When Christen Press has the ball at her feet, the world watches and waits, and when she has a microphone in her hands, the world listens.
The two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup Winner and long-time National Women’s Soccer League player has already made a name for herself on the pitch, but now with, together with Tobin Heath—who Press calls her partner “in every sense of the word”—Press is making a name for herself in the media space through The RE-CAP Show, the pair’s soccer podcast side of their business venture RE-INC.
Press and Heath are taking their show on the road to the NWSL Championship and hosting a live show at Fan Fest, a mark of just how much success the two players are having in the space, but also a testament to the exponential growth of the NWSL and the fanfare around the championship match.
”Part of sports is the culture and the hullabaloo around things,” Press says. “As an active player and an entrepreneur in the sports space, the final is a very important event for me to be at.”
Although Press will not be playing in this final, her team Angel City FC missed out on the playoffs this year, coming to the final remains a top priority for her to stay engaged in the tightly-knit but ever-growing women’s sports space.
“This will be my third final, and even the difference between the last two that I was at is enormous,” Press says. “I’m really excited to see what this weekend brings.”
For Press, championship weekend provides both a celebratory atmosphere — one when the women’s soccer community can get together to celebrate the season — but also an educational opportunity to stay up to date with all that goes on behind the scenes to keep the league operational.
“I think it’s really important for us as a women’s sports community, and a women’s soccer community, to come together to celebrate the season, be celebrated, see what’s going on with the different brand partners and media rights holders,” she says. “It’s all the things that support the infrastructure of the league that as a player when you’re not in season, you’re not paying attention to.”
Press, who has played professionally for nearly 15 years, is well aware that the length of a pro career is finite. In starting RE-INC in 2019 along with Heath and fellow USWNT teammates Megan Rapinoe and Meghan Klingenberg, the initial motivation was this idea that they could build something in a business that would long outlast their playing careers.
”It wasn’t a thought of retirement and what are we going to do next, which is a real thing that women professional athletes have to deal with,” Press says. “But I think in our circumstances, especially because of the USWNT cultural impact and our fight for equal pay, we realized we had this extraordinary symbol of meaning to the world and that we could build that into a platform that could impact more lives than we could do individually.”
While RE-INC has a multifaceted business model, the podcast has truly become a focal point for the company. Press is proud to be among the voices creating women’s soccer content, and she’s hoping more and more people, especially former players, will join her in what she considers to be a growing and exciting space.
“[This space] is not crowded, I would actually say that it’s really young and we’re pretty early into it,” Press says. “It would be amazing to see, you know, 50 more women’s soccer podcasts, hundreds more.”
Gone are the days when people considered a handful of women’s sports podcasts as a saturated market. As the league grows, the conversations around the league grow right along with it, and as Press sees it, it is time for women’s sports media to build its own infrastructure focusing on the unique aspects of women athletes rather than just a carbon copy of men’s sports content.
“The business of women’s sports in a lot of ways fails the athletes and the fans,” Press says. “That is because it was just a copy-paste of what men built, but the product of women’s sports is quite different. A lot of the best ways that the fans can connect to players, teams, and brands has been lost in the copy-paste infrastructure. Now we have these new kinds of media opportunities and entities that are able to start to redesign what the media landscape looks like for women’s sports.”
With The RE-CAP Show, Press and Heath are able to show, rather than tell, what women’s sports looks and feels like in what the pair call “gal culture.”
”Everyone knows what bro culture is, everybody knows what it seems like, what it sounds like, but what are the gals like?” Press says. “What are we like in the locker room? What is the culture of the women’s athlete? That’s kind of been lost because it’s quite different from bro culture.”
As the landscape continues to grow and evolve, Press is confident that there will be a windfall of more jobs created in the space, which will only benefit the athletes themselves as they look to extend their mark on the industry post-retirement.
“It’s across a spectrum of things, across media, across creating more products, creating more value, and more partnerships with brands,” Press explains. “I think the goal is, if we can right side the business of women’s sports, there should be a lot more opportunity for athletes to make money within the game, and when they’re done playing, can continue to do so.”
For Press and Heath, taking on this project together has been a true labor of love. The couple, who have worked together since their early days as teammates on the USWNT, have found their flow professionally, and take seriously the responsibility of their work.
”We both played together on the USWNT for so long, and so I think the way that we work together professionally was kind of set by that standard of what it's like to be a player on the USWNT—there’s a lot of weight and responsibility in that phrase,” Press says. “We truly were so self sacrificing in that job and in honoring what it means to represent your country on the world stage, and so that has really set the tone for how we function.”
Press credits her and Heath’s complementary styles on work has made for an easy division of labor and a path to building a successful platform together. Whether it’s Heath’s “crazy ideas” or Press’s organizational skills, the two are having fun, learning as they go, and getting out of their comfort zones.
“It’s funny because in the grand scheme of things, we’re both women, we’re both soccer players, we’re both CEOs, we’re both queer, there are so many similarities,” Press says. “But when you zoom in, we’re quite opposite.”
The RE-CAP Show, which sits at the intersection of sports and culture, allows both Press and Heath to lean into their strengths. In Heath, Press sees the true meaning of the word partner, and so far, it’s working.
As the two prepare for their live show, they are also looking forward to the main event, the NWSL Championship featuring the 2024 Shield Winners Orlando Pride and second-seeded Washington Spirit. Although Press is not a betting woman as she puts it, she’s feeling like the Pride will be the likely victor Saturday.
“I can’t help but cheer for this Orlando side because just having been in this league from the beginning, Orlando is a team that is always at the bottom of the table. That’s how I’ve seen them, so it’s fun to see some of the players like Marta, who has been on the team for so long, to now have the opportunity to shine and be supported with a great cast of coaches and players. That’s my prediction, but we’ll see what happens!”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as In a Growing Media Landscape, Christen Press is Finding Her Own Voice .
