Sports Business | The GIST

Everyone is playing (and paying) women’s flag football

While there’s still higher male participation in the U.S., flag football is rapidly flourishing among women and girls. During the 2023–2024 season, nearly 43K girls played in high school (105% increase YoY), while other data suggests about 500K girls aged 6 to 17 years old participated at some level in 2023.

February 21, 2026

Olympic, Paralympic brands dazzle in front of record global audience at Milano Cortina 2026

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Americans dig the Winter Olympics. Last week, the first five days of the Winter Olympics wrapped with 26.5M viewers across NBC platforms, a 93% increase over a comparable period at Beijing 2022. This has been followed with record-breaking global audiences fueled by digital and social growth: Social engagement has doubled since Beijing 2022, with Olympic digital platforms surpassing 100M users.

February 19, 2026

Parity SVP Alana Casner explains why brands adore athlete moms

Let’s be clear: Advertisers do portray mothers across advertising, more so than women without children. But the standard portrayal features mothers as caretakers engrossed in domestic tasks and has changed little since the 1950s.

February 14, 2026

Athletes, celebrities, and executives illustrate brand opportunity at Winter Olympics

The Winter Olympics are underway and seem to be trekking in the footsteps of Paris 2024, a.k.a. the “Social Media Olympics.” Once again, we’re seeing trends play out in real time as athletes and celebrity fans play an increased role in driving brand engagement. We’re breaking down the top headlines out of Milano Cortina this week.

February 12, 2026

AI prominence in Super Bowl ads ignites conversation about its role in women’s sports

Super Bowl (SB) ads are often a pulse check on trends in the year to come, at least from an advertising perspective — after all, these are the companies betting big on reaching the most Americans possible in a single spot. And this year, many SB ads featured AI companies and some were even created by AI, although a majority of SB viewers didn’t like them.

February 10, 2026

Brands at the Super Bowl are considering women’s sports, women fans more than ever

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Women make their way to Radio Row

February 07, 2026

Parity survey shows higher fan engagement around women athletes ahead of the Winter Olympics

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On Monday, women athlete partnership platform Parity shared results from a survey of almost 12K adults across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia on how sports fans perceive gender equity in the upcoming Winter Olympics.

February 05, 2026

Rebel Girls doubles down on sports partnership in new AU Pro Basketball deal

Sports Business

Rebel Girls doubles down on sports partnership in new AU Pro Basketball deal

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February 03, 2026

In an exclusive with The GIST today, Gen Alpha girls empowerment brand Rebel Girls (RG) is announcing a new media partnership with Athletes Unlimited’s basketball arm, AU Pro Basketball (AUBB). While basketball has been a priority for RG, evidenced by activations with A’ja Wilson and Sabrina Ionescu, this is the brand’s first foray into hoops at the organizational level.

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The GIST of It Podcast

Ep #531

Why Norway is dominating the Milano Cortina Olympics

February 17, 2026

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Why Norway is dominating the Milano Cortina Olympics

Norway has the secret sauce for Olympic success.

We’re more than halfway through the Milano Cortina Olympics, and Norway is once again leading the medal count with just 80 athletes competing — an astonishing success rate. What makes the Norwegians so darn good at the Winter Olympics? Today’s episode of The GIST of It aims to find out as co-hosts Lauren Tuiskula and Alessandra Puccio dig into why the Scandinavian country of just 5.6M people absolutely dominates the snow.