Women’s sports are experiencing unprecedented growth across Canada, and it’s not just fan enthusiasm driving the change. A new wave of female entrepreneurs is reshaping the landscape, creating opportunities that traditional sports business models have long overlooked.
The numbers tell a compelling story. According to a recent Yahoo Sports report, viewership for women’s professional leagues has jumped 41% over the past year. This surge isn’t happening by accident—it’s the result of dedicated investment and innovative approaches pioneered largely by women who’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of competing in an underfunded system.
“We kept hearing there wasn’t enough market interest to justify major investments in women’s sports,” says Marissa Chen, founder of HerGame, a Toronto-based sports marketing firm specializing in women’s leagues. “But that was always a chicken-and-egg problem. How can you build audience interest without visibility and promotion?”
Chen’s company has partnered with three provincial sports organizations to develop grassroots marketing campaigns that connect fans directly with female athletes. The approach has yielded impressive results, with attendance at women’s basketball games up 27% in participating regions.
The entrepreneurial momentum extends beyond marketing. In Vancouver, former national team soccer player Janine Williams launched Elevate Equipment last year, developing performance gear specifically designed for female athletes rather than simply modifying men’s equipment.
“Women’s bodies move differently. Our center of gravity sits lower, our Q-angles are different,” Williams explained during a community forum in Surrey last month. “When I played professionally, I was constantly adjusting ill-fitting equipment. The message was clear: the industry wasn’t designed with us in mind.”
Williams’ company has secured $1.2 million in seed funding and recently announced partnerships with three Canadian university athletic departments.
This grassroots revolution isn’t limited to major urban centers. In Moncton, New Brunswick, school teacher and former collegiate hockey player Sarah Lapointe noticed the stark difference between resources available to boys’ and girls’ youth hockey programs. Rather than accepting the status quo, she launched Equal Ice Initiative, which has redistributed more than 400 hours of prime practice time to girls’ teams across the province.
“It’s about creating conditions for success,” Lapointe told me during a phone interview. “When girls consistently get the 6 AM ice times before school, we’re sending a message about priorities. Change doesn’t happen without deliberate intervention.”
The impacts of these efforts are increasingly visible. Statistics Canada reported that girls’ participation in organized sports rose 8% last year, the first significant increase in nearly a decade. More tellingly, retention rates for teenage girls in sports programs have improved by 12%, addressing the troubling dropout rate that has plagued women’s athletics.
But challenges remain. A survey by Canadian Women & Sport found that despite increased viewership and participation, women’s sports still receive just 4% of total sports media coverage. Corporate sponsorship, while growing, remains disproportionately allocated to men’s leagues.
“There’s this persistent myth that women’s sports are somehow less entertaining or commercially viable,” says Dr. Elena Kazakova, sports economist at the University of British Columbia. “The data simply doesn’t support that anymore. Women’s championship games consistently deliver engaged audiences that sponsors should covet.”
The evidence suggests Dr. Kazakova is right. The 2023 PWHL championship series averaged 920,000 viewers per game, numbers that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
What’s particularly notable about this growth is how it’s happening outside traditional power structures. While established sports networks and major corporations are gradually increasing their investments in women’s sports, the real innovation is coming from entrepreneurs who identified market gaps and moved decisively to fill them.
Take Brianne Taylor, whose digital platform SportsherTV aggregates streaming options for women’s leagues that often get buried on multiple services. The platform gained 75,000 subscribers in its first six months, demonstrating substantial unmet demand.
“The audience was always there,” Taylor explained at a sports business conference in Calgary. “They were just tired of searching through multiple platforms or missing games entirely because they weren’t promoted properly.”
The rise of women’s sports represents more than just business opportunity—it’s reshaping how young Canadians view athletic achievement. In a poll conducted by Physical and Health Education Canada, 62% of girls aged 12-17 could name a female Canadian athlete as a role model, up from just 36% in 2015.
For entrepreneurs like Chen, Williams, Lapointe and Taylor, these changes validate their business instincts while fulfilling a deeper mission. They’ve recognized that waiting for established institutions to evolve wasn’t going to create the opportunities women athletes deserve.
“Nobody was going to build this for us,” says Chen. “But that’s fine—we’re perfectly capable of building it ourselves.”
As these women-led initiatives continue to gain traction, they’re not just growing women’s sports as a business sector. They’re fundamentally altering expectations about what sports culture can and should be in Canada—more inclusive, more innovative, and increasingly, more profitable.
The message to the broader sports industry seems clear: underestimate the market for women’s sports at your own financial peril. These entrepreneurs have identified the gap between what female athletes and fans deserve and what traditional business models have delivered. Their success suggests the next major growth opportunity in Canadian sports was hiding in plain sight all along.
