Designing a Room of Possibilities
During Super Bowl week, the biggest stage in sports culture, we built a room that most brands would have never thought to build.
No massive footprint. No viral stunt. Instead, we gathered a high school quarterback who made California history, a woman with a 33-1 international record leading Team USA Women’s Flag Football Team, a trailblazing coach who was the first woman to walk the sidelines of a Super Bowl, and a room full of young women watching all of it happen in real time.
That was the activation. That was the point.
What Most Brands Get Wrong About Inclusion
When brands talk about inclusion in sport, the instinct is almost always to scale. Bigger events. Broader reach. More impressions. More bodies in a room.
But scale is not proximity. And proximity is what actually changes things.
When a young woman watches a panel on a screen, she sees representation. When she is sitting five feet away from Vanita Krouch, the most decorated player in U.S. Women's National Flag Football history, and hears her describe what it took to go 33-1 on the world stage, she does not just see it. She feels it is possible. That is a fundamentally different experience. And it requires a fundamentally different approach to event design.
Inclusion is not a headcount. It is a room designed to change what someone believes is possible.
Why the Intimate Room Matters More
For our Nike x DICK'S Sporting Goods Super Bowl Women's Night, we made a deliberate choice. Rather than building something broad, we built something precise.
Our live podcast experience, moderated by SportsCenter analyst and host of HER Playbook Podcast, Madelyn Burke, brought together Katie Sowers — one of the first women to coach in the Super Bowl — alongside Vanita Krouch, three-time IFAF World Champion and Team USA quarterback, and Daisy Throckmorton, a rising senior who became the first female quarterback to lead a men's tackle football program in California history and was just named to the NFL Girl's Flag Football Showcase for the 2026 Pro Bowl.
The VIP guests in that room were not just spectators. They were the St. Ignatius College Preparatory Women's Flag Football team and athletes from the Next Level Flag Football program. The people who most needed to be in proximity to this conversation were placed at the center of it.
That is not an accident. That is strategy.
Our Agency POV
Women's flag football is having a real moment. The NFL is investing, the NCAA has granted emerging sport status, and the Olympics are watching. But institutional support unlocks infrastructure, not identity. It builds fields and funding. It does not build the internal belief that you belong on them.
That part happens in rooms, in conversations, in the moment a high school athlete realizes the woman at the front of the room was once exactly where she is sitting.
Brands that understand this earn real cultural equity. The ones that do not are running activations that look good in a recap deck and disappear by Monday.
If your brand is thinking about how to show up in women’s sports, now is the time.