U.S. Olympic rugby (and TikTok) star Ilona Maher and former NCAA swimmer Ann Ragan Kearns launched a skincare line today, called Medalist. The brand’s products are specifically designed for women athletes, which involved rigorous testing from Maher and other athletes across different age groups and sports.

The gender gap in sports viewership and valuations may be closing, but there’s one area of the women’s sports ecosystem where supply is far behind demand: merchandise. On Wednesday, payment network Klarna and fan intelligence company Sports Innovation Lab (SIL) estimated the value of the women’s sports merch market at $4B.

Tech entrepreneur and investor Alexis Ohanian — who co-founded Reddit and is married to Serena Williams — shared further details with Front Office Sports on the 776 Invitational, a pro women’s track and field event offering record prize money.

Sponsorship insight platform SponsorPulse recently published its Sport Team Sponsorship Value Guide, which estimates and ranks the value of NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, and WNBA teams’ brand partnerships. While no WNBA team cracks the top 50, the report contains key insights about the league’s potential value.

Everything is bigger in Texas…even pickleball. This weekend, Dallas hosted the CIBC Texas Open, which included both amateurs and Professional Pickleball Association Tour pro players. Last Tuesday, The GIST spoke with Twisted Pickle — a Dallas-based pickleball marketing agency co-owned by Ashlee Erickson Blakley and Suzanne Greever — about the sport’s explosive growth.

Last week, Nike hosted its first-ever Coach The Dream event at its world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. The goal was to highlight the impact of coaching on the next generation of athletes and discuss how the sports ecosystem can evolve to keep kids in the game through conscientious coaching, which could lessen the gender gap in youth sports.

Yesterday, the NCAA Board of Governors and the Power Five conferences voted to settlement terms in House v. NCAA, the lawsuit claiming the NCAA’s pre–NIL ban on student-athlete compensation violated antitrust regulations. The settlement, if approved by the judge, will change college sports’ business model, creating industry-altering shockwaves.

Last Thursday, Parity — a sponsorship platform that connects brands with women athletes — released a study in partnership with SurveyMonkey. The results contain the “most robust” data on women’s sports fans globally, Parity CEO Leela Srinivasan told The GIST.

The WNBA is more popular than ever — which means we’re getting more lame takes from men too ignorant to learn the game. NBA writer Ethan Strauss and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons are the latest male journalists to join the list, but they’re drowned out by a women’s basketball community that’s bigger than ever.

Tomorrow marks the two-year anniversary of Ally’s 50/50 Pledge, which aims to close the gender gap in sports advertising with an equal spend on women’s and men’s sports. The GIST checked in with Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer last week to commemorate the milestone and discuss where the brand hopes to expand next.

Broadcaster Scripps is a relative newcomer to the women’s sports space, but has already seen significant wins by investing in local markets and the emerging women’s sports sector. Scripps Sports president Brian Lawlor spoke with The GIST last month about what’s been working for the thriving platform.

’Ship season is back, back again. Here’s the lowdown on this weekend’s hardware-hoisting: