Marilou McFarlane, CEO of Women in Sports Tech: “It’s rewarding beyond measure to see how technology has impacted the growth of women’s sports”

When we think about technology sport here at TechFinitive, we immediately think of two recent trends. First, the explosion of data to help athletes achieve their full potential. Second, the growing popularity of women’s sports, with the recent Fifa Women’s World Cup breaking records for attendance and engagement. Marilou McFarlane, CEO of Women in Sports Tech, sits at the sharp edge where those two trends meet – so we were delighted to pin her down for an interview.

“It’s rewarding beyond measure to see how technology has impacted the growth of women’s sports,” she told us, “especially in terms of NIL [names, images and likenesses] tech and the ability for sponsors to now see the dramatically better ROI from female athletes than male athletes.”

Marilou added: “Women’s sports is a ’50-year overnight success’, so to speak, thanks to technology’s role in sports.” And she can also claim some credit, have spent almost 15 years in C-suite roles at Mustard, CoachNow (formerly Edufii), StatSports, SportsBoard and Vivo Girls Sports.

Prior to her work in sports tech, Marilou worked in advertising, marketing and sponsor partnerships for Turner Broadcasting and CBS Radio. And she puts her running shoes where her mouth is: Marilou is a 3:06 marathon runner. Good luck keeping up with her!

As you will shortly discover, this background, and her desire to inspire both fellow entrepreneurs and athletes, led Marilou to found the non-profit Women in Sports Tech (WiST). What does that organisation do? Read on.

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Tell us your elevator pitch

Women in Sports Tech is the only workforce accelerator for diverse talent at the intersection of sports and tech. WiST’s innovative programs, original content, and global community for women and employers provide career support and growth opportunities that drive business innovation and success.

WiST’s programs provide female and non-binary students and early to mid-level career professionals the knowledge, experience and support they need to succeed while providing invaluable opportunities for employers to enhance their talent pipeline and build more inclusive cultures.

Programs include the WiST Fellowship: summer internship experiences for college, graduate and PhD students. 84% of graduates are now working in the sports tech industry.

The WiST NETWORK provides the single source for diverse hiring in the sports tech industry, with over 4,200 applicants from the site in 2023 alone. WiST Presents offers educational original content and events that provide much-needed career resources for students, early to mid-career professionals and leaders at all levels. 

WiST corporate partners include IBM Sports, Comcast Sports Tech, GameChanger, Stats Perform, FairPlay Sports Media, SRAM, Warner Bros Discovery, Deckers Brands, Specialized, the USOPC, the Australian Sports Tech Network and more.

What is it about sports tech that excites you? What made you get into this sector?

As a lifelong competitive athlete, I’m fascinated by the impact technology has on athlete performance and using data to reduce the risk of injury and improve the process of rehabbing from injury to return to full health and optimal performance state. Since founding WiST, I have enjoyed learning about the tech that dramatically improves fan engagement as well as venue innovations that will also minimise climate impact.

I got into this business organically having founded my first startup Vivo Girls Sports in 2009 to provide support and online resources for teenage girls to keep playing sports, since they quit sports at 2x the rate of teenage boys due to a full range of societal and personal pressures. This first online community, vivoGS, was filled with original content and community engagement to inspire young women and sparked the launch of espnW, long before women’s sports and female athletes were recognised as they are today.

It’s rewarding beyond measure to see how technology has impacted the growth of women’s sports, especially in terms of NIL [names, images and likenesses] tech and the ability for sponsors to now see the dramatically better ROI from female athletes than male athletes. Women’s sports is a “50-year overnight success”, so to speak, thanks to technology’s role in sports.

Worth a read: Paris Olympics under threat as Russia favourite for hacking gold medal

Can you give an example of a complex problem in sports that you – or your company – have been involved in tackling with technology?

Women in Sports Tech (WiST) drives growth opportunities for women and employers as the only workforce accelerator in the industry. WiST has developed specific programs that provide a tangible impact on a more vexing problem facing employers in the sports tech industry: diversifying and expanding their talent pipelines.

Sports is a dramatically diverse ecosystem, and the teams building the technology must be representative of the clientele they serve. WiST also focuses on helping leaders in the industry improve their culture to be more inclusive, since many teams, especially technical teams inside organisations, are still rather homogenous and retention is a key objective for all employers.

It’s one thing to bring in the best talent, it’s quite another to ensure that these diverse employees actually feel they belong, are treated equitably to their male peers, and bring in an innovative mindset from a variety of lived experiences that companies need to succeed.

WiST’s flagship initiative is the WiST Fellowship program, providing summer internship experiences for college, grad and PhD students as well as valuable mentorship and a community of support that will endure far into their careers.

What are some examples of AI being used in sports that stand out to you?

Seeing how IBM Sports continues to evolve its fan engagement offering via tournament mobile apps using AI is incredibly interesting. For example, last summer we had a very talented WiST Fellow, Kahlia Hogg, paired for her internship with IBM, a founding WiST corporate partner.

Kahlia has recently graduated from Duke with a Masters in Computer Science and AI and is a former professional soccer athlete who knows a great deal about the sport of tennis as well. Her summer project was to work collaboratively with the technical team to write code that adds more commentary to matches, enhancing the rich experience for fans inside this proprietary app, using language that is very realistic and comparable to what would be written or broadcast by humans.

This application doesn’t replace human broadcasts or written posts by any means, it simply greatly expands the number of matches that can offer commentary for fans, including many that are not held on the centre court by the top-ranked players but are still of great interest to millions of fans who follow Wimbledon each year. Using many years of matches played and their accompanying broadcasts and written posts, AI uses this voluminous valuable data for good.

Related reading: IBM and Wimbledon’s Catch Me Up cards to give personalised write-up for every singles tennis player in 2024’s Championships

Thinking of injury prevention and/or recovery, what are some technology and/or science developments you’ve found particularly fascinating?

As we all experience the explosion in women’s sports popularity, again, thanks to tech, it’s rewarding to see so many tech companies now creating platforms to ingest and make sense of the wide array of data points specific to the female body. “Because we are not men!” to quote Wild.AI CEO/Founder Hélène Guillaume Pabis.

Women for too long have been training and eating like men. To date, less than 7% of all research on athlete health is focused on women – the inequity in science in this regard is maddening. How do our hormonal cycles affect our training and game-day performance? Together with Dr Stacy Sims, the world reference in this field, the Wild.AI team analysed 451 white papers of Dr Sims combined with other researchers to cross-correlate what science said for each phase of the cycle.

Using AI, they’ve turned this into a tangible, actionable algorithm to turn athlete data into female athlete data to develop a readiness score along with personalised and adaptive training and nutrition recommendations.

WiST partner OURA has made similar commitments and progress in terms of focusing on female health broadly. As a lifelong athlete myself, I count on my OURA ring’s data each day and it has transformed the way I approach my sleep habits for instance, and how I adapt my daily workout to what my personal readiness score is for the day to both enhance my performance and also minimise risk of injury.

I’m incredibly excited to see how the impact of this new research focus might unlock the key to reducing ACL tears in female athletes at all levels. My daughters, who each played soccer collegiately and professionally, have each torn their ACLs (my older daughter twice!) and I’ve torn my own as well. We are the lucky ones to have no lingering issues in our knees after successful surgeries, but this isn’t the case for many.

What advice do you have for those wanting to start a career in sports tech, or those wanting to launch a startup in the space?

My advice for founders in the sports tech space is to recognise that a great product alone does not make a great business. I see too many technical founders who underestimate the power of marketing and create a product that don’t actually solve their customers’ problems and has too many points of friction to sustain a positive user experience over time.

I emphasise to founders the importance of building their brand from their earliest days and launching to key customer stakeholder groups creatively and thoughtfully. People today have the three-second attention span of a fruit fly: if you don’t grab them at the get-go, you won’t get a second chance.

It’s critically important for startups to not only focus on building the product itself, but also to focus on empathy for customers’ pain points, make data-driven marketing and product decisions, realise the power of original content and storytelling as their best marketing, and realise that constant learning and iteration are key to the process.

It’s also very important to recruit the best possible talent and build a culture of inclusivity where everyone feels they truly belong.

Today’s sports tech leaders eager to expand their talent pipelines may gain access to the WiST NETWORK to search the candidate database as the single source for diverse hiring in the industry today. There is also the WiST LinkedIn Community Group available to engage with the WiST talent and former WiST Fellows and post job openings, from entry to senior level.