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Odessa Jenkins Gives Tackle Football The Spotlight It Deserves

Helmets for tackle football / JWS
Helmets for tackle football / JWS

Odessa Jenkins is the CEO of the Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC), a professional women’s tackle football league with over 20 teams and 1,000 women and coaches in 17 states. She spoke with Just Women’s Sports about the future of tackle football and why 2021 is shaping up to be a critical year for the WNFC.

You have an extensive background in both business and sports. Obviously, we believe that women’s sports are one of the most exciting opportunities in the space. What convinced you that the WNFC could succeed as both a business and a sports league? 

I worked at a startup for several years, and in 2014 I also came to be the owner of my first women’s tackle football team. It was in a different league, and I was really excited about becoming an owner. So as I took on that ownership, I was also learning the basics of building a business from the ground up in my startup work. I learned to ask questions like, Is there a viable market for this thing? What is the value proposition? Who is the consumer that will be consuming it and growing it? How will it look 50 years from now? How is it going to make money? All of these things that I think a lot of people never consider in women’s tackle football, to be honest with you.

Women have been playing the sport for 75 years, yet there’s never been a corporation formed for women’s tackle football, which I couldn’t believe. There were charities and other kinds of businesses, but never a corporation. So I started to look at women’s tackle football like a startup. What’s my value prop? What are our lines of revenue? And that’s when I started to think about how to create the WNFC.

So why do I think it could be valuable? It’s not me, it’s the market that’s telling me that it could be valuable. There’s been $600 million invested in alternatives to the NFL over the last seven years. We have the WFNC called an alternative to the NFL, which is a compliment. And the fact that nobody knew anything about this sport outside of lingerie football, to me was a business opportunity.

So that’s what kind of got me thinking, it’s been around for 70 years, it’s not going away, there’s enough players, there’s enough coaches to spin up a new league every single year. That means that the product itself is viable. Now how we make a viable business around it is the problem that I’m solving with the WNFC.

What do you think makes the WNFC different and how are you positioning the league to be the league for womens’ football?

There’s a couple of things you have to do to be at the pinnacle of the sport. One thing we’re doing is that we aren’t taking from our team in a way that leaves them in a financially desperate situation. So for example, we’re the only league that doesn’t require a team to pay us annually. We actually have profit sharing with all of our teams.

That was the first thing we did in the WNFC. Instead of having the teams pay us, we actually paid them. A part of our five-year plan is to actually invest back into the teams and grow them to be profitable businesses.

The other thing is our branding and our marketing. We’re the only women’s tackle football league, which is crazy, that has had a chief marketing officer and a chief branding officer. Our team is structured like any other executive team would be. And so our branding, our content, is always fresh. It’s always new.

I think the other thing that makes us unique is because we’ve done those other things, we’re attractive to sponsors. So we were the first football league of our kind to solicit a global sponsorship from a major brand with Adidas. We were the league that made brands pay attention to women’s tackle football. That’s how we’ve been different is that we have actually developed revenue lines.

I think the other thing that makes us significantly different is what we’re doing with apparel. We’ve created a viable line of business with our fan shop. It’s going to be a six-figure business in 2021. That kind of volume has never really been done, frankly, because an apparel line coming out of football has never been built. So doing those kinds of things differentiates us. And I think the team that’s running the league differentiates us as well. It’s a big group of people who are doing it because they want to see women’s tackle football become a professional sport.

I was looking at your site earlier and saw the uniforms — they are really fresh, and the colors are awesome. I also saw a bit about a new TV channel, WNFC TV. Can you talk about that? 

What I’m trying to do as a woman of color, and frankly as a startup founder, is to try to find other high growth businesses that are like mine and connect them to the WNFC. So we connected with this amazing company called Vyre Network, and they are a TV and live streaming network that is based in 116 countries. They are basically creating their own Hulu, with mid-level content. And so this group, Vyre Network, is now going to globally distribute all WNFC games. So we will be the first league ever to have every single one of our games globally distributed.

Everyone always asks, “Where do I find a game?” Even with the more established leagues, right. Where do I go to watch the WNBA? Now you’ll have an answer to that question for the WNFC in 2021.

You’ll go to Vyre Network. You will be able to watch our game on a mobile app. It’s free. There’s no barrier to entry, no sign in. You download it on Android or iOS. You download the application, you go to our channel, and you can start watching our games anywhere in the world. It’ll be on a website, it’ll be on Roku TV, Apple TV, and it’s coming to smart TVs in the summer. So it’s a great partnership. It’s another revenue generating opportunity for the league as we continue to grow.

And I saw that you guys had the 2021 schedule up on the site too. I mean, pending what happens with the pandemic, is that pretty much set?

Yeah, it is. Our schedule is set right now. What’s crazy is that we’ve been talking to a couple of expansion teams, so our schedule is set and done. But we might have some surprise announcements coming here very shortly where we grow a little bit.

Our championship game is going to be the weekend of August 6th and 7th. It’s going to be hosted in Dallas, Texas, at the University of North Texas, Apogee Stadium. So it’s a 60,000 person stadium, and it’ll be a big deal for us.

Our season doesn’t start until May. So we’re going to try to stay away from the pandemic as much as we can. But barring everything being shut down in May, this is going to be the most exciting year in this sport that we’ve ever had.

I wanted to chat a little bit about you specifically and more about your background. I know you referenced working at startups and how that experience shaped your perspective. I know that you also spend time in the NFL as a Bill Walsh coaching intern. I’m curious as to how that experience shaped your perspective?

I was in the NFL for eight weeks doing an internship, mostly with the Falcons, and a week with the Dallas Cowboys and their rookie camp. I don’t know that anything was more impactful for me than truly seeing the lack of parity in the athletic experience of professional female football players compared to professional male football players.

I also learned a lot from a business perspective, frankly, walking into and getting behind the scenes of the Dallas Cowboys. Even for a week, you get a clear understanding of why they have one of the most impressive and valuable brands in all of the world. It is attention to detail, always sticking to the brand, the level of professionalism, always sticking to the plan, the way they buy into their people, keeping their culture internal, but letting it be started externally. So all of those things I learned.

But when I got to the Atlanta Falcons, Sam Rapoport was critical and has always been an ally for me, and Scott Pioli, who’s a mentor of mine, was the assistant general manager there at the time. And him and coach Dan Quinn really opened the entire organization to me. Katie Sowers had been there before me. And so that organization was very open to the idea that a baller is a baller, a coach is a coach, and it didn’t matter if you were one of the men. So they really gave me an open eye to the entire operations team. And what I really saw there was that you can’t have that level of success without a significant level of investment. And that’s why when I was with the Falcons, I determined then and there that I was going to create the WNFC, because that was the missing piece in women’s football.

Obviously the pandemic has been a big hurdle in your time as a CEO. Have there been any other big hurdles that you’ve had to get over? And if so, how have you worked to overcome them?

I think the biggest hurdles dealing with women’s tackle football right now are the pipeline, because girl’s football isn’t developed. We have to develop women’s football from the top down and not from youth to professionals. So that’s always a challenge. In developing this thing, we also have to work to develop a pipeline to help girls. It’s more challenging than it is for other sports, because Title IX doesn’t include girls playing football in college.

I think the other big challenge is fundraising. We’ve done a good job of fundraising but I think that a lot of sponsors just don’t know we exist, so we need awareness. Once they figure out we exist, they’re like, “Yeah, let’s do business.” But I think that lack of awareness, and, frankly, the fact that most people think of half naked girls when you say women’s football, is a barrier for us. And so we’ve tried to respectfully market against that and market for what we’re about.

I am curious, in terms of that pipeline that you’re talking about, how does it work right now? Where do a lot of the players come from? I’m sure a lot of them grew up playing the sport, but I am also assuming that some of them transitioned from other sports. Is that true?

Yeah. And so that’s what’s crazy. And that’s where I think the value of women’s football is even more clearly stated. Even though there is no college level, there is no high school level, there is no junior level, there are still thousands of women every year finding football. So it should tell everybody something that women continue to play it, they continue to find it. It’s generally women who played other sports and didn’t realize, “Oh my God, I could play football.” So, college athletes, basketball players, cross fitters, runners, any woman who loves the game and is an athlete. So most of our recruiting it’s done on social and at events, at practices, in our local communities. But frankly, thousands of women every year are discovering that they can play football for the first time through us, through our league, because there’s nothing else introducing them to the idea of playing the game.

Athletes are athletes, but when a football player finds football, it is the most beautiful thing ever, because frankly for a woman, not only is she finding her purpose in her sport, she is embarking upon something that she never imagined doing. You don’t know how good or how amazing or how electric you are as a football player until you play football. And that takes 22 people to be on the field at the same time, 11 on 11. That’s what also makes this sport extremely special.

Was there anything else that you wanted to bring up that I didn’t mention at all?

The only other thing I wanted to talk about is a partnership that we haven’t announced yet, but it’s coming. I want to give a shout out to She Plays CEO Ashley Hart. We’ve been talking about partnering to make the first fantasy football for women. So I want everybody to look out for that, because that is also something that will, I think, change the industry.

US Tennis Stars Advance as Wimbledon Field Narrows

Italy's Jasmine Paolini celebrates her first-round win over Latvia's Anastasija Sevastova at the 2025 Wimbledon Championships
World No. 4 Jasmine Paolini fell in the second round of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships on Wednesday. (Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images)

The 2025 Wimbledon Championships wrapped its second round on Thursday, with the grass court Grand Slam seeing just 15 of the tournament's 32 seeded players advance to the Friday and Saturday's third round.

A full half of the WTA's Top 10 players did not survive the week, with 2024 Wimbledon finalist and world No. 5 Jasmine Paolini joining four first-round star exits by falling to unseeded Kamilla Rakhimova in a three-set, second-round battle on Wednesday.

At the same time, unseeded fan favorites like Japan's No. 53 Naomi Osaka and England's own No. 40 Emma Raducanu secured third-round spots at the London Slam, joining top surviving contenders like No. 4 Iga Świątek and defending Wimbledon champion No. 16 Barbora Krejčíková.

Notably, a full five US players managed to move ahead, tied for the largest national contingent still standing at the tournament.

Led by 2025 Australian Open champion No. 8 Madison Keys, the US group also includes No. 10 Emma Navarro and No. 12 Amanda Anisimova, as well as unseeded players No. 54 Danielle Collins and No. 55 Hailey Baptiste.

With matches against Świątek and No. 7 Mirra Andreeva, respectively, Collins and Baptiste have a tough third round ahead — though Navarro's battle against the 2024 champ Krejčíková arguably headlines Saturday's slate.

US tennis star Emma Navarro eyes a return during a 2025 Wimbledon match.
US star Emma Navarro will face 2024 champ Barbora Krejčíková in Wimbledon's Round of 32. (Rob Newell/CameraSport via Getty Images)

How to watch Wimbledon this weekend

While world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka is still holding strong in the dwindling field, this year's Wimbledon play is proving that the London Slam is anyone's to take, as the grass court humbles even the sport's top stars.

Expect the twists and turns to continue as tennis's best battle for spots in Sunday's Round of 16.

Round-of-32 Wimbledon play kicks off at 6 AM ET on Friday, with live continuous coverage of the tournament airing on ESPN.

Finland Opens Women’s Euro 2025 with Upset Upset Win Over Iceland

Finland's Katariina Kosola and Emma Koivisto celebrate a goal during their opening 2025 Euro match.
Finland earned a surprise 1-0 win over Iceland in their 2025 Euro opener on Wednesday. (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

The 2025 European Championship is officially underway, as Euro action kicked off with a group-stage upset on Wednesday.

Though the 2025 UEFA tournament's opener was a sweltering affair amid a European heat wave, world No. 26 Finland prevailed, earning a 1-0 upset win over No. 14 Iceland in Group A.

Finnish winger Katariina Kosola played hero, curling in the winning goal in the match's 70th minute — just 12 minutes after Iceland midfielder Hildur Antonsdóttir picked up the competition's first red card.

"The result is important for our confidence," Kosola said after Finland's first major tournament win since the 2009 Euro. "It was the kind of goal I have been practicing a lot."

"It's terrible to lose and we feel frustrated," said Iceland head coach Thorsteinn Halldórsson. "It is an even group and we knew Finland were good, but our first half wasn't good enough."

Elsewhere, No. 16 Norway closed out Wednesday's slate on top of Group A, taking three points by defeating host No. 23 Switzerland in day's second match.

Led by captain and 2018 Ballon d'Or winner Ada Hegerberg — who pulled the match even with a second-half strike — Norway battled to a 2-1 comeback win, despite the Swiss side outshooting and out-possessing the Norwegians.

Spain jersey hang in lockers ahead of the team's 2025 Euro opening match against Portugal.
Reigning World Cup champions Spain will open their 2025 Euro account against Portugal. (Aitor Alcalde - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

How to watch this week's 2025 Euro action

Group B steals the 2025 Euro spotlight on Thursday.

While No. 13 Italy snagged a 1-0 opening win over No. 20 Belgium to kick off the day, 2023 World Cup champions and tournament favorite No. 2 Spain will face No. 22 Portugal at 3 PM ET.

Friday's Group C slate will pit No. 12 Denmark against No. 6 Sweden at 12 PM ET, before No. 3 Germany contends with No. 27 Poland at 3 PM ET.

Closing out the first group-stage matches will be arguably the toughest draw of the 2025 Euro pool.

Saturday's Group D slate features major tournament debutants No. 30 Wales against the No. 11 Netherlands at 12 PM ET, with No. 10 France taking on defending champions No. 5 England to cap the day at 3 PM ET.

Live coverage of 2025 Euro matches will air across Fox Sports platforms.

USWNT Caps Summer Friendlies with 3-0 Canada Shutout

Yazmeen Ryan, Michelle Cooper, Claire Hutton, Mandy McGlynn, and Izzy Rodriguez and the rest of the USWNT huddle after their July 2025 friendly win over Canada.
The USWNT finished the summer international window with 11 goals, conceding none, across three matches. (Brad Smith/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)

The world No. 1 USWNT ruled the pitch on Wednesday night, shutting out North American rivals No. 8 Canada 3-0 to finish the international window on a high note.

Catching the Canada backline sleeping, US midfielder Sam Coffey opened the scoring at the 17-minute mark before 19-year-old Claire Hutton claimed her first-ever USWNT goal by heading in a Rose Lavelle corner kick in the game's 36th minute.

Houston Dash forward Yazmeen Ryan then padded the US tally in the waning minutes of the match, finding the back of the net just eight minutes after subbing onto the field.

Despite fielding a young roster, the US overpowered a veteran-heavy Canada side in almost every category, topping their Northern neighbors in shots, shots on target, possession, and — most notably — set pieces.

Canada ultimately couldn't match the game's mental pace or physical battle, as the USWNT scored all three goals off dead ball situations — a free kick, a corner kick, and a throw-in.

"It's not about the opponent," US head coach Emma Hayes said after the match. "It's about what we do, and I felt that was extremely dominant."

With Wednesday's contributions, the USWNT finishes the summer window with 11 goals scored across the three friendlies — and zero goals conceded.

The US now enters an extended break before reconvening for another as-yet-unannounced friendly series in October — but players will be expected to perform in the meantime.

"I said to the players in the end in the huddle, if you want to compete to win the biggest things, it's not what you do here that matters," said Hayes. "It's what you do when you go back to your club."

Seattle Storm Looks to Climb the WNBA Standings in Weekend Gauntlet

Seattle Storm star Nneka Ogwumike high-fives teammates as she's introduced before a 2025 WNBA game.
The No. 5 Seattle Storm will face No. 4 Atlanta and No. 3 New York this weekend. (Soobum Im/NBAE via Getty Images)

The 2025 WNBA regular season returns on Thursday night, with teams at the top of the league standings looking to prove their mettle against close competition across the long holiday weekend.

The No. 5 Seattle Storm have arguably the toughest weekend assignments, taking on the No. 4 Atlanta Dream on Friday before tackling the No. 3 New York Liberty on Sunday.

Four middle-of-the-pack teams will look to close in on a double-digit season win tally while the league's frontrunners strive to maintain their advantage in this weekend's slate:

  • No. 7 Las Vegas Aces vs. No. 8 Indiana Fever, Thursday at 7 PM ET (Prime): Though still without star Caitlin Clark, the Fever hope to harness their 2025 WNBA Commissioner's Cup victory momentum against an Aces side tied with Indiana with an 8-8 season record.
  • No. 5 Seattle Storm vs. No. 4 Atlanta Dream, Thursday at 7:30 PM ET (WNBA League Pass): Seattle will look to make strides against a strong Atlanta side while putting last Sunday's stinging 84-57 loss to up-and-comer Golden State in their rearview.
  • No. 6 Golden State Valkyries vs. No. 1 Minnesota Lynx, Saturday at 8 PM ET (WNBA League Pass): The rising Valkyries must face a Lynx side hunting redemption, as the league-leaders look to bounce back from their stifling Tuesday Commissioner's Cup upset loss.
  • No. 5 Seattle Storm vs. No. 3 New York Liberty, Sunday at 1 PM ET (CBS): With injured Liberty center Jonquel Jones still sidelined, the Seattle Storm will have a chance to steal a weekend game against the reigning champs, as New York struggles to re-find their footing.

With the 2025 WNBA All-Star break looming, early top performers must keep standards high if they want to hold the line when the season crosses the midway point.

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