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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7622603\/2026\/09\/24\/womens-sports-who-tells-story-wnba-nwsl\/?emc=edit_na_20260924&nl=breaking-news&segment_id=227035",
    "parsed_content": "Supported ByWho tells the story of women\u2019s sports? It is the question stalking this boom era, causing friction behind every ratings record and viral clip. Conflict exists between the people who have been in the room for decades \u2014 left to feel forlorn \u2014 and the ones who just walked in and act like they should command the space.Who gets to tell the story of women\u2019s sports? Insert permission into it, and we have a real squabble about defining a culture when it becomes commercially valuable to people who weren\u2019t responsible for building it. The claiming always starts once the risk dissipates.Jessica Robertson took the risk. Long before this custody battle over the women\u2019s sports narrative, she set out to build one. In 2020, as the co-founder and chief brand officer of a startup, she sat at her kitchen table for months, thumbing her iPhone notes app, hunting for one word to anchor an outsized ambition. She kept circling around togetherness, an almost quixotic thing to want that year, with the world locked down and the company\u2019s launch pushed off the calendar by a pandemic. She kept circling the idea that a handful of prominent women could add up to something larger than their sports fame. Eventually, she arranged some letters into a brand: TOGETHXR. Together. To. Get. Her. The final vowel swapped for an X \u2014 a multiplier, an intersection.Five years after its launch, TOGETHXR is an influential media and commerce company, a growing collection of events and partnerships and communities. It is an ideal case study for this growth period. It is proof of a concept that traditional sports business remains slow to recognize: Women\u2019s sports already had an audience, and neglect of that base restrained growth more than anything else.\u201cThe goal for us wasn\u2019t to boil the ocean,\u201d Robertson said. \u201cBut we weren\u2019t going to be existing on breadcrumbs.\u201dI\u2019m not telling you about TOGETHXR to write a business profile. This is a journey for perspective. I embarked on it because I couldn\u2019t escape the loudest conversations about the women\u2019s sports boom, the ones that weren\u2019t actually about the people or the games. They were arguments and grievances and dog whistles dressed up as sports debate over whether this progress was real, whether it would last, who deserved credit, who warranted vilification and who needed to be \u201cprotected.\u201d Most of those questions were being asked and answered by people who showed up tardy and insolent. I wanted to learn from the ones with emotional and sweat equity.The lesson wasn\u2019t about entrepreneurship. It was about entitlement.Alex Morgan\u2019s dreamThe dream emerged from chagrin. Alex Morgan, the soccer legend, spent years frustrated about the investment in women athletes and the stories told about them. It all felt perfunctory to her and to generations of her peers. She called Robertson, a storyteller with an enterprising spirit, with a business idea. Immediately, Robertson said yes.While reflecting on the company\u2019s five-year anniversary in March, Robertson wrote: \u201cWomen athletes are not a niche. They are a multiplier.\u201dThree other world-class champions agreed. Sue Bird, Chloe Kim and Simone Manuel joined Morgan as co-founders, creating a quartet that could not be dismissed. In the background, Robertson sharpened the vision.It was all so intentional. Four stars came together from different corners of the sports world, trying to widen the playing field and risking some of their reputation to boost an unproven business.\u201cI knew we were stepping into something bigger than just building a media company,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cWe saw a real gap in how women athletes were being covered, valued and invested in, and we believed there was an opportunity to change that. And the gap was personal.\u201dTORCON75% Picked25% Picked130 votesMorgan and the group have succeeded in translating those internal feelings into a business that puts women\u2019s sports at the center instead of the margins. TOGETHXR now generates tens of millions in annual revenue. It has achieved profitability. It has built an audience of more than four million across all its platforms, and they aren\u2019t passive followers. They are loyal and engaged. They show up in the comments, at events and create the culture around the brand. The numbers don\u2019t just measure reach; there\u2019s a resonance. TOGETHXR hasn\u2019t just transformed the mantra \u201cEveryone Watches Women\u2019s Sports\u201d into lucrative apparel. It has built stars, turning athletes such as Sydney Colson, Theresa Plaisance and Jordan Chiles into digital-media personalities with crossover appeal.The company helped create a platform for the quirky humor of Colson and Plaisance. In 2023, it co-produced an unscripted comedy series with Ryan Reynolds\u2019 Maximum Effort and Fubo, following the two \u201cbench warming besties\u201d as the WNBA players pursued fame through stunts and interviews rather than basketball stat lines. Then TOGETHXR partnered with Dear Media to launch \u201cUnsupervised,\u201d a distinct, original podcast in a crowded space and one built around their chemistry. And in July, the company turned to Chiles, the Olympic gold medalist, to co-host a new weekly show with iHeartMedia called \u201cEveryone Watches Women\u2019s Sports,\u201d the same trademarked phrase that has already generated eight figures in merchandise revenue. Putting the gymnast behind a mic instead of on a balance beam is a move the company often makes: Let the athlete be a voice, not just a highlight.\n \n \n \n TOGETHXR now has a presence at NWSL Championship Weekend, embedding with the league to capture its community rather than just recap the outcome, and this spring that relationship deepened into commerce with the first-ever league-wide \u201cEveryone Watches Women\u2019s Sports\u201d capsule collection. Earlier in the year, the company worked with Aveeno on an editorial franchise called \u201cThe Strength Issue,\u201d pairing content around the likes of ballet dancer Misty Copeland, Paralympic swimmer Ali Truwit, and USWNT forward Sophia Wilson, an effort to diversify the way we look at strength. Earlier this year, it added Angel Reese and Michelle Wie West as investors.Nothing the brand does happens by accident.\u201cIt\u2019s really a cultural ignition story,\u201d said Nancy Dubuc, the company\u2019s executive chair. \u201cWe didn\u2019t build a company to go find an audience. We knew the audience was there.\u201d\n Investor Angel Reese debuted her Barbie signature doll and matching Angel Reese 1 basketball shoes at TOGETHXR House in Chicago during the WNBA All-Star Weekend.Courtesy of TOGETHXRA convenient truthThe simplified version of the boom has been recited so much that it\u2019s almost considered conventional wisdom. It focuses on women\u2019s basketball arriving because of a generational talent, a manufactured rivalry and a flood of new followers pushing the sport into the mainstream. Caitlin Clark. Clark vs. Angel Reese. Clark vs. WNBA jealousy. Drama begetting drama.That framing is not all false. It is conveniently incomplete.\u201cIt\u2019s not overnight,\u201d Dubuc said. \u201cThis has been on the backs of executives, players, coaches and die-hards from a lot of sports for decades.\u201dBreakthroughs are rarely as sudden as they seem. Twenty-five years passed between Title IX\u2019s passage in 1972 and the WNBA\u2019s first tip-off, 25 years of girls competing with a low ceiling. And basketball has had it easy compared to others. Every sport has fought for relevance. Leagues launched and folded. Athletes accepted meager pay, went overseas and played year-round, hoping multiple paychecks could add up to a living. Executives tried to forecast\u00a0days that no one else believed would come. The moment gets the headline. The years before it don\u2019t.The past few years added attention \u2014 not a loyal audience \u2014 and attention is a voracious beast. It hunts for discord that needs arbitration rather than a game to enjoy.In August, veteran basketball journalist Ric Bucher used his podcast to ask why more men aren\u2019t in the WNBA broadcast booth. His trigger: a DiJonai Carrington foul on Sophie Cunningham that he thought the crew calling the game was too careful debating. The women were smart, he allowed. \u201cBasketball-savvy,\u201d he said. But he wanted more disagreement, more edge. Then he reached for a line that muted the rest of his argument.\u201cAll of it feels like a girls\u2019 club,\u201d he said.\n DiJonai Carrington\u2019s hard foul on Sophie Cunningham on Aug. 8 in Chicago elicited opinions about more than basketball.Melissa Tamez \/ Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesBucher isn\u2019t a villain here. He\u2019s a mirror, and I only recognize that because I spent months looking into the same one. I entered an environment that women built for themselves, and some quiet part of me went looking for the reason it should let me enter. Perhaps I wanted a hook, a justification, some proof that would make my attention worth something to a space that had never asked for it. I wasn\u2019t really wondering whether women\u2019s sports deserved an audience. I already knew they did. I was wondering, in a much smaller and more embarrassing way, whether I could restrain my sense of entitlement.Bucher didn\u2019t. Strip away the broadcast jargon, and his question was similar, just spoken instead of swallowed: Why doesn\u2019t this need me, and what should be done about that?It\u2019s fine to feel this way. But it\u2019s a terrible feeling to act on because it mistakes something that succeeded without you for something that\u2019s broken. It doesn\u2019t mean that women\u2019s sports need to become a protected space, or that every new voice is an intrusion. Criticism is part of being taken seriously. So is representation.TOGETHXR wants the audience to do something more meaningful than consume content. It wants women to recognize themselves, and men to recognize a different way of watching.\u201cWe want to challenge the status quo of traditional sports coverage,\u201d said Paula Hughes, the chief digital officer. \u201cWe\u2019re still covering the same things, but changing our tone of voice around it.\u201dOn their own termsKati Fernandez, the company\u2019s chief content officer, calls the approach identity-forward storytelling. It is content meant to validate an experience, not explain it to someone who has never bothered to notice.\u201cCan we make people think?\u201d said Fernandez, a former ESPN executive. \u201cCan we make people feel?\u201dI met Robertson in person for the first time in Phoenix last spring, during a TOGETHXR House event at the Final Four. We had no idea we were from the same place, Paducah, Ky., a town 1,500 miles and a lifetime away from the desert. We talked about home. We talked about drifting and dreams. We talked about belonging.All the while, a 28,000-square-foot venue was filling up with visitors. Fans shopped, took pictures and buzzed around a warehouse that had been turned into a mecca of women\u2019s sports. It was part retail space, part social gathering, part convention, a sprawling celebration of the games and the athletes and the community that supports them.Robertson kept getting pulled away: a vendor question, a greeting, a photo, an executive decision that couldn\u2019t wait. She excused herself and returned several times. Then she disappeared into the rush.I waited 10, 15, 20 minutes. She never made it back. She was too busy, and I was hogging too much space and attention. So I left.Appreciation isn\u2019t possession. And attention isn\u2019t authorship. There is a difference between entering a room and assuming it was built around you.I got in a car and headed back to my hotel, past the arena and the fans spilling into the streets, through a Final Four weekend that no longer needs anyone to explain why it matters.\n The Women\u2019s Final Four, which was held at Phoenix\u2019s Mortgage Matchup Center in 2026, has reached an excitement level that rivaled the men the past few years.Chris Swann \/ NCAA Photos via Getty Images\u201cFive years ago, people still questioned whether there was an audience for this,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cNow the growth across women\u2019s sports speaks for itself.\u201dI kept thinking about Robertson at her kitchen table, searching for a way to spark a brand. She wasn\u2019t trying to fill a void. She needed to open a portal.Robertson spent months hunting for the one word that could anchor a vision. I spent months learning the difference between witnessing and claiming.Who gets to tell the story of women\u2019s sports? The people who built the room, and everyone who enters it with the humility to know they didn\u2019t.\nJerry Brewer is a senior columnist at The Athletic. He has been a prominent voice across the national sports landscape for more than two decades, including stops at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Orlando Sentinel, Louisville Courier-Journal, Seattle Times and Washington Post. He was a 2025 Pulitzer Prize finalist in commentary.Follow Sep 24, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports termsPlay today's puzzleWhat did you think of this story?MEHSOLIDAWESOME",
    "published_at": "2026-09-24T10:00:21+00:00",
    "author_name": "Jerry Brewer",
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    "ai_headline": "Who tells the story of women\u2019s sports? The answer is changing.",
    "ai_simplified_title": "TOGETHXR Redefines Women's Sports Narrative Amidst Boom",
    "ai_excerpt": "This article explores the evolving narrative of women's sports, focusing on TOGETHXR, a media and commerce company founded by Jessica Robertson and athletes like Alex Morgan. It highlights the shift from traditional media's neglect to a women-led approach that recognizes and amplifies the existing audience and talent.",
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