single game can quietly fork into duplicates if start times shift or a venue gets updated without a consistent reference key. None of this is dramatic on its own. In aggregate, it becomes an engineering tax that compounds every day.
The feature that exposed this most brutally was “where to watch.” Fans ask it constantly because broadcast is the difference between being casually aware of a league and actually following it. And yet, across women’s sports, broadcast information is often missing, inconsistently presented, or buried in formats that are not designed to travel. A handful of leagues publish watch data cleanly. Many don’t. Some post it in one-off pages that change structure without warning. Others scatter it across press releases and graphics and social posts, where it’s legible to people but useless to software. If you want to put watch links in a product—reliably, at scale—you’re not “integrating.” You’re reverse engineering.
Stats are worse. Not because the numbers don’t exist, but because the pathways to access them are rarely built like a platform. In the best cases you’re dealing with inconsistent schemas and gaps. In the common cases you’re scraping tables, cleaning fields, reconciling mismatched naming, and building translation layers that turn whatever happens to be published into something stable enough to ship. You start to see why women’s sports conversation online can feel uneven: it’s hard to build analysis and tools when the raw material is scattered, brittle, or locked behind arrangements designed for enterprise customers, not the broader ecosystem.
Then there are betting lines—the clearest marker of whether a sport has been wired into the modern internet. Odds data exists, but it’s not “out there.” It’s controlled, licensed, packaged, and inconsistent across leagues. Even when sportsbooks post lines publicly, the ability to ingest them cleanly and responsibly at scale is not a given, and the more complete solutions are typically gated behind paid feeds. The result is that women’s sports, despite its growth, still lives in a narrower and less reliable odds universe than it should. If you’re building a fan product, you’re forced to make a choice you shouldn’t have to make: include partial coverage and accept the holes, or exclude it entirely and pretend the market doesn’t exist.
All of this is why building Bet on Her turned into something closer to a data factory than an app project. To get to a user experience that feels obvious—open the app, see what’s on, see what’s live, see what finished, tap to watch, tap into players and teams—we had to build internal machinery that most fans will never see: ingestion engines that pull from dozens of fragmented sources, scraping systems for leagues that don’t provide usable access, normalization pipelines that clean time zones, venues, duplicates, and broken fields, and identity resolution that maps teams and athletes across a world where names are not stable keys. We added monitoring and fallback logic because any of it can break overnight. Not as an edge case. As a normal operating condition.
It’s tempting to treat this like a developer gripe, but it’s bigger than that. Data is how sports scales online. It’s the substrate for everything that turns a season into a daily habit: platforms, highlights, analysis, fantasy, betting, personalization, discovery, and the steady churn of conversation that keeps fans connected between games. When the data layer is fragmented, everything downstream becomes harder. Fewer products get built. Fewer stories get told with depth. Fewer fans stick, because friction compounds. Leagues become overly dependent on whatever distribution deal or social spike happens to hit, rather than benefiting from an ecosystem of third-party builders who expand the surface area of the sport.
Women’s sports doesn’t have a belief problem anymore. It has an infrastructure problem. And building this app made that impossible to ignore, because it should not be this hard to answer the basic questions fans ask every day: who’s playing, is it live, what’s the score, where can I watch, who are the players, what are their stats.
Bet on Her® is our attempt to make women’s sports feel as navigable as it deserves to be, even when the internet still isn’t built to represent it cleanly. But the bigger point isn’t that we managed to stitch it together. It’s that we had to. If the next decade of women’s sports is going to be as large as everyone says—and it can be—the data layer can’t remain an afterthought. Infrastructure is what lets momentum compound. Without it, growth keeps getting spent on re-solving the same basic problems instead of building what comes next.
