Athlete Storytelling Workshop for Brand Teams
Your most powerful brand assets are your athlete stories: Don't leave them untold.
Your audience doesn't want just the highlight reel. In 6 weeks, your athletes will start sharing stories that connect with customers and let your brand shine.
Your athletes are out there doing things that should stop people mid-scroll. But your collaborative content… isn't. This is a live storytelling workshop for your sponsored athletes, ambassadors, or scholarship cohort. Every athlete leaves with one honest, publishable story that sounds like her and does your brand's job.
Your athletes can shift sports culture
The highlight reel isn't the full sports story.
Once I sat in the audience of over a dozen trail running panels, and one word came up in all of them: "inclusion." Brand reps wove it into every answer. Then I went home, opened Instagram, and scrolled the sponsored athletes those same brands pay for. Gear photos. Finish-line shots. Captions that boil down to "Believe in yourself! You can do it! My shoes are cool." 😬
You're spending good money on athlete sponsorships. What comes back is content that's… fine. Not because your athletes aren't compelling. Because nobody showed them what story you need, and nobody showed you how to ask for the story they actually have. So everyone shrugs and defaults to the highlight reel, and the highlight reel looks exactly like every other outdoor brand's highlight reel.
Your content should start conversations
The story you can use sits where three things overlap.
Despite the buzzy Forbes headlines, "storytelling" is quite simple. It's one person saying "here's how an experience changed me" and another person saying, "so it isn't just me?!" The stories your athletes are censoring are about bodies, fear, and belonging: underfueling in high school, running postpartum, the comment on the trail, the asterisk she puts on a result. Those stories are the ones brands are scared of, since they STAND FOR SOMETHING. They're also the ones I specialize in finding and connecting to a brand's mission.
01 · The brand
Your point of view
What you'd say if you weren't scared of saying the wrong thing. Most brands solve that fear by saying nothing of significance.
02 · The athlete
Her story
The one under the summit photo. The DNF at mile 40. The comeback after a baby. The training plan that told her to cut calories during taper.
03 · The audience
What customers repeat back
The line a woman screenshots at 11pm because she has never seen herself in outdoor media before, and suddenly… there she is.
Most athlete content hits one of the three. Many sponsor deliverables hit zero. This workshop is built to land all three in one piece. LFG.
How it works
The story mining process.
Phase 1: Brand Discovery
Campaign goals, the brand voice you have on paper, the athlete content you can't use and why. If there's a date on your calendar (a launch, a race, a fundraiser, a podcast), we'll aim the stories at it.
Phase 2: Athlete Workshops
Focused sessions with me and your athletes, no brand manager in the room. 😉 We'll find their root stories, work through self-censorship blocks, play with story structure, and practice long and short form messaging that elevates their uniqueness while shouting out your brand, too.
Phase 3: Story Curation
We'll give notes on every athlete's piece and get you finished stories for the campaign, blog, or social media. Athletes get a new set of tools to make their stories shine moving forward, pulling in their sponsors in storytelling in a way that makes fans actually listen.
Bring out the megaphone
Stories shift the future of sport.
8 of 11
Didn't see themselves in the sport before
First 50k Sisterhood athletes who told us trail running media didn't represent them. Five called the program "transformative for representation." All eleven said they wouldn't have attempted a 50k alone this year.
$23,600
Raised on their stories
The Cairn Project set a $15,000 goal. The athletes' own words, published as they trained, closed it at 157%. Seven sponsors got stories they could run, not gear photos.
Hundreds
Of women who've told their story
Over the past five years I've helped hundreds of women share their stories: on stages, on podcasts, in businesses built on "my mess became my message," and in fundraisers that raised tens of thousands of dollars for causes they care about.
Angie's workshop breathed life back into my creative work for the first time in a long while. It started to feel like it was hurting more to hold back my voice than the fear of publishing scared me.
Ericka Johnson · Thru-hiker, mountaineer, runner
The storytelling series taught me that it's not the big giant story of success, but the real stories are all of those in between moments of overcoming and learning along the way.
Kara Marino · Trail runner, First 50k Sisterhood
Angie brings an infectious enthusiasm to her presentations, making her content both engaging and memorable. Audiences leave her sessions not only informed but also inspired to apply what they've learned.
Michelle Song · The Mountaineers
What you walk / run / bike / paddle / ski away with
- One publishable story from every athlete in the cohort, in her voice, aimed at your brand's point of view, with one round of my notes.
- A discovery call up front and a short wrap memo at the end: what the team produced, which three stories to run first, what your athletes still need.
- Athletes who know how to find the next story without me in the room.
- If you have a date on the calendar, stories timed to it. If you don't, stories ready for your channels whenever you are.
The fee
Athlete Storytelling Workshops start at $4,500 depending on roster size; I typically work with 5–15 athletes at a time. Reach out to chat and we'll find a solution!
What athlete managers keep telling me
You have the audience, the voice, and the mission. You're short on time, proof, and staff.
Here's what stellar athlete storytelling gets you back.
- A return on the money you're spending on athletes.
- Relatable women talking about your brand on their own channels.
- Stand-out stories, not vague platitudes.
- Word-of-mouth recommendations everywhere.
- To be ahead of the game, not following it.
- Fantastic storytellers to collaborate with.
- A trusted contractor (HI IT'S ME) to take the load off staff and resources.
- Proof of your brand values and performance that you can publish.
And the future of your community?
Your athletes stop sending you content you can't use.
They stop defaulting to bland gear photos and run-of-the-mill summit selfies. You start sharing stories that make new and returning customers say, "ME TOO!" The ones about body image, injury, having kids (or not), juggling the complications of life and sport.
Your campaigns stop looking like every other outdoor brand's campaigns, because the women telling the stories are honest, relatable, and specific. They're sharing on their own channels, to their own communities, because the story sounds like them and represents their people.
The gap between what you say you stand for and what your content actually produces closes. Your actions stand behind your words, and your customers can tell.
And somewhere out there is a woman who needs to hear one of your athletes' stories before she signs up for her first race, buys her first piece of gear, or decides she's an athlete at all. You get to be the brand that gets there first.
Your teammate in outdoor engagement 👋
I'm the ideal customer for the brands I work with.
I've spent fifteen years (and counting!) in this ecosystem as a race director, storyteller, community manager, river guide, podcast host, and menstrual cycle educator. I've been on both sides: building culture in the space and being the token woman wondering if she even belongs in it.
I've been the athlete on the other end of a lame brief. I've been the participant who could feel the difference between a brand that got it and one that didn't. I know what it takes to get a woman to tell the true version of her story in a space that wasn't built for her, and I know the difference between a stand-out story and a vague platitude.
The brands that figure this out now will still be relevant in ten years. The ones that don't are already falling behind. ⚠️
✨ Bring this to your team if
- You manage sponsored athletes, ambassadors, or scholarship recipients, and you're the one who has to turn their content into something usable.
- You want the everyday athlete relatable stories, not only podium finishes.
- You can hand me the roster and the goal and let me do the damn thing. (My favorite client sentence is "here's the idea, now go.")
- When an athlete says something honest (or, as it's historically been called, "outspoken" or "TMI"), you keep her.
- You run a nonprofit or advocacy org whose ambassadors have the passion and none of the words yet.
Next step
You know the stories are there. Let's get them out of your athletes' heads.
Book a 15 or 30 minute call. Bring your roster size and whatever's next on your calendar. I'll tell you straight whether this fits, and what I'd do instead if it doesn't.
