Women’s Sports Wins as a Collective, Not as Private Islands

There’s a weird irony at the center of women’s sports right now: the thing we spent the last decade begging for—more coverage, more creators, more platforms taking it seriously—has finally arrived, and it’s created a new kind of problem. Not a lack of attention, but an abundance of it. A constant flood of content across every surface where sports can exist: Instagram and Threads, athlete-led podcasts, brand activations, Bluesky feeds, newsletters, YouTube cuts, highlight accounts, traditional outlets stepping further in, and new ones that didn’t exist a few years ago. It’s loud in the best way. It’s also messy. Don’t get me wrong, we have actively contributed to this here at Bet on Her.

If you’re already deep in it, you’ve built your own coping mechanisms. You follow the right reporters. You know which accounts break news fastest. You keep a mental map of who’s credible, who’s performative, who’s selling, who’s actually watching the games. You develop rituals—check this app in the morning, that site at lunch, that podcast on the drive, that feed during halftime—until your fandom starts to look like a second job.

But if you’re new, or returning, or just trying to widen your aperture beyond one team or one league, the experience can feel like trying to drink from a firehose while being asked to solve a puzzle. Women’s sports is no longer hard to find because it’s hidden. It’s hard to find because it’s everywhere, scattered across private islands that don’t connect cleanly to one another.

That’s the realization that hit us while building the Bet on Her app. Not that women’s sports needs “more content.” It already has it. The problem is that the ecosystem isn’t shaped like a cohesive front page. It’s shaped like a thousand individual outposts—each one doing meaningful work, each one fighting for survival and attention, each one forced by incentives to build its own corner of the internet.

And the moment you zoom out, you see what that architecture does to momentum. It fragments the story.

Women’s sports doesn’t move in isolated arcs. It moves in waves. A breakout season in one league changes the conversation in another. A coaching hire reshapes a national team pipeline. A viral clip turns a role player into a household name. A new collective bargaining agreement changes the economics of a sport, which changes roster decisions, which changes parity, which changes viewership. The throughlines are the point—because the throughlines are how you turn “moment” into “movement.”

But today, those throughlines get lost in the soup. Not because nobody is telling stories. Because too many stories are happening at once, on platforms designed to reward immediacy over context. One app gives you highlights but not schedules. Another gives you scores but not the deeper why. Podcasts give you nuance but require hours. Social feeds give you pulse but not memory. Traditional coverage often drops in when it’s convenient, not when it’s continuous. And each league, understandably, prioritizes its own growth strategy, its own broadcast deals, its own partnerships, its own walled garden.

So the fan experience becomes a kind of fractured pilgrimage. You move from island to island trying to reconstruct the larger truth: what matters right now, what’s connected, what’s noise, and what’s actually shaping the future.

This is the part where it’s tempting to blame the platforms, or the leagues, or the media companies. But the more honest answer is that this fragmentation is a side effect of a bigger reality: women’s sports has been forced to grow in pockets. Different leagues have had to build their own oxygen, their own revenue, their own distribution, often without the institutional scaffolding men’s sports inherited. If you’ve had to fight for scraps, you build defensively. You protect your audience. You hoard your data. You chase the viral spike because you can’t count on the next one. You act like an island because islands survive by guarding their shorelines. We’ve been here, and the temptation to compound this behavior is baked into the ecosystem of always on social media.

The cost is that the collective moves slower than it should. If women’s sports is going to win at the scale we all say we want—culturally, economically, globally—it can’t be a set of private islands. It has to become a continent. A connected surface where discovery is easy, where context travels, where newcomers can get oriented without already knowing the lore, where the ecosystem doesn’t require a scavenger hunt to participate in.

That’s the philosophical question that kept sneaking into our product development of the app: what does it mean for women’s sports to win together?

It doesn’t mean every outlet merges. It doesn’t mean every league standardizes its voice. It doesn’t mean everyone agrees on narratives or politics or priorities. Women’s sports is too rich for that, and honestly too alive. It means something simpler and harder: it means designing the ecosystem so that the work compounds. So that a story told in one place can be found in another. So that a highlight can lead to a schedule, and a schedule can lead to a watch link, and a watch link can lead to a player profile, and a player profile can lead to the journalist who’s been tracking that player since college, and that journalist can lead you to the deeper story you didn’t know you needed. It means building connective tissue that allows the fan journey to flow instead of fracture.

That’s what we tried to do with Bet on Her—not as “the fix,” but as a proof point that the problem is real. We weren’t trying to build a new media voice that competes with everyone else. We were trying to build a single surface where all of these voices can coexist without forcing the fan to do the stitching manually. A place where the abundance becomes navigable instead of overwhelming. And because this ecosystem is now too big to follow linearly, we leaned into the idea that AI can be used for something more meaningful than novelty. Not to replace writers, or flatten coverage into generic summaries, but to help draw connections across the flood: to thread together what’s happening across leagues, to surface the patterns, to provide the “here’s what matters and why” layer that is missing when everything is scattered. Used well, AI isn’t the story. It’s the connective tissue. It helps turn a thousand posts into a coherent day, a coherent week, a coherent season.

That’s the bet: that women’s sports is entering an era where the limiting factor isn’t supply. It’s coherence.

The most exciting thing about this moment is not just that there’s more content than ever. It’s that women’s sports has become too big to be held by any single outlet, any single league, any single algorithm. It’s a living network now. And networks only realize their power when nodes connect.

So yes—this is a story about building an app. But it’s also a story about what we think the next phase has to look like. If women’s sports is going to keep rising, it can’t rise as a set of isolated wins, isolated audiences, isolated products, isolated timelines. It has to rise as a collective. As a surface you can actually stand on.