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. They want the stories they can see themselves in. In 6 weeks, your athletes will connect with customers and make your brand the one that's synonymous with the sport.
Your athletes are out there doing things that should stop people mid-scroll. But your collaborative content… isn't. This is a live, immersive intensive for your athletes and ambassadors. Every athlete will leave with one honest, publishable story that sounds like her, that her followers stop scrolling for, and that you can run across your channels all year.
Your athletes can shift sports culture
The highlight reel isn't the full story the audience is craving.
One summer week 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 (sometimes twice, once for the panel and once for the person filming the panel). At home, I opened Instagram, curious to see how their content showed off that value of inclusion. But all I got was gear photos, shiny finish-line shots, and captions that boil down to "Believe in yourself! You can do it! My shoes are cool." 😬
…Not exactly the inclusion stories I was expecting. A huge mismatch between what the brand reps said behind the mic and what their athletes promoted online. BOOM, that trust was lost, immediately. Nooothing in that content told me what the brand believed, who it was for, or why I should hand it $180 for a pair of cushiony shoes or a shirt with holes in it. And each brand account sounded like the same flavor of vanilla.
You're spending a big budget on athlete sponsorships, but the content that comes back is… fine. Beige. But definitely not helping you grow your customer base in a compelling way. The issue is that your athletes never learned how to tell their story underneath your brand story, the one only you can tell. So everyone shrugs and defaults to the highlight reel, and the highlight reel looks exactly like every other outdoor brand's highlight reel.
Not on my smartwatch! I'm here to help you get more from your athletes' truest, most scroll-stopping stories, AND build their confidence in the content they create for your brand. A win for you, a win for them. And a win for all the people who want to join the sport, too.
Your athlete content should start conversations
The story you can use forever sits at this overlap.
Your story needs to hit all three – then people screenshot it and send it to a friend with a recommendation to check you out.
01 · The brand
Your unmistakable 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. It's safe. It also means nobody at the expo can tell you apart from the booth on either side.
02 · The athlete
Their unique 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. Every one of those is a story her followers have lived but never seen anyone publish honestly.
03 · The audience
What customers repeat + share
The line a woman screenshots at 11pm because she has never seen herself in outdoor media before, and suddenly… there she is. She feels understood by a brand, finally. That screenshot outlives your campaign.
Most athlete content hits one of the three. Many sponsor deliverables hit zero. I teach your athletes to land all three in one piece, so the story works for her audience and yours at the same time. LFG.
My specialty is finding the story underneath the summit photo and aiming it at what your brand stands for. I've done it with the Trailblazers program at the Alliance for Gender Equity in Outdoor Adventure, with the First 50k Sisterhood, and with hundreds of women on stages and podcasts.
Despite the buzzy Forbes headlines, "storytelling" is quite simple. One person says "here's how an experience changed me," and another person says "wait, so it isn't just me?!" BOOM, connection and trust. The stories your athletes censor are the ones about bodies, fear, and belonging: underfueling in high school, running postpartum, the comment on the trail, the asterisk she puts on a result. Brands get scared of those, since they STAND FOR SOMETHING. They're also the ones I know how to find.
How it works
The story mining process meets campaign goals.
Phase 1: Brand Story Campaign Strategy
This is where I get nosy. What are you working toward this year? Who should care? What's the brand voice on paper, and what's the voice you use when nobody's watching? What can't your athletes say, and why? I want the guardrails and the goal before I meet a single athlete. If there's a date on your calendar (a launch, a race, a fundraiser, a podcast), we'll aim the stories at it.
You'll get a story strategy framework you can rinse and repeat for all your future campaigns. You'll find consistent messaging strategy and a campaign voice that makes your brand shift the culture of sport.
Phase 2: Athlete Workshops
Focused sessions with me and your athletes, no brand manager in the room. 😉 (Nothing personal. People tell the truth differently when their boss's boss sits on the Zoom.) I'll help them 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 naturally complementing your brand values.
Your team gets the permission to be fully themselves. Every athlete will leave knowing exactly what stories to tell to put your brand on top.
Phase 3: Story Curation
I give notes on every athlete's piece and hand you finished stories for the campaign, blog, or social media. Athletes leave with a skill, not a one-and-done worksheet: how to find the next story, shape it, and tell it so people feel something and remember who sent her there. That keeps paying you back long after our last session.
Athlete sponsorship isn't just a modeling contract, but a movement to make sports better for all. Let's make sure it's a win for your brand, your athletes, and your current and future fans.
Bring out the megaphone
Stories shift the future of sport.
$300,000+
Raised for wilderness scholarships
The Trailblazers program at the Alliance for Gender Equity in Outdoor Adventure. We taught 75 athletes to tell their own adventure stories, and those stories created more than $300,000 in scholarships.
$23,600
In one season, from 11 athletes
The Cairn Project set a $15,000 goal. The athletes published their own words as they trained and closed it at 157%. 7 stoked sponsors got stories they could run, not same-old gear photos.
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 said they wouldn't have attempted a 50k alone this year.
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 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 next to them: a skillset they can leverage for all of your future campaigns, events, and appearances.
- If you have a date on the calendar, we'll create a story publishing schedule. If you don't, they'll be in a library, 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. After learning about your brand's needs, I'll send you a curated proposal. Payment plans are provided (split payments between a deposit, before we start, and after we wrap).
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.
- Athletes who post about you without a reminder email, because they want to.
- Followers who find you through her, and stay.
- Comment sections where women tag each other instead of scrolling past.
- Stories you can run in a campaign, a grant report, a pitch deck, and a sponsor recap.
- Athletes who re-sign, because the partnership gave them something the check didn't.
- Word-of-mouth recommendations at trailheads and start lines.
- A contractor who takes this off your staff's plate (HI IT'S ME).
- Proof of your brand values that you can publish, not just believe.
But what if she says the wrong thing?
Nobody says it out loud (but they're all hoping someone will).
Honest stories feel like risk, and the internet trained every brand manager to expect a screenshot and a bad week.
I kept my own story about menstrual cycles a secret for years, sure that telling it would cost me my credibility as an athlete. Telling it did the opposite. People trusted me MORE. Athletes opened up, asked for advice, shared their own story with the next one. (One even said my story saved her life.) Sharing about one of the most vulnerable body topics changed the course of my business and relationships.
That's the part brands miss. An athlete who has practiced telling a hard story tells it well: with context, with empathy, with a reason she's telling it at all. That's a skill that we'll build together.
Your athletes don't need you to be brave for them. They need you to not flinch when they're brave.
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.
Your words and your content finally match. Your actions stand behind what you say, and your customers can tell. That's what turns a follower into a customer, and a customer into the person recommending you at the trailhead.
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 👋
Bonus: 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.
Over the past five years I've helped hundreds of women tell their stories on stages, on podcasts, in small businesses, and in fundraisers that raised tens of thousands of dollars for causes they care about.
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 doesn't fully include 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 that draws folks to your store page.
- You want the everyday athlete's 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 alllll the passion, but none of it reaches your feed.
Next step
You know the stories are there. Let's get them out of your athletes' heads and into the Saved folder.
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.
