The Management Firm That Puts Female Athletes at the Center, Not the Side Project
Current sports marketing is designed for men. Always Alpha built a different one for women.
Allyson Felix is the most decorated American track and field Olympian of all time.
11 Olympic medals, 7 gold.
She also had a life-threatening pregnancy in 2018. When asking Nike for maternity protections, they refused and proposed a 70% pay cut. After Felix wrote a New York Times op-ed exposing the treatment, Nike changed its policy industry-wide.
Treatment like that is why Felix created the first Olympic Village nursery at Paris 2024. She signed with Athleta as their first-ever athlete sponsor, launched Saysh footwear and now runs Always Alpha alongside co-founder and CEO Cosette Chaput, who spent nearly a decade at a prominent agency watching female athletes get relegated to side projects while male athletes received dedicated resources.
In October 2024, they launched the first management firm designed exclusively around female athletes, teaming up with Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment in February 2025 to create the first full-service management firm dedicated exclusively to women's sports.
Within 18 months, their roster includes back-to-back NWSL MVP Temwa Chawinga and 2016 WNBA MVP and champion Nneka Ogwumike, a 10-time All-Star and President of the WNBA Players Association. In building partnerships for this roster, Felix and Chaput identified three principles that they operate on to revolutionize partnerships for female athletes.
Key Takeaways:
Female athletes earn 80-90% of income from marketing (the inverse of male athletes), yet brands apply identical partnership models designed for men
Female athletes drive 2.8x more purchase intent than lifestyle influencers, but brands still measure success by follower counts instead of engagement depth
What brands call "women's sports marketing" is men's sports marketing that includes women. What it really is are companies that sell to women leveraging women’s sports to do so.
Marketing Evaluations Don’t Come In “Unisex”
Marketing teams evaluate female athletes the same way they evaluate influencers. That's the first mistake.
Female athletes earn 80-90% of their income from marketing, which means the relationship they have built with their audience is tied directly to their career. The engagement is load-bearing in a way that a lifestyle influencer simply isn't.
Yet agencies apply the same playbook to both.
Brands compare 200,000 followers to 2 million and dismiss the smaller number. "One thing that comes up a lot is what we call vanity metrics," Chaput says. Brands miss that female athletes don't have audiences. They have fandoms. Fandoms convert differently, but brands won't see it if they're measuring the wrong things.
The Always Alpha Custom Tailoring
Off-the-rack sponsorship deals were designed for and to further leverage male athletes, but those standard fits don’t translate the same to female athletes. Always Alpha tailors the way they build relationships on three principles that actually suit the way their roster earns and operates.
Fandoms Don’t Follow Follower Counts
Peloton instructors Becs Gentry and Kirsten Ferguson each have roughly 200,000 Instagram followers. Their engagement rate can run 10-12%, four times the industry benchmark of 3%.
These instructors are there for women during vulnerable moments (like early morning workouts) for an hour plus per day. They encourage them through tough physical challenges. That builds trust at a different depth than passive scroll. Trust converts. So when these women recommend a product, their audience listens because their relationship was earned, not bought.
At Brandweek, Always Alpha shared a Parity stat that female athletes drive 2.8x more purchase intent than lifestyle influencers.
"Don't do a one off. Invest, tell the stories, give these women a platform to really connect with these fandoms that they already have such a rich connection with," Chaput says.
Female athletes have proven they convert. So why aren't the brands that sell to women showing up? Three categories should dominate women's sports marketing but remain "exceptionally behind":
Beauty (still scratching the surface despite selling almost exclusively to women)
Parenting and motherhood brands (Felix's Pampers partnership created the first Olympic Village nursery at Paris 2024, making a non-endemic brand a talked-about part of the Games)
Fashion (getting a "sprinkle" of interest but far from saturated)
The brands treating entry into women's sports as "risk" are actually building defensible positions now. Those that aren’t are going to get left behind very quickly.
Building A True Women’s Sports Market
Always Alpha operates from a core thesis:
"The biggest opportunity in women's sports is the fact that women's sports marketing hasn't really existed and it's just starting."
Current sports marketing consists of Nike, Gatorade, and State Farm expanding budgets to include women. But it's still men's sports marketing that includes women.
True women's sports marketing comes from companies that solely rely on women to buy their products like Sephora, ThirdLove, and Vagisil (which partnered with the New York Liberty just last year).
These brands have been in influencer marketing because sports wasn't on the menu. Data now shows female athletes drive conversions at higher rates than traditional female influencers.
When Nike spends more on women, they're extending an existing budget. When Sephora enters sports for the first time, they're creating a category.
Champion Athlete Passions, Not Playbooks
Always Alpha calls themselves "the center of the wheel"—deploying best-in-class specialists rather than forcing everything in-house. Temwa Chawinga wants to build academies in Malawi. Mel Reid and Kira Dixon successfully launch a podcast on iHeat Women's Sports audio network. Always Alpha connects them with agents, TV producers, podcast networks, and documentary teams who can execute those visions.
"One thing we're talking about all day every day is ownership in IP and really getting those seats at the table. That's how you really start to shift generational wealth," Chaput explains. “How do we build long term platforms? How do we build real businesses around our clients?”
The most successful partnerships become collaborations where brands learn from athletes what their audiences actually want.
When a brief goes out to 100 influencers with identical asks, female athletes shouldn't be on that list. The partnership structure needs to be different, collaborative, long-term, and built around the athlete's actual passions. Otherwise, that’s not a partnership.
The Time to Build Your Own Market Is Coming
The US Women's World Cup win in 1999 was a cultural moment that didn't translate into sustained commercial infrastructure.
"Looking back it was more a moment, not a foundation, not a movement. Back then you had to depend on legacy media, and legacy media missed it. But social media now ensures it won't be missed," Chaput says.
Visibility alone doesn't build infrastructure. Brands that confuse a moment for a movement will make the same mistake as in 1999. The spotlight moments are coming with LA 2028 and Women's World Cup 2031 in the US.
Brands showing up for those moments without established relationships will find themselves sweeping up crumbs. Those building partnerships now will have credibility when global attention arrives. 20% of Always Alpha's clients had never had an agent before. They're building a market, not just competing in one.
"Just because things have been done one way for a really long time doesn't mean you have to continue down that path," Felix says. Forge a new path that fits the ones who walk it.
