Unexpected Curves

Female rappers are more visible than ever, in large part because of new media. The same thing is happening in women’s sports. We are seeing the collision of generational talent, and media exposure allowing for the growth of the women’s game.

What similarities are we seeing? What’s different? And how can both industries work together to create momentum for exponential growth? Joining me on the podcast to talk about how women’s sports can be apart of the next 50 years of hip-hop if female rappers are leading the way is music journalist @sowmyak Clock starts now! Tik-Tok!

Before it becomes a Netflix film, The Girls of Summer is worth revisiting.

This week, longtime New York Times reporter Jere Longman joins the show to discuss his book The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World (the story that inspired Netflix's upcoming adaptation), and why the 1999 U.S. Women's National Team still matters more than 25 years later.

The conversation explores how a tournament with little marketing became the largest women's sporting event in history, why the success of the '99 team was about far more than soccer, and how the movement they helped build continues to shape women's sports today.

"If you let me play sports, I will learn what it means to be strong".

More than 30 years later, those words remain one of the most recognizable messages in women's sports.

This week, we catch up with Janet Champ, who started her career at Wieden+Kennedy and went on to build some of Nike's most influential campaigns, including If You Let Me Play. At a time when women's sports received little attention from advertisers, Champ and her creative partner Charlotte Moore began creating ads that weren't really about products. They were about ambition, fear, confidence, identity, and the process of becoming. Together, we explore how stories shape culture, why women saw themselves in Janet's work, and how a young writer who never intended to work in advertising helped change the language of women's sports.