From BYU Student to Startup Founder, She’s Changing How Women Engage With Sports
While holding her son George, Lily Shimbashi finished the business plan for Sportsish, a sports media company specifically built for women who follow sports.
“Why build a women’s sports media company? To help female fans feel seen in the way that I craved to be seen my whole entire life and to help them feel empowered,” she said. “I wanted to create new female fans because I knew there was a lot of potential there, but I also wanted to empower old female fans with knowledge and feeling like they have a community in this sports space.”
And ever since that night, Shimbashi has been on a mission to create the next mainstream sports media destination for women — reinventing sports coverage along the way.
Sportsish markets itself as “not your boyfriend’s sports news.”
“There are plenty of women who know their stats and their scores better than men. But they also want to know a deeper story when it comes to the sports industry, and so, that’s what I try and give,” Shimbashi said.
Sportsish combines pop culture and sports while also showcasing the personal side of athletes such as their fashion, relationships, inspirational stories and more.
“Lily was doing this long before Travis (Kelce) and Taylor (Swift) came around. Lily was already merging pop stars and sports,” said Annabelle Peterson, Sportsish’s creative director.
Swift and Kelce’s romance put a spotlight on the millions of female fans that sports leagues and teams may have overlooked. After Swift attended her first Kansas City Chiefs game to watch Kelce, a wave of women flocked to the NFL. Two million new female fans tuned into the Chiefs’ game the next week, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
But this is still just the beginning for Shimbashi and Sportsish in the company’s pursuit of becoming a mainstream destination. To get there, the key is “more,” according to Shimbashi.
“We have all of our social channels and our website, but I just want more and more women working together,” she said. “I never wanted to build this alone. I’ve only wanted to build something along with other women for women, and so that’s kind of the goal within the next year: more talent, more fans and more female voices within this sports space that’s been dominated by men for so long.”
“There are women that came into sports fandom because of Taylor, but many of them stayed for the Trinity Rodmans, Coco Gauffs and A’ja Wilsons. Maybe their introduction to sports was nontraditional, but they’ve become full-fledged fans now. And truly nothing has made me feel more fulfilled than seeing women catch the bug of sports fandom,” Shimbashi said.
Read the full Deseret News article by Krysyan Edler here.