Who tells the story of women's 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 — left to feel forlorn — and the ones who just walked in and act like they should command the space.
Who gets to tell the story of women's sports? Insert permission into it, and we have a real squabble about defining a culture when it becomes commercially valuable to people who weren't 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's 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's 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 — 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's sports already had an audience, and neglect of that base restrained growth more than anything else.
"The goal for us wasn't to boil the ocean," Robertson said. "But we weren't going to be existing on breadcrumbs."
I'm not telling you about TOGETHXR to write a business profile. This is a journey for perspective. I embarked on it because I couldn't escape the loudest conversations about the women's sports boom, the ones that weren't 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 "protected." 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't about entrepreneurship. It was about entitlement.
The 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's five-year anniversary in March, Robertson wrote: "Women athletes are not a niche. They are a multiplier."
Three 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.
"I knew we were stepping into something bigger than just building a media company," Morgan said. "We 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."
Morgan and the group have succeeded in translating those internal feelings into a business that puts women's 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't 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't just measure reach; there's a resonance. TOGETHXR hasn't just transformed the mantra "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" 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' Maximum Effort and Fubo, following the two "bench warming besties" as the WNBA players pursued fame through stunts and interviews rather than basketball stat lines. Then TOGETHXR partnered with Dear Media to launch "Unsupervised," 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 "Everyone Watches Women's Sports ," 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.
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 "Everyone Watches Women's Sports" capsule collection. Earlier in the year, the company worked with Aveeno on an editorial franchise called "The Strength Issue," 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.
"It's really a cultural ignition story," said Nancy Dubuc, the company's executive chair. "We didn't build a company to go find an audience. We knew the audience was there."
The simplified version of the boom has been recited so much that it's almost considered conventional wisdom. It focuses on women's 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.
"It's not overnight," Dubuc said. "This has been on the backs of executives, players, coaches and die-hards from a lot of sports for decades."
Breakthroughs are rarely as sudden as they seem. Twenty-five years passed between Title IX's passage in 1972 and the WNBA's 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 days that no one else believed would come. The moment gets the headline. The years before it don't.
The past few years added attention — not a loyal audience — 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't 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. "Basketball-savvy," he said. But he wanted more disagreement, more edge. Then he reached for a line that muted the rest of his argument.
"All of it feels like a girls' club," he said.
Bucher isn't a villain here. He's 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't really wondering whether women's 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't. Strip away the broadcast jargon, and his question was similar, just spoken instead of swallowed: Why doesn't this need me, and what should be done about that?
It's fine to feel this way. But it's a terrible feeling to act on because it mistakes something that succeeded without you for something that's broken. It doesn't mean that women's 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.
"We want to challenge the status quo of traditional sports coverage," said Paula Hughes, the chief digital officer. "We're still covering the same things, but changing our tone of voice around it."
Kati Fernandez, the company's 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.
"Can we make people think?" said Fernandez, a former ESPN executive. "Can we make people feel?"
I 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's 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't 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't possession. And attention isn't 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.
"Five years ago, people still questioned whether there was an audience for this," Morgan said. "Now the growth across women's sports speaks for itself."
I kept thinking about Robertson at her kitchen table, searching for a way to spark a brand. She wasn't 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's sports? The people who built the room, and everyone who enters it with the humility to know they didn't.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic .
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