How being a girl dad, running a youth basketball program and becoming a sports owner changed the way I look at investing in women’s sports
Earlier this week, I saw that Unrivaled had raised more than $100 million at a $650 million valuation. Less than a year earlier, it had been valued at $340 million. I didn’t look at that and think, damn, we missed it. My first thought was almost the opposite. There is still a lot more coming.
Maybe I think about news like that differently now because we aren’t just watching the sports business anymore. We own part of a professional basketball team in France. We own part of a professional soccer club in Vancouver. I’m involved in conversations around another 3-on-3 basketball league. I am blessed to see ownership deals come across my desk weekly now. Over the last couple of years, sports ownership has gone from something I studied and advised around to something we actually do. And once you start investing into sports properties, you start looking at everything differently. You stop asking only whether you like the team, league or sport and start asking about the operators, business model, rights, audience, scalability and what the thing could eventually become.
Lately, one question keeps coming back to me: What should we own next?
The more I think about that question, the more women’s sports keeps moving up my list. Part of that is absolutely business. The numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. But my interest in women’s sports didn’t start with a valuation, a spreadsheet or an investment opportunity. It started a long time ago with my daughter.
BEFORE I WAS AN INVESTOR, I WAS A GIRL DAD
One of my earliest memories of my daughter playing competitive sports was during her first year of volleyball. She went into a tryout for an elite travel team and they initially identified her as an outside hitter because she could jump, even though she was probably six inches shorter than most of the other outside hitters. Then somebody watched her pass the ball and saw something different. They saw her IQ, her understanding of the game and her natural leadership, so during the tryout they asked her if she would try setting.
What I remember most isn’t whether setter ultimately became her position. She moved around during her volleyball years. What I remember is watching my daughter get asked, in front of all her peers, to try something she really hadn’t done before and being completely willing to do it. There was a very real possibility she could fail in front of everybody. She didn’t hesitate.
That is probably one of the reasons I’ve always believed so strongly in team sports, particularly for girls. Sports teach you things that have almost nothing to do with the actual game. You learn how to fail publicly and come back the next day. You learn leadership and accountability. You learn how to depend on somebody else and what it feels like when other people depend on you. You learn that being uncomfortable isn’t necessarily a reason to stop. Those lessons matter a lot longer than the final score of a volleyball match.
Eventually, injuries complicated volleyball for my daughter. She kept hurting her thumb, which is obviously a significant problem when you’re setting and hitting a volleyball. I’ve been injured plenty of times playing sports myself, so injuries didn’t change my perspective on athletics. Watching my daughter deal with them changed my perspective as a father. My instinct was to fix it, take away the pain and tell her what she should do, and I couldn’t do any of those things. I had to give a 13- or 14-year-old girl the grace to work through some pretty difficult decisions about something she loved. She didn’t want to stop, but eventually she had to decide what was best for herself.
Volleyball also introduced me to something else I wasn’t expecting. It was probably my first real exposure to the business of youth sports, and specifically the business around girls sports. Travel volleyball was crazy. The tournaments, hotels, training, equipment, clubs, recruiting and the amount of money and time families were investing was eye-opening. There was already a significant economy around these girls. I just hadn’t thought about it that way before.
Years later, I would end up seeing that economy from an entirely different seat.
THE VIEW FROM TWELVE TIME
Today, I get to see the girls basketball pipeline up close through Twelve Time. Our mission is to give talented kids opportunities they might not otherwise have, and affordability is a major part of that. We intentionally keep our fees at roughly a third of what comparable high-level programs can cost, and then we go well beyond that by helping with travel, food, merchandise and other expenses. We don’t want a family’s ability to write a check to determine whether a talented kid gets the opportunity to be seen.
Our girls team has become one of the teams I’m closest to in the program. They’re an incredibly talented group, but they’re also just a great group of girls. They have huge personalities. They love my wife, Leanne, and we love being around them. I love their coaching staff and the way the girls respond to them. We let them have fun and they definitely take advantage of that, but when the ball goes up you remember very quickly what level of basketball you’re watching.
These are middle-school and early high-school girls playing Nike EYBL basketball, and some of them are receiving Division I scholarship offers before they’re old enough to drive. The skill level is incredible. We can play five-out and have four girls on the floor who can legitimately knock down threes at a 35-percent-plus clip. They’re better shooters, more athletic, more skilled with the basketball and processing the game at a level I don’t remember seeing from girls this age even five or ten years ago.
That’s why I believe people who are watching the explosion of women’s basketball today may still be underestimating what’s coming next. Look at the athleticism already reaching the college level. South Carolina has four women on the same roster capable of dunking. Now look underneath that at what is happening in elite youth basketball. These girls are developing differently and developing earlier.
I believe the women’s game five or six years from now is going to look significantly different than it does today. I don’t mean it will lose what makes women’s basketball different. In many ways, I think the women’s game still has more of the old-school, classic basketball that a lot of us grew up loving. What we’re going to see is that same brand of basketball played with another level of shooting, athleticism and individual skill. If somebody who only watches the WNBA came with me to an elite eighth- or ninth-grade EYBL game, I genuinely believe they would be blown away by what these girls can already do.
I’ve watched the business evolve right alongside the talent. Recruiting starts incredibly early. Social media starts even earlier. A 12- or 13-year-old athlete can begin building an audience and, whether we like the terminology or not, becoming a product. At Twelve Time, we actually try to insulate our younger players from some of that because we don’t want the pressure of recruiting, rankings and social media interfering with their development. There will be plenty of time for all of that. But from a business perspective, you can’t ignore what is happening.
The ecosystem is being built earlier than ever before.
WHEN DAWN WALKED INTO THE GYM
One of my favorite moments with our girls happened at nationals in Chicago a couple of years ago. We were playing and I was standing up cheering like I normally do when Leanne started tapping me on the leg. I sat down, she pointed across the gym and said, “Look who’s here.”
It was Dawn Staley.
You have to understand how funny our reaction was. I’ve watched Dawn for years. I had South Carolina season tickets when she first got there and there might have been 1,500 people in the arena. It was so quiet you could hear her coaching during the timeouts. I’ve been to hundreds of South Carolina games and have been around Dawn before. None of that mattered. Leanne and I still looked at each other like, Oh my God, Dawn is here.
She has that kind of gravity.
I had invited Dawn and her assistant, Dale, to come see our girls if they had a few minutes, and they graciously did. They weren’t there to recruit anybody. Our girls were sixth and seventh graders at the time. That almost made it cooler because there wasn’t an agenda behind it. Dawn Staley had simply taken some of her time to come watch these girls play basketball.
You could see the moment our girls realized who was sitting there. You could also see the other team realize it. During a timeout, some of their players were looking over at Dawn and Dale instead of paying attention to their coach. Hell, I think some of the coaches were looking over wondering, Who are they here to see?
As excited as Leanne and I were, I was even more excited watching our girls. It was one of those moments where you understand what representation actually looks like. They weren’t looking across the gym at somebody adults had told them was important. They knew exactly who Dawn was and what she represented. Here was arguably the most important figure in women’s basketball sitting courtside watching them play.
That kind of gravity matters, and there are more women developing it throughout basketball.
WHEN A HIGH SCHOOL PLAYER BECOMES A BUSINESS
I saw another version of it in Chicago with Jerzy Robinson her last EYBL season. At the time she was still in high school, before beginning her career at South Carolina. She walked through the gym and the reaction from the younger girls was incredible. Everybody wanted a picture with her. She stood there for over 45 minutes taking pictures, talking to kids and trying to work her way through the gym.
What caught my attention wasn’t only that she was a great basketball player. It was the equity she had already built before playing a minute of college basketball. She was culturally relevant to girls who wanted to be where she was going. She handled the attention with a maturity that was impressive for somebody who was only 16 or 17 years old, and watching it from a business perspective, I realized she wasn’t simply a basketball prospect anymore. She was already building a business around who she was.
That is a fundamental change in the women’s game. We’ve always had incredible female athletes, but they haven’t always had the infrastructure that allowed them to become culturally significant brands this early. Today, social media, NIL, shoe companies and increased television exposure have connected every level of the women’s basketball ecosystem.
I think much of this movement started from the top down. A handful of superstar players over the last decade `brought enormous attention to women’s college basketball and eventually the WNBA. More moms and dads started watching. Their daughters started watching. Those girls then started paying attention to the next college stars and eventually the high-school players who might be next. Suddenly a high-school girl can walk into a gym filled with seventh and eighth graders and have the kind of gravity we traditionally associated with professional athletes.
That didn’t happen at this scale five or six years ago.
FROM A FLYER TO ALMOST ESSENTIAL
If you had asked me ten years ago about investing in women’s sports, I probably would have viewed it almost like an angel investment. There was potentially enormous upside, but there was also enormous risk. You were making a bet on what women’s sports might eventually become.
Today, I look at it almost completely differently. I believe having exposure to women’s sports is becoming essential for anybody trying to build a serious sports investment portfolio, and I believe the category may have some of the largest remaining growth potential in the industry.
Unrivaled is a perfect example of why investors are paying attention. The league recently raising that $100 millin, it makes me wonder what else is sitting somewhere today that hasn’t been properly valued yet.
At the same time, believing deeply in women’s sports does not mean every women’s sports property is automatically a good investment. That’s where I think some discipline is going to become increasingly important. When a category gets hot, capital follows it, and when enough capital follows something, eventually people start overpaying.
I can believe women’s sports as a category remain undervalued while simultaneously believing a particular women’s sports asset might be overvalued.
Those two things aren’t contradictory. That’s investing.
THE PEOPLE COME BEFORE THE PROPERTY
One thing sports ownership has taught me is that I evaluate these opportunities differently now. When we looked at the Metros, I didn’t evaluate the basketball first. I evaluated the operators. That remains the first thing I look at today because of the way we invest.
I’m not a particularly good passive investor. If I take a meaningful position in something, I pour myself into it. That means I need to know who I’m getting into business with. How do they make decisions? How do they communicate? How do they respond when something goes wrong? Do they know what they don’t know? Most importantly, can we work together when the business inevitably gets difficult?
After the people, I look at the structure. Who owns the rights? Where does revenue come from today and where could it come from tomorrow? What does the cap table look like? How much additional capital will the business require? What can ownership actually influence? Where is the enterprise value ultimately being created?
The sport itself obviously matters because there has to be a ceiling. That’s why we’re willing to look outside the things we already know. We’ve spent time looking at cricket, for example. When you start studying the enormous global audience around cricket and then realize how many people are watching it in the United States, you have to ask whether there’s an opportunity there. I don’t have to grow up loving a sport to recognize the business opportunity around it. Plus, cricket seems like a dope sport.
For me, though, the people and the business structure still come first.
I DON’T JUST WANT TO BUY VALUE. I WANT TO HELP CREATE IT.
There are two very different types of sports investments that interest me. I would absolutely love to own 3 or 5 percent of a major property worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There is value in simply being inside that room. It establishes credibility, creates relationships, gives you access and potentially allows you to participate in the appreciation of a scarce asset.
But that’s probably not where our biggest financial opportunity exists.
Give me the opportunity to own 30 percent of something worth $20 million that we believe could eventually become worth $200 million. That’s much closer to how we think about investing because we believe we can affect the outcome.
We’re not only bringing a check. We have athlete relationships and people in our organization with significant audiences. We understand sponsorship, brand partnerships, media, content, marketing, audience development, youth sports, merchandising and data. We have people who know how to build businesses. If we’re buying 3 percent of a $500 million property, that organization probably doesn’t need us operating the business. If we’re buying 30 percent of an emerging league, team or platform, we’re going to work.
That’s where I think our money and our experience can have an outsized impact.
SO WHAT WOULD I ACTUALLY BUY?
Somebody asked me recently what I would do if I had $25 million committed tomorrow that had to be invested specifically in women’s sports. I thought the answer would be easy. It wasn’t, because the fan in me and the investor in me immediately went in different directions.
The investor in me wants to get in early. I want to find the emerging league, the next 3-on-3 opportunity, the technology company, youth infrastructure or some other business around women’s sports where $25 million combined with our involvement could materially change the trajectory. I’d rather help create the next $500 million valuation than simply pay today’s price to participate in one.
But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t another part of me that thinks it would be incredibly cool to own part of the Atlanta Dream. It’s the closest WNBA franchise to us, and there is something powerful about being able to say you’re an owner in one of the premier women’s professional leagues in the world. That kind of ownership would also give us a platform to help influence women’s sports from the top down.
Then my mind goes somewhere even bigger.
Why not the Carolinas?
I remember sitting inside Colonial Life Arena when there were 1,500 people watching South Carolina women’s basketball. Look at what exists here today. Look at the fan base Dawn Staley and those women have built. Women’s basketball isn’t a niche in this market anymore. It is part of the culture.
So what would happen if the Carolinas had a professional women’s basketball property of its own? Could you eventually bring some of the women who helped create this culture back into the organization as investors, executives, ambassadors or owners? Could you take the loyalty that already exists around women’s college basketball and extend it into the professional game?
Maybe the answer isn’t a WNBA franchise. Maybe you go to Unrivaled and ask what it would take to create a Carolina-based 3-on-3 property. Maybe it’s another league that doesn’t exist yet. Maybe $25 million is better spent building the youth, training, technology and media infrastructure underneath the professional game.
I don’t know the answer yet.
That’s what makes the question interesting.
WHAT I WANT OUR GIRLS TO SEE
My daughter doesn’t need me to buy a women’s sports team to know how I feel about women in sports. I hope I’ve spent her entire life showing her that. Our girls at Twelve Time don’t need a press release either. They see what we invest in them. They know who shows up. They know how seriously we take their development and their opportunities.
But I do think there is something important about young women seeing men invest real capital, real time and real resources into women. Not as charity. Not because it makes for a good marketing campaign. Not because supporting women’s sports happens to be popular right now.
As an investment.
I want my daughter and our girls to see men look at a business built around women and say, I believe this can be valuable. I believe these athletes are valuable. I believe this audience is valuable. And I’m willing to put my own money behind that belief.
Ten years ago, I probably would have looked at women’s sports as a flyer.
Today, I look at it as almost essential.
We already own basketball. We own soccer. We’re exploring 3-on-3 and other sports properties. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to own next, and I’m not interested in buying something simply because women’s sports happen to be hot.
I want to find the right people, the right structure and the right opportunity. I want to find the place where our capital, relationships and experience can actually change the outcome. And if we can find that opportunity in women’s sports, where the underlying talent, audience and culture are all moving in the same direction, I think that’s a pretty damn interesting place to put our next dollar.
So what should we own next?
I’m starting to have a pretty good idea where we should be looking.
