Women's Sports Needs Enterprise Thinking. Here's Strack's Corporate-to-Impact Model.
The jump from Fortune 500 executive to social impact entrepreneur can be a career pivot.
But for Stef Strack, it was a strategic advantage waiting to be leveraged.
Her motivation came from a place of deep personal understanding. "When I founded VOICEINSPORT, I was solving for something I experienced firsthand," Strack explains. "Both as a former Division 1 athlete and as a sports executive, [I saw] the absence of really sustainable systems for girls and women in sport." She discovered this and made it her guiding light through her career progression: 15 years at Nike leading large-scale corporate change across business units ranging from $250M to $3.5B. Soon followed by her role as CEO of rag & bone, before finally building VOICEINSPORT, a platform connecting young women athletes with professional mentors and sports experts. Her corporate experience informed her approach, but it also became the foundation for systematic market development that pure-play competitors couldn't replicate:
15+ Fortune 500 partners
85% confidence improvement rates
60 active Title IX advocacy chapters driving policy change at the school level
She shares the strategies that led to these game-winning metrics.
Market Failure by Design
Women's sports suffers from a strategic architecture problem that most organizations don't recognize.
Traditional market participants treat complex, multi-dimensional challenges with single-purpose solutions. Commercial players optimize for immediate ROI within existing market structures, while impact-focused organizations prioritize mission advancement but lack systematic frameworks for sustainable scale.
Both approaches miss a key insight: sustainable growth in underserved markets requires hybrid architectures capable of addressing immediate needs while building long-term market infrastructure.
Strack's unique position covered both athlete experience and corporate leadership. Her time navigating both sides of the system exposed gaps that weren't visible from a single vantage point.
"When you looked at the holistic gaps within the women's sports space, there was a major gap in sports science research, there was also a really big gap in equity for young girls in the public school system," Strack explains. Only 6% of sports science research focuses on women athletes, while 93% of NCAA schools fail Title IX compliance requirements.
The market needed organizations sophisticated enough to create commercial sustainability and systematic change investment.
The Either-Or Strategy Dead End
Most organizations feel they have to choose between a false binary: commercial success or social impact.
Pure commercial models focus on traditional sponsorship and media investments, limiting their ability to deploy the patient capital required for market development. Their quarterly reporting requirements and ROI expectations make long-term infrastructure investments nearly impossible to justify.
Pure impact models prioritize mission advancement, but struggle with resource constraints that limit both scale and sustainability. They rely heavily on donor funding or grant cycles that create operational uncertainty and prevent systematic program development.
The gap between these approaches creates market failure.
"Brands and leagues were launching campaigns around equity in sport or keeping girls in sport, but without the actual infrastructure or the expertise to make it stick and scale. We're [VOICEINSPORT] not the awareness campaign. We're the action engine behind those initiatives."
Both models treat corporate experience as either irrelevant to authentic impact or incompatible with mission-driven work—missing the meaningful opportunity drawn from her experience as a decision-maker on both sides
Strack gets that brands face quarterly pressures but genuinely want to create impact. She understands that nonprofits are driven to make lasting change but are constrained by donor cycles and limited reach. This insider knowledge of both ecosystems allows her to design solutions that work for everyone.
Fortune 500 Thinking Meets Social Change
Strack's evolution from Nike executive to social impact entrepreneur demonstrates strategic experience translation in practice.
Her corporate foundation provided the systematic thinking needed to identify market architecture gaps rather than just market participation opportunities.
This systematic approach led Strack to a crucial realization: a single platform wouldn't be enough.
"We have created VOICEINSPORT, the digital platform to unlock mentorship, wellness services, and educational science-backed content—built to keep girls in sport. But some things are fundamentally critical to build through a nonprofit infrastructure, which is why I ended up launching the VOICEINSPORT Foundation."
This emerged from what she discovered when presenting to brand executives. Strack shares a statistic that stops them cold: 93% of NCAA schools are out of Title IX compliance. The reality hits hard with even some of the top universities that are winning championships not in compliance with Title IX.
This infrastructure crisis revealed why brands' well-intentioned campaigns weren't creating lasting change. VOICEINSPORT’s platform provides tools, data, and community to move beyond marketing message to lasting change that will have an effect and impact for women and girls in sport.
To translate this to brand decision-makers, the process involved recognizing that women's sports required infrastructure building rather than optimization within existing frameworks. Corporate strategic planning experience enabled her to design dual-engine organizational architecture that could serve immediate athlete needs while investing in long-term systemic change.
Impact amplification emerged through sophisticated measurement systems that track both commercial performance and social outcomes. The platform reached 50,000 athletes with 85% reporting increased confidence, while the VOICEINSPORT established 60 advocacy chapters conducting Title IX compliance evaluations that aligned with government findings.
This systematic approach attracts multi-stakeholder partnerships that pure-play organizations struggle to coordinate, including the WNBA Changemakers coalition of major brands committed to systemic change investment.
Three Ways Corporate Thinking Wins
Corporate experience translates into social impact advantage through five strategic principles that successful leaders apply systematically:
Coordinate Multiple Agendas Into Unified Action
Enterprise experience managing complex internal constituencies transfers directly to orchestrating external partnership ecosystems. Corporate leaders understand how to create alignment across diverse stakeholder priorities—skills that become competitive advantages in social impact sectors where coordination complexity often prevents scale.Deploy Long-Term Thinking for Market Creation
Long-term corporate planning frameworks enable patient capital deployment that pure-play organizations cannot sustain. Corporate leaders learn to think long-term and invest in building things that take time to pay off—skills that translate perfectly to creating market infrastructure instead of chasing quick wins.Leverage Data and Measurement Systems
Corporate leaders bring sophisticated analytics capabilities that most impact organizations lack. They know how to track both financial performance and social outcomes, creating accountability systems that satisfy board requirements while proving impact to stakeholders. This enables organizations to speak the language of both investors and mission-driven partners.
The Corporate-to-Impact Translation Model isn't just theory. It's the competitive upper-hand waiting to be deployed. While 94% of women executives were athletes, only 1% of the $66 billion global sponsorship flows to women's sports.
So, remember, your stakeholder management skills and strategic frameworks aren't résumé lines. They're market-building tools that competitors can't replicate.
It’s time to build.
