GRAPHIC: STEPHANIE SAVELA ’25/THE HAWK
Lily Shimbashi grew up wanting to be the next Erin Andrews, currently a Fox Sports sideline reporter who has become one of the most popular women sportscasters in the U.S.
After graduating from Brigham Young University in 2015, Shimbashi started working as a broadcast and media assistant for the Utah Jazz, fulfilling her dream of working in broadcast journalism. But it didn’t take long for her to notice how women sportscasters were treated by the men around them.
“That was a really disheartening moment where I said, ‘Do I want to pursue this career that I’ll never be enough, or know enough, or never impress men on their couches who are then tweeting about my looks?’’’ Shimbashi said. “That is what I started to observe about women in the industry and how they were treated.”
Shimbashi also noticed that everything the Utah Jazz’s media team put out catered to men. So, Shimbashi began to consider an “untapped niche”: women sports fans who were constantly being quizzed on their sports knowledge or told they didn’t know enough.
Shimbashi took that concept, that revolutionary idea that women fans could be as into sports as men, and founded Sportsish, a sports media platform catered specifically to women fans, in 2021.
“I started to dream of a world where it wasn’t like that, where we could talk about sports in the ways that we wanted to or felt comfortable to us,” Shimbashi said. “Our comment sections were safe and friendly and didn’t have any trolls telling us that we didn’t know enough.
Molly Yanity, Ph.D., professor and director of sports media and communication at the University of Rhode Island, said platforms like Sportsish help to bring sports to more women fans because digital platforms are more accessible to smaller audiences.
“It doesn’t have to be a gigantic audience to warrant the production that goes into it, from an ESPN or an ABC or CBS or NBC,” Yanity said. “It can be done more on a niche level, and that has also helped grow an audience to create the demand for the bigger things.”
Sportsish is not the only platform of its kind. In recent years, other sports media platforms have targeted women audiences. Some like The Gist or Girls Club focus on both women’s and men’s sports but are designed to appeal to an audience that is predominantly women. Other platforms like Togethxr and Just Women’s Sports only cover women’s sports.
Yanity said one of the main differences between women sports fans and men sports fans is that women are looking for a community surrounding the teams and sports they follow. These platforms “create a community and a sense of belonging” for them.
“Whether it’s a women’s team or men’s team, there’s a community that we’re looking for,” Yanity said.
After seeing a viral video story about the women’s weight rooms at the NCAA Basketball Tournament in 2021, Shimbashi was set on making sure her coverage was an even 50/50 split between women’s and men’s sports. She felt it was the responsibility of the media to fight against the system that has “elevated men’s sports for so long.”
“We’re not perfect, but you’ll never see a swipe post of mine without a female athlete included, without minority athletes included, without LGBTQ athletes included,” Shimbashi said. “I really want every type of woman to feel seen.”
While Sportsish was made “out of a desire to speak to women,” Shimbashi said that includes all types of women media consumers, acknowledging the different ways they prefer to consume stories. Sportsish offers a website and a newsletter with more longform content, social media pages for quick swipe stories and story segments on Instagram and TikTok.
Of Sportsish’s 220,000 followers, 90% are women between the ages of 18 to 35. Shimabshi said Sportsish curates a specific brand for that audience, making sure the platform stands out from other mainstream sports pages.
“We’re very curated. We have a very clear, branded style. We use pink, we use green. We are not afraid to come off as feminine and fun and whimsy,” Shimbashi said. “We want it to catch your eye, and we want it to be different.”
Sportsish also embraces emotional vulnerability. What has been viewed as a negative characteristic for women for so long, Shimbashi sees instead as a “superpower.”
“The ability to connect emotionally to a human being based on their story is why women make powerful leaders, wonderful mothers,” Shimbashi said. “Whatever you want to be, you can be it, and I think at the core, a lot of that is our emotional intelligence and vulnerability. Female sports fans are different. They should be spoken to differently.”
Kylie Williams ’23 started following Sportsish on Instagram for its coverage of all sports and not just basketball, baseball, hockey and football, the big four that get the most attention in other mainstream media services. Platforms like Sportsish also serve as a safe space for fans, Williams said.
“I think Sportsish is a really good way for even girls who do know a lot about sports to share that with women and not just men,” Williams said. “In a lot of conversations, women are also kind of looked down on or asked to name five players.”
Even as someone who can name well more than five players and understands the games herself, Williams appreciates the way Sportish focuses on the storylines within games and not just the details of the game.
“Sometimes, I feel like some of the storylines get missed, at least ones that I’m interested in,” Williams said. “Women like the storylines. We like everything. Making it a little bit personal, it makes it more interesting. I feel like Sportsish does a really good job at appealing to that side of things, while also giving you the content of news and updating you on what happened.”
When Shimbashi founded Sportsish four years ago, she felt like she was doing a lot of convincing to get women around her to care about sports. Now, with “an appetite that has never been there before from female sports fans,” Shimbashi said the content Sportsish produces changes with it.
“You have the die-hards who grew up watching and loving sports and feeling comfortable as a sports fan. You have new people who maybe just fell in love with the storyline of Caitlin [Clark] and Angel [Reese], or they like seeing Taylor Swift at football games,” Shimbashi said. “I want content that speaks to all of them and makes all of them feel comfortable and seen and heard.”
