Nick should probably pass here, but what do I know? My team lost.

Shot on: Olympus XA2 arthouse film lab cine bw

© Sean Niu

Some twenty-four years and six FIFA World Cup cycles ago, football fans gathered in sweltering and unnaturally humid (by then standards) South Korea and Japan. Of course, many were in attendance to celebrate a game they loved and support their countries and players. But a larger majority was there for the vibes. During the 2026 matches, there’s been an onslaught of criticism that the FIFA World Cup is no longer about football but instead centered around fashion, food, and fun, as if that’s a new thing.

I’d wager that the only difference between 2002 and 2026 is how we communicate culture. Once upon a time, it was about flip phones and a burgeoning internet that included the early days of Myspace, and now everything is on TikTok and Instagram. Sure, in 2002, most people were still buying merchandise at stadiums and in stores. Thanks to the rapid expansion of fast fashion, e-commerce distribution has shifted from an ancillary market to a major one. The kind that results in the sports apparel industry being valued at a staggering $301.1b in 2026. As they did back then, everyone buys jerseys because they look cool and want to be part of a big cultural moment. FOMO never goes out of style.

At the same time that fans filled the stadiums in South Korea and Japan, Sam Parkinson, Apparel Design and Development Manager at Mizuno, was glued to his television screen in Manchester. As a little kid, he and his brother were avid football fans. The world watched the dazzling display of multicolored jerseys and the teams that they represented. Parkinson and his brother were busy looking at the ground.

“The first thing that my brother and I would look at would be the boots. It was about what [the players] were wearing, how they were wearing them, and what colour the boots were. We were fascinated by them. We had that connection between, ‘That’s what that player was wearing. Okay, that looks cool. We want to buy it and try it ourselves, see if it would make us better players.’”

Even as someone who treated her first pair of purple-and-green PUMA distance racing spikes like they were the newest Christian Louboutin red-bottom heels, I’ve never quite understood why people appreciate footwear design. While shoes often complete a look, they’re the last article you think of. Maybe some of that is because the purpose is often utilitarian, existing solely to be dirtied, and when it’s not, it’s usually placed high up on some shelf or never even taken out of the box. My theory is that we obsess over shoes because they never lose their aesthetic shape. If you think about it, they’re canvases that are often designed on rather than for.

Parkinson and his brother became so invested in the design of shoes, specifically football boots, analyzing the make and model like you would a car. No two shoes were the same, even if they, for all intents and purposes, served the same purpose.

“I remember the boots back in the 2002 World Cup, and they were iconic. You had the Adidas Predator Mania, Total 90s, and the Nike Vapors. I could probably watch a football match and tell everyone exactly what boot the player was wearing. Beckham wore Predator Mania. Thierry Remy would wear Nike Mercurial Vapor boots.”

“If you look at the World Cup at this moment, Adidas, Nike, and Puma all have pink boots. That originality has gone.”

When Parkinson and I meet, he’s returned from a quick trip back to visit his family in England. Even if he makes time for the odd cycling trip or adventure, the Netherlands has had to become his home away from home.

We begin by discussing the most pressing question of the hour: as an Englishman currently residing in the Netherlands, who has the best kit? He skips over the question altogether and starts with Sweden.

“It’s a nod to the heritage and the history. It’s not trying to be something different but something that does evoke emotion that’s related to the country’s roots. But it does have those little surprises, those little details that tell stories and connect to the fans—the history, the traditions, the country’s identity. Done subtly, I think that’s so powerful.”

After a quick Google search, I find myself contemplating whether Parkinson is talking about the jersey that I’m seeing. Because it’s rather… plain. Not ugly by any means. Just… functional. And for a man who has designed for everything from national rowing teams to streetwear, I find it a particularly odd favorite. I consider whether much of this is Parkinson’s diplomacy; he plans on telling me he’s neutral about every kit, doesn’t he?

“I don’t think the England kit is going to be iconic in the future, if I’m being honest. But you need to ask: am I the target audience? Maybe it’s designed for the next generation. Maybe in 20 years, they’ll remake it, and that’ll become the iconic kit for them.”

The one England football jersey that Parkinson has held onto is from the 2006 World Cup in Germany. He remembers that Umbro designed it, and his only explanation for keeping that jersey, alongside the several rugby jerseys collecting dust in his closet, is that “there was a need.” It’s the latter part that perplexes me because, truly, what kind of child or adolescent really needs a professional jersey? Parkinson equates the word with emotional connection. It’s the only logical reason why every four years, millions of Americans buy Team USA kits during the World Cup, regardless of standings.

FIFA 2026 has brought that concept of team loyalty into direct contention. And if we go down a rabbit hole of analyzing whether fans actually care about individual teams and players as much as they did ten years ago, fashion might be the decisive answer.

“Loyalty is important, but if something looks really cool, people want to buy it. I was back in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and I saw just as many young boys and girls wearing the Japan kit as the England kit. They weren’t buying it because of a connection to Japan—they were buying it because it looked cool. It stood out.”

I’m curious about the psychology of coolness. When Parkinson mentions the word, he makes sure to unpack every aspect of the design: the texture, color, fabric, fit, and feel. And there’s only one jersey from his childhood that manages to trigger every single sense.

“I’ve still got my original Sale Sharks jersey. It was given to me as a birthday present, and I was probably nine or ten. If you imagine an old rugby jersey, it was a cotton mix with a stand collar, blue and navy hoops, and the sponsors weren’t printed on—they were embroidered. It was quite heavy.”

“I think about the fabric, the weight of it, the heaviness, the texture. You wouldn’t wear it to play rugby today because it’s so heavy, but it’s still a great jumper to throw on when it’s cold. I also love the embroidery because you can actually feel the texture coming through.”

On today’s call, I’m wearing a black cropped hoodie from Bandit. It’s a heavyweight outerwear garment with the brand’s logo embroidered onto it. I chose it because of the embroidery and stitching. To me, it feels like a complete piece. With the amount of washing I do, the printed logo would’ve simply been erased.

“A printed logo is lighter, easier to apply, and a little cheaper. It also takes a lot less time. If you look at sports like volleyball or handball, where jerseys have multiple sponsors, sublimation is often used because it’s faster, more durable, and more cost-effective.”

Parkinson’s default answer to all of my trap questions is that it depends on the brief. He presents a compelling counterargument to my current thesis about designers. Unlike most who suggest they create in flexibility and freedom, it’s almost as if he actually prefers having guardrails. There’s something about knowing that the garment has a clearly defined purpose and audience that stimulates his creativity. It’s only after I set the parameters around my initial questions about the design of the English football kit that he opens up about the details that he’s noticed.

“Just looking at little details like the collar, for example. I can imagine that on paper, that would look great, iconic. From a performance point of view, it does look a little bit heavy. But then again, in 20 years, it might look iconic and will go down in history. I don’t know. That’s the beauty of it. Right now, I’d be like, ‘It could just be a little bit cleaner, a little bit less bulky, and a little bit refined.’ But that’s just me being picky. It’s still a good design, still a good kit. That’s just my personal taste, and that’s what design is. It’s just an opinion at the end of the day.”

Many designers that I’ve encountered up till this point are absolutists. They believe in a concrete right and wrong and the foundational colors of black and white. Parkinson, instead, speaks in a very uncomfortable grey, which is ironically the color of his jacket. I ask him sheepishly whether it’s his favorite color. Unsurprisingly, he responds neutrally. It’s a good base to work with. But, importantly, it’s a color that he notices first in the world. If people stumble into a car park and notice the models and makes of the vehicles, Parkinson is the type to read the color. A red looks like red, but when you actually read into it, you discover that it may reflect something about social preferences. Maybe that’s why he feels so plainly about everyone wearing pink boots at the World Cup; the color says the same thing about everyone, which is nothing at all.

“Last year, I went to a golf tournament in the UK. I started noticing the colours that were prominent around the golf scene, whether that was the tones of the greens or even the cars in the car park. You can tell a lot about what colours people like from the cars they drive. From there, you can build a colour palette and compare it with what’s actually on trend.”

“It’s not an inspiring story, but that’s why it’s important to get out of the office, have a look around, and see what’s actually happening in the wider world.”

To Parkinson, noticing such details might seem ordinary in his line of work. And maybe it is. The thing that distinguishes him is not what he notices, but what he notices first. I imagine a designer would look at an Audi RS e-tron GT and think luxury. Parkinson would probably recognize the bright red color first and understand that the person driving the car would be as inclined to buy red basketball shorts as they would a high-fashion bag in that same color.

“The colours I’m noticing at the moment are more tonal and metallic. If you look at bikes or cars, people tend to move away from bright whites because they get dirty so quickly. Instead, you’re seeing darker greys, blacks, navy blues, maroons—maybe even dark teals if someone wants to stand out just a little bit.”

We seem to be amidst a minimalism wave in society right now, and it seems to me that everyone is going for the sleek look… and that somehow means greys and darker, cooler blues and greens. I also consider that preferences can be culturally dependent. The Dutch and American flags are comprised of the same colors, and yet our preferences in fashion and color couldn’t be more different. That’s why, when he’s out in the world, Parkinson is picking up on texture in conversation with color.

“When I was designing football jerseys, we’d visit the towns and countries of the teams we were designing for. We’d look at the architecture, the history, the culture—anything that could inspire the design. Then there’s a story behind the jersey that genuinely connects to the town, the country, or the club.”

“A good example was Swansea in Wales. We visited the stadium, looked at the architecture, the shapes, and asked ourselves how we could translate that into the design. Swansea has a history as a mining town, particularly for copper, so we actually put copper under a microscope and used those microscopic textures as the starting point for the graphic story. It was something completely different, but it still had a genuine connection to the club’s history.”

It’s about feeling color. In theory, all of us associate colors with certain emotions. Yellow is supposed to be reminiscent of happiness. Green of calm. Red of anger. That sort of thing. But the image that Parkinson is painting is much more tactile. As he speaks, I take a penny out of my wallet and feel that it’s smooth and cool to the touch. Even if I didn’t touch it, I would’ve associated its buttery brown hue with that feeling. Surely, I wouldn’t pick up a Swansea uniform and immediately know about its history or architecture. But I’d recognize the copper as metallic and nostalgic. It’d be enough to make me curious to want to know more. I guess that’s the graphic story that Parkinson is mentioning; it’s about using texture-derived color to inspire curiosity and emotional connection.

Earlier in the conversation, I found Parkinson’s borderline neutral stance on design perplexing. I’m discovering that what I’ve perceived to be a lack of decisiveness on his end might actually reflect a core philosophy I learned from another designer I’ve profiled. Parkinson isn’t telling you what to feel; he’s simply guiding you on how to feel it. And that in turn leads him to embrace failure and rejection, not as the result of the process, but rather, its genesis.

“Throughout the design process and throughout my career, failure has been a massive part of it — in a good way. You need failure in the creative and product development process because otherwise, you don’t know what works. Whether you’re experimenting with new trims, logos, fabrics, or construction techniques, you often don’t know the answer until you actually make something. It might be the right solution, or it might not be quite there yet.”

“But that’s what takes you down the journey of asking, ‘What if we changed this? What if we tweaked the sizing, the cut, or the materials?’ Those experiments end up driving your design direction, and sometimes you arrive at something completely different from what you originally imagined — but it solves the problem in a better way.”

I glean that Parkinson doesn’t actually love design; he loves experimentation. He’s deeply analytical in his process, using terms like variables and data metrics to describe what is often regarded as purely artistic and creative.

Whether it’s the color and type of boots that players are wearing on the pitch or the history behind the distinct shade in a club’s color palette, he wants to learn more about the world around him by actually engaging with it. I guess that’s why he spends as much time mountain biking through terrifying terrains as he does holed up in the studio.

The studio will always have its place. Inside it, he’s obviously seen countless versions of his designs on mannequins and displayed digitally. But it’s that sense of getting his hands dirty that leads him to point out that he only takes in the full effect of the design when it’s worn.

“I think it always looks better when it’s on an athlete. Even when you have a sample on a mannequin, nothing quite compares to seeing it on the big stage — whether that’s a football kit, a design, or any piece of performance wear.”

“I remember the first internship I ever got was designing footballs, and I designed one that was used in a cup final here in the UK. I was sitting in a bar watching it and thought, ‘Wow, this is why we designed it that way.’ Seeing the graphics, the visuals, and how clear and recognizable it was in that environment really brought it to life.”

He laughs when I ask him to point out something he wished to change when he saw the football on screen. Unsurprisingly, he was satisfied with it because he met the goals outlined by the brief. However, to my delight, I discover that there are a few particular pet peeves he may or may not have witnessed with some of the projects that he’s worked on.

“For me, it’s things like how a cuff is applied. Is it binding? Is it a self-fabric cuff? Even something like thumb holes — are they actually needed, or are they just there because they look good? I think about things like the choice of a zipper, too. Is it functional? Is it aesthetically pleasing? Those little details matter.”

“The biggest thing for me is making sure every trim and application is fit for purpose. Zipper pulls are a big one. For example, I don’t love tracksuit jackets with really long zipper pulls because I don’t think they’re always functional. Those are more suited to outdoor activities, skiing, running — things where you actually need that extra accessibility. It’s quite nerdy, but those are the details I notice.”

Typically, I’ll hear a designer talk about annoyance in terms of aesthetic choices. And it could very well be that long zipper pulls look ugly to Parkinson. But functionality is where his athlete-brain kicks in. Because he doesn’t just consider how something looks, he thinks about the context in which it may be used. He’s right that longer zipper pulls are necessary to slip in and out of clothing while engaging in high-performance activities outdoors. But walking down the street with a coffee in hand, that same zipper pull could lodge itself in your cup and make a mess.

Small stuff like that. Small stuff that actually may not be small at all. In this noisy, oversaturated retail market, the only way to distinguish a luxury retailer from fast fashion might be in the way the tags are printed.

“Another example is the size label inside the neck of a jersey or jacket. I’ve seen garments that are incredibly premium and high-tech, but then they let themselves down with a really basic, cheap-feeling label. The texture is rough, it’s uncomfortable, and the first thing someone does is cut it out because it irritates them. To me, that’s a missed opportunity. Every touchpoint matters.”

We get to talking about my Bandit hoodie again. It too has a long tag that is unfortunately stitched at both the top and bottom into the garment, so I cannot remove it easily without taking a pair of scissors to the cloth itself and risking cutting right through the hoodie. Parkinson skips over the whole tag bit to ask me about the package it came in. I tell him about the opaque, elegant-looking polybag.

“This is probably a bit sad, but I actually keep those bags. I use them when I travel to store my clothes or keep things organized. They’re not like the flimsy polybags you normally see — they have a really nice quality and feel to them.”

Everyone is looking for the big moment at Cannes Lions, while Parkinson still has his eye on that one row of cars in a random car park in Amsterdam. Much of his ability to be that perceptive isn’t from training or experience. I consider that it’s because he’s taken himself out of the equation altogether. Even as I sit here, writing this profile in the first person, I’m putting myself into the story. And maybe that has the desired effect of humanizing a designer at Mizuno. But it will inevitably limit my ability to craft my words in a way that allows the reader to make sense of whatever they will. Whether it be his comments on following briefs or adapting retail to different cultural and lifestyle contexts, Parkinson seems to subscribe to the belief that design doesn’t actually belong to the designers.

“Some of the running T-shirts you see people wearing now are baggier, a little heavier, and they’re not necessarily performance-driven. They’re designed to look cool and align with current fashion trends. They look great when you go for a coffee or a drink after your run, but actually running in them? The looseness and extra weight can work against you.”

“It comes back to comfort. As a design principle, comfort has to be number one. If something isn’t comfortable, you’re not going to wear it, keep it, or use it. That comes down to so many variables — the fabric choice, the fit, the application of trims, and all those small details. I completely understand why those styles exist because they’re part of a fashion trend, but performance and fashion aren’t always the same thing.”

We get to talking about the Nike Radical Airflow jersey. There’s no other way to describe it other than to say that it looks bad***. You know, like when ripped jeans first became a thing, some people were pissed that they were technically paying more for destroyed clothing, and others found it cool. The jersey has a bunch of perforations and ripped-out sections, probably to increase airflow and keep athletes cool. It’s performance wear that tries not to treat fashionability as secondary.

Except, it doesn’t necessarily achieve that goal. At least not to the folks who are tie-dying the jersey, adding embellishments, and personalizing it to make it look appealing. Intention on paper and execution in life will always look different. Perhaps the difference between Parkinson and other designers of his stature is that they will try to find the closest alignment between the two, while he expands upon the incongruousness to create something new altogether.

Which brings us back to his initial argument that the greatest arena for potential is in footwear.

“Especially in the running market, visibility and brightness are really important. If you look at current trends, the color is often concentrated in the shoes and the socks. The actual outfit is usually much safer — more tonal and neutral. You’ll see a lot of black, white, and simple colors, maybe with the occasional standout color, but generally, the energy is in the lower half of the body. The shoes and socks are where people are expressing themselves, with maybe a little bit of color coming through in the shorts as well.”

I think about the 2010s era of Nike spikes, the bright neon pinks and yellows that glowed on screen during the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games. Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in the glacier blue color, a mix between indigo, violet, and dark blue that feels holographic. On one hand, brighter colors are more exciting to look at and own. On the other hand, they’re an absolute pain to clean and look after. That’s why I imagine that Parkinson’s favorite color is probably a darker neutral maroon, navy, or black.

“For me, it’s always white when it comes to running shoes. Always white. There’s a psychology behind what a white trainer represents. To me, it looks fast. When I see some of the black running shoes that are popular right now, they just look heavier.”

I challenge him on the lack of functionality, which he acknowledges. Somehow, his mind will block out the fading blood stains he’ll end up getting on the heel from the trails he’s traversing. Throughout our conversation, there hasn’t been a single lengthy spiel about inspiration or creativity. He intentionally designs for unanticipated reactions. If someone appreciates the Mizuno Acera for its artistic snake-like swirls, great. Another person might find its cushiony heel to be the only reason to sport it. And that’s great too. Like the 2026 FIFA World Cup jerseys, it’s just about making something that people want to wear.

Parkinson is already slightly nodding off by the time we wrap up. I don’t know if it’s the coffee he had beforehand or the fact that I throw a softball question that results in him both reminiscing on and carefully thinking about his favorite flapjack meal he likes to eat before heavy design work (he truly doesn’t understand how people can overload on something like chocolate beforehand); he’s somehow perked up enough to think about his weekend. He may hit a trail. Or he may get on his bike. Regardless, he’ll probably find himself reading the colors along the way, not because he intends to turn every single one into a garment. But because they tell him a little something about the people he designs for.

“I’m trying to just think off the top of my head in terms of the best work I’ve done in design. And I can think of one. It’s not a sexy one– there’s not an inspiring story behind it. But it does remind me about the importance of getting out of the office, having a look, and seeing what is actually happening in the wider world.”

By Niki Iyer

One Tree Hill. Season 1, Episode 3, 00:34:40.

Brooke: “When that last shot went through, did you feel it change?”
Lucas: “Feel what change?”
Brooke: “Everything. I mean, how many moments in life can you point to and say, ‘That’s when it all changed?’ You just had one.”

I’m coming off of writing a profile on a current Olympian, Kendall Ellis, who, against every instinct of hers, admitted to me that she is in her twilight years. This next Olympic cycle will be her final one, and has her thinking about the ‘last lap.’ No matter the heights they’ve reached and the competitors they’re measured against, every athlete remembers their first and final game, match, or race. If Brooke Davis is even 1% right, what changes in that moment? And what would change if you never took the last shot?

When I meet Heather Horn, producer at Crunchyroll, she’s sporting an outfit that screams Hawaii. It’s a loose-fitting top with illustrated pineapples all over it. She smiles brightly while adjusting her shirt for the camera.

“Everything always comes back to pineapples!”

I was initially introduced to Horn via a producer friend who specializes in graphic novel and game adaptations. I’m looking to meet a producer working in anime and manga content, given the recent uptick in athletes revealing themselves to be major fans of the most niche titles. Be it Noah Lyles with his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards or Chloe Kim and her love for Princess Mononoke, all the athletes seem to be reading and watching the format, and I found it impossible to deny that there must be a connection, an overlap between athletes and artists, sports and anime fans.

I am not part of this target demographic. The only manga title I’ve looked into is One Piece, and as you might be able to guess, it was solely because of the Netflix show, which is why I am shocked to find that Horn is a former collegiate athlete, a retired rifle specialist whose roots lie somewhere between Honolulu and Los Angeles. Ok, amazing, finally a way for me to connect with this seemingly obscure (pardon my French, bat**** art form.)

“My family came to Hawaii two generations ago with my grandfather, who was a colonel in the U.S. Marines. My father was actually born in Honolulu. My grandfather unfortunately died in the Vietnam War, and I don’t want to say that my family was stranded in Hawaii, but that’s where they wanted to make their final home. So my father grew up there, and he couldn’t imagine raising a family anywhere else or in any other culture.”

Horn’s origin story mirrors the athletic journey: it begins with serendipity and ends with uncertainty. It was her grandfather’s unfinished plan, a last match never played, that laid the foundation for her family’s entire future, including how her father and Los Angeles-raised mother would meet as ROTC cadets.

“Their meet-cute is actually kind of legendary. All of the cadets lined up back-to-back, and they said, ‘Turn around, that’s going to be your buddy. That’s your partner for the next four years.’ They were both dating other people when they met, so it was kind of a slow-burning romance. My dad had a girlfriend back home, my mom was involved with a local boy from Los Angeles, and those relationships eventually ended.

By the end of their four years as cadets together, the way my mom tells it, she and my dad were sitting on a sofa together, facing down the fact that they were going to be separated after graduation, and that they’d be assigned to different bases. They decided they didn’t want to be separated, and they got married.”

The way that Horn describes it, her parents’ love story is a grounded Netflix rom-com in the making. And by that, I don’t mean there are random showy firework displays, an appearance of a prince, or supernatural elements. It’s a slice of life. For all of us mainlanders, those of us who would be called haoles (I learned of this term, embarrassingly, through the rebooted version of Hawaii Five-0), Hawaii is a tourist destination, the land of beaches, pineapples, and a laid-back surfer lifestyle.

After a couple of hours in a rabbit hole about Honolulu’s famous ABC stores and the current lineup of flavors at Honolulu Cookie Company, I finally come across something that I believe explains Horn’s wistful, whimsical personality. The Aloha Spirit Law, passed in 1986, mandates ‘expressing kindness, compassion, and mutual respect’ as part of public policy. Get that, Californians? It’s illegal to be an a*****e in Hawaii.

In many respects, Horn reminds me of a soft-spoken Alice from Alice in Wonderland, strong-willed and curious but a much more avid listener than a talker. That is, until you get her to talk about the things she’s actually passionate about. Growing up on the islands, like many of the kids around her, Horn took up basketball and a bit of baseball.

“Basketball had been my sport. I tried out for the middle school teams, and that was a really challenging experience because I was cut both times. I had volunteered as manager for the basketball team, but then in eighth grade, I was cut again as a player but invited to return as manager. I was looking at the array of options. I knew I wasn’t going back to basketball, and I had trouble adjusting to softball. I wasn’t fast enough, nor did I love running enough for soccer.”

On the surface, it might seem like yet another childhood athlete story. But at Horn’s insistence, I dig into the culture of youth sports in Hawaii and discover the following. Over 60% of Hawaii youth play organized sports, with most playing up to 3 sports. That’s well above the national average numbers of 50% and 1, respectively.

To make things extra interesting, Horn was a graduate of the famous Punahou School. If that name sounds familiar, it is because it boasts well-known alumni, including former President Barack Obama. But Punahou is known for one thing above everything else: it’s home to legendary athletes. We’re talking about golfer Michelle Wie, surfer Carissa Moore, volleyball player Erik Shoji, and countless other Olympians and Hall of Famers.

This is the kind of school where the question was never ‘will you excel at a sport?’ but rather, ‘which sport will you excel at?’ And Horn was on a mission to figure out how she’d get a varsity letter if basketball, baseball, and soccer were off the table.

“I knew we had a rifle team because my father had been on it when he went to Punahou. I thought, ‘Well, that actually sounds great because it’s a sport where I can get a letter and I won’t have to run.’ So that was definitely a point in its favor. I should also mention that my mother briefly competed in rifle at UCLA as an intercollegiate sport. She got involved because she wanted to improve on what she was learning through ROTC. She’d heard there was a competitive rifle team at UCLA, and decided to give it a try. So, in a way, rifle is a two-sided family heritage.”

There’s something particularly odd to me about a young teenager taking up weapons, a sentiment that apparently I do a poor job at concealing.

“I think I was probably ten or eleven when I started. My parents got my brother a BB gun, and he wasn’t very interested in it, but I thought it was a great fun thing. That wasn’t actually the first time I’d ever handled a firearm, though. I’d been to supervised hunting and fishing days and educational outreach events where you could learn about firearm safety and, under very close supervision, fire a shot. So it wasn’t like my parents just handed us a BB gun and said, ‘Have fun.’ Communities that are really gun-safety-forward tend to start education pretty early. It’s never too early to teach a child about firearm safety. If a child is old enough to open a cabinet, they’re old enough to start learning about respecting what’s inside it. Gun safety is something that never stops; it has to be reinforced constantly, both for yourself and for the people around you.”

Even though Horn doesn’t verbalize it, I consider that despite how deeply ingrained firearm culture was in her community, she stumbled upon the competitive side of sport much like Lucas Scott did with the Tree Hill basketball team. Sure, the sport of rifle was always there, but there was nothing that could’ve certified that Horn would take it up. When she missed that shot at basketball tryouts, a part of her may have still believed that there was a way back to… basketball. She most likely had no idea that there was another target waiting for her.

Rifle was part of a plan that included archery and fencing. Horn hoped to become a triple, or even quadruple threat, like her father. That plan was nipped in the bud when she excelled at rifle in her sophomore year of high school.

“I unexpectedly made the varsity team in my sophomore year, and I have to give a huge shout-out to Coach Finley. Whatever she saw in me as a freshman, I still, to this day, don’t fully understand. I spent half the time talking to the person on the point next to me. I wasn’t focused at all. And she simply said, ‘I thought you had it in you.’ I felt so responsible for that that I had to really live up to it.

In my sophomore year, I quit the distractions. I really doubled down on practice and committed myself to the sport. That’s when I fell from a like to a love.”

I’m curious about how quickly Horn took to her sport, considering the transition from a team environment (basketball) to a more individual one (rifle).

“Rifle is a team sport, but you’re ultimately responsible for your own performance. When you step up to the firing line, you’re with yourself in near silence for however long you’re standing there. There’s no, ‘Nobody passed me the ball,’ or, ‘Someone else let me down.’ There was a level of personal accountability and control over the variables that I just hadn’t experienced before.”

Horn and I instantly connect over this. As a track athlete, I can understand how liberating personal accountability can be. It might seem counterintuitive, but I’ve always felt that having more control over the situation’s outcome outweighs the pressure. We end up dovetailing into a conversation about the role of neurodivergence in sport, including my theory that every elite athlete falls somewhere on the spectrum (even if it is undiagnosed). There must be a reason for that laser precision and sharp focus; the ability to be lackadaisical about life as a whole, but then slip into a flow state as soon as the gun goes off.

“I think it was another right encounter at the right time because it was what I needed. After basketball, I was ready for something where my score was my score. At least at the high school level, it’s quite objective. If your score is high, you’re going to be on the team. That was something I needed.”

I immediately conjure up the image of that one Turkish pistol athlete, Yusuf Dikeç, whose stance went viral during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games because he looked like an actual hitman. There were no airs, special equipment, or frills about him. He showed up, gun in one hand, the other hand in his pocket, and fired. Yusuf would go on to win the silver medal at those Olympics.

Throughout her early high school years, Horn perfected her technique, honed her stance, and surprised both herself and her coaches. But mostly, she always showed up like there was another practice, competition, or another target ahead. It’s a particularly refreshing counter to the “live every day like it’s your last” philosophy we’ve been indoctrinated with.
I’ve always been curious about what that adage actually means, and how approaching life that way would change the decisions you make. Sure, you might choose to go skydiving or travel the world if it were your last day. But honestly, could you? Logistically, it’s unlikely. And figuratively, it becomes impossible; you’re more likely to be thinking about some grand adventure than going on it because you’re worried about getting everything right, as this is your last possible opportunity. You could be missing out on the coolest jazz festival at your local park because you want to use your last day to try to make it to Coachella.

As we mull over this philosophical tangent, Horn mentions another allure of the sport.

“People often don’t realize that rifle is intensely mental. Every sport has a mental component, but the physical portion of rifle is really an act of endurance and repetition. It’s doing the same thing, the same way, every single time, and letting your body become that machine. I found a lot of liberation in losing myself to that process.”

It seems intuitive on paper, but I quickly learn that this is one of the many reasons that a sport stereotypically deemed as the ultimate symbol of masculinity actually rewards women over men.

“One of the hidden advantages of rifle is that women compete on equal footing with men. There isn’t this assumption that because someone is bigger or stronger, they’re automatically going to win. The target doesn’t care. People think rifle is all about strength, but it really isn’t. It’s a mental endeavor. It’s a consistent endeavor. It’s an endurance endeavor. Those are all areas where women tend to perform really well.”

I wrack my brain trying to remember another sport that places its male and female athletes on equal footing and struggle to come up with an answer. Chess, maybe? But I find Horn’s point all the more interesting because of how the sport has been stereotyped. Chess has always been for all genders. It has never been seen as hypermasculine. Rifle, sharpshooting, and pistol are different.

“Physically, if you’re talking about the basic standing shooting stance, and standing is the most difficult position, score-wise, you want to use as little muscle as possible. Women have hips. Men don’t. You can put your elbow on your hip and lock it in. Then the weight of your rifle should travel straight from your fist, through your forearm, down through your hip, through your leg, and into the ground. It should be one geometric line. There should be no strength involved in this. It should all be physics. Men have to find a spot underneath the ribcage instead.”

As she explains the nuances of the stances, including a kneeling one, which is incredibly difficult on the joints but Horn excelled at, I find myself lingering on her previous statement: People think rifle is all about strength, but it really isn’t. It’s a mental endeavor. It’s a consistent endeavor. It’s an endurance endeavor. She might not say it outright, but within that statement, I glean that she sees the sport’s rewards differently than others do. Where another athlete is eager about what’s in front of them, she’s already thinking about the next target. There’s this unspoken conviction that after the so-called last shot, there’s always one more.

So that meant that after high school, there would be collegiate athletics. It was a given, not just because of how quickly she was progressing in high school, but also because she had someone to look up to. Ryan Tanoue went to her rival school, St. Louis, and was making incredible strides professionally at the University of Nevada, Reno.

There were numerous reasons for Horn to attend the University of Nevada, Reno. But chief among them, I learn that her grandmother still lived in Southern California, which meant that when she was missing a good spam masubi or a nice plate of loco moco, she could find a secondary home just a drive away. I have to ask her the quintessential recruitment question: other than Nevada, Reno, what other school did it come down to? Her answer couldn’t have been more unlike the former.

“It came down for me between Nevada, Reno, and Texas Christian University. TCU is a beautiful campus. It’s a private school, so the facilities are lovely. The team was, you know, all about Southern hospitality. But I wanted to be closer to family, and I wanted to be closer to the food that I grew up on. And I think cowboy culture would have been a very different life.”

I’m going to need her to explain the difference between the Stagecoach version and whatever it is that Horn is implying.

“I mean, I’m trying to be really kind in describing things because I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, Heather, what is this bull*** that she’s talking about years later.’ But to be honest, for me as a person and for my style and my flow, the TCU team was a women’s team, an all-girls team. And they had—picture this—they took their team photo, and this is so bold of them, bold choice, fantastic choice, like a power move: in white sundresses and cowboy boots, with their rifles, looking very sorority rush. And the Nevada Reno team was in Adidas tracksuits. And I was like… I think the tracksuits are more my speed.”

During the recruiting process, it’s very easy to acquiesce to a college coach and team’s preferences. The goal is no different than being a runway model. No matter your individual features, you need to fit in with the rest of the lineup. It’s an interesting conundrum that many would not perceive as the case for individual sport athletes.

Horn arrived at the University of Nevada, Reno, with a state championship title under her belt, developing into a national-caliber athlete with Olympic potential. She was committed to spending the next four years not only progressing as an athlete but also pursuing journalism. There was a clear plan laid out. Now all that she had to do was follow it, and she’d be at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in no time. Horn’s story is particularly easy for me to understand because, in many ways, both of us were raised sheltered. Calling it a bubble might be instinctual, but what I’m trying to say is that we grew up in tight-knit communities that were more or less disconnected from the mainstream happenings in the US. Against everyone’s best efforts, there’s absolutely nothing that will prepare you for entering a college environment where your fellow students are trying to piecemeal a family dynamic.

“I want to be very cautious about this, but I also had a group of friends in my freshman year in my dorm who, I’d say, had quite a bit of impact on my life, both good and bad. It was an all-girls academic dorm, but what I ultimately discovered after I arrived was that it was actually a lot of purity ring, super-Christian girls. So I had never been surrounded by so much feminine energy in my life. Ever.

Punahou is nominally a Christian school, and we went to chapel every week. But it was very interfaith in practice. A lot of my friends growing up were Buddhist, for example, and my personal background is that my mother is ethnically Jewish and converted to Buddhism, and my dad is Catholic. So religion was never really a major topic. So I’m sitting in the dorm, on the floor, and there’s an impromptu Bible study at like 2 a.m., and I’m just thinking: ‘Can I leave, or is it like formally required that I be part of this?’”

The last line is quite possibly the best metaphor for elite athletics as a whole. There will come a moment during your career when you will find yourself wondering why? Why go through the 5 AM training sessions, the brutal physical therapy and rehab, traveling for competition, and yet never getting to explore the cities that you compete in, or worse yet, competing and losing on your birthday? When you’re winning, the answer is easy. But that phase is always the shortest, so motivation has to come from a deep inner conviction that athletics is actually what you want to do. It’s the way that Horn frames this question as seeking permission that really strikes me. The sport becomes so deeply embedded in you that you forget that you can actually hang up the shoes, and in her case, the rifle, and walk away whenever you want to.

Add to that, Facebook was becoming popular in the 2000s, and Horn was starting to pick up on bad body imagery from both virtual and in-person spaces. It was particularly odd because, as mentioned before, physicality had very little to do with performance in her sport. She showed up in freshman year focused, but she quickly started to see things slip in her sophomore year.

“By my sophomore year, more things and more thought were being put into what my life outside the sport would look like.”

Her performances weren’t drastically dipping. Horn was still in the Olympic pipeline. But it was clear that she was shifting in and out of the flow state. And in the absence of attention towards her sport, she could finally consider what kind of future awaited her.

Horn was on the firing line and competed at the 2008 Olympic Trials, but when she didn’t make the final cut, she stepped back to analyze not only what went wrong, but why. There was the trajectory of her performances over that year, leading up to it, the timing, and the accumulation of two years of pressure being away from home. And above all else, for someone who never took last shots, her mind was on the what’s next question.

“Rifle is not a sport where there is a million-dollar Nike endorsement waiting for you. No one competing in it is under the illusion that they’re going to make big money. You can have a career in it as a coach, and there are some pathways there. I can’t speak as much to precision pistol or trap and skeet, which are also Olympic sports. Trap and skeet is maybe a little closer to the hunting and fishing community, so there may be more endorsement opportunities, a speaker circuit, or broader educational work.

But typically speaking, if you are not a collegiate athlete, or you are not independently wealthy — if you can’t take a gap year supported by family, or access to equipment that lets you continue training independently — the path narrows quite quickly. Broadly, your options after graduation are either: you make the US Olympic team and become a sponsored athlete, you make the national team and become a resident athlete in Colorado, or you join something like the US Army and try out for the Army Marksmanship Unit in Fort Benning, Georgia. And I didn’t see myself in either of those camps. You can keep chasing the Olympic dream — but then what is the career you are building alongside it?”

With NIL spreading like an uncontrolled brush fire, there’s a lot of chatter about how much money professional, and now collegiate, athletes are making. The fundamental truth is that not only is the purse reserved for the top 1% of all athletes, but it’s also not evenly distributed across sports. You can be a multi-time national champion and the world number one in track and field, and receive nothing more than a fraction of a percent of what an American football player does in their freshman year of college. My mother used to tell me that in America, it’s a privilege to be a starving athlete.

Horn’s exit from the sport diverges from mine because hers was a slow build to a moment that never happened. It’s like a record player skipping a track entirely. She didn’t go from athlete to ex-athlete; she jumped all the way to filmmaker and producer.

“I was practicing, and because of my class schedule, I had become asynchronous with the team practice. I was supposed to be going in to practice individually on my own, no coach, just me. And I should have been experienced enough for that kind of practice. But my mind was not there; my heart was not in it. I was dragging my feet; I was getting my equipment set up so slowly.

Up till that point, I had been trying everything; at least I thought that I was trying everything that I could to bring my scores back up. And bring them to where I expected of myself and where I know Coach Harvey [of the University of Nevada, Reno] had expected me to grow into. My heart was not there. And that was when I knew that I was not going to be able to keep this career.”

It could very well be a storyline out of Blue Lock, Ace of the Diamond, or any number of Crunchyroll’s anime titles.

“A lot of the most iconic sports anime follow high school teams, and they end with this bittersweet feeling that now it’s time to move on.”

Of course, anime and sports fandoms share the overlap in how committed audiences are to certain characters and athletes. But I’m particularly curious about the philosophical similarities that inspire athletes like Noah Lyles and Chloe Kim to embody the essence of these characters.

“I think these stories allow us to think, ‘What’s my open door? What’s going to be my chance encounter?’ And you’re not going to actually find that answer unless you try a bunch of different things.”

Horn would see the final collegiate practice through. It wasn’t a particularly stellar showing, but she got the job done. I decide to try on my best B. Davis voice and ask: Looking back now, if you had known at the time that it would have been your last shot, would you have done it differently? I’m curious to know if she would’ve tried the infamous kneeling stance, a very difficult approach to the sport that, somehow, Horn mastered earlier on in her career. Would she have preferred to have been at a different range altogether?

“Actually, one of the great secrets of rifle, and I’m reading into some William Tell s*** here, is that you do not need to see the target to shoot a perfect score. If you know where the target should be, and you know where your body should be, you should still be able to take a perfect shot.”

She reminds me of an anecdote she had mentioned in passing earlier. It was about a woman who returned to the sport later on in life and started placing nationally in prone competition. Apparently, there was also a gentleman who, even in his 60s and 70s, was ranking nationally in the men’s competition. I’m scratching my head, wondering what the hell she’s getting at?

“Look, it’s not impossible that that was not my last shot. Then there’s the question of ‘Where can I go in LA to shoot that type of rifle?’ But I do still have all my gear. I haven’t been able to part with it. So was that moment really my last shot?”

In her eyes, her career never actually ended, and she is not an ex-athlete. Even if the most recent shot she took was a decade ago, it wasn’t her last one. Theoretically, she could dust off her rifle and pick up where she left off. And it wouldn’t matter whether she succeeds or not. Just the belief and conviction that she can get to the line is enough for her to pick up her rifle and remind herself that she’s still an athlete. As track athletes, we’re told to run through the finish line even in practice, and it’s not because the extra meter is going to make or break the stopwatch. It’s so we remind ourselves that even after the race seems over, to keep going. I guess that’s why it’s important for Horn not to take the last shot. Whether or not she returns to the sport, the conviction that she could at any time keeps her going. Most athletes reminisce about the past; Horn’s next target is in the future and hasn’t even been discovered yet.

“Oh, and do you know the craziest stereotype I’ve heard about us? That we’re all sharpshooters. Do you know the number of hitman jokes and ‘You must be good in a zombie apocalypse’ I have received?

By Niki Iyer

OSCAR PIASTRI IS… MJ

KIMI ANTONELLI IS… JEAN GREY

CHARLES LECLERC IS… SPIDER-MAN

LEWIS HAMILTON IS… THE HULK

ESTEBAN OCON IS… NED LEEDS

SERGIO PEREZ IS… SCORPION

CARLOS SAINZ IS… MAY PARKER

GEORGE RUSSELL IS… YELENA BELOVA

MAX VERSTAPPEN IS… BILL METZGER

FERNANDO ALONSO IS… PUNISHER

Written by: Melissa McLeod

Graphics by: Sara Shohoud

Social Design by: Sara Shohoud

Sahara Desert, Morocco 2017 — I wouldn't ride snow or surf for another 5 years, but something about the infinite dunes of the Sahara convinced me into thinking I could conquer the infinite sand. Or maybe it was just the lasting suggestion of the magic mushrooms I had ingested under a full moon, shared by a friendly Mexican couple who had smuggled the chocolate in from Amsterdam the night before.

© Sean Niu

Ellie, the mascot for the New York Liberty, is a total layup. I’ve never been to a game in Brooklyn, but whenever I see a new video on my feed, I stop and watch. I’ve come across a lot of debate over whether the person behind the mask is a man or a woman… but here’s the thing: I don’t want to know. The beauty of Ellie is that we’re only meant to see Ellie… or whatever diva Ellie takes on, like Elliedonna (Madonna) during a performance. When you show up to a game (or to watch a video), you’re not there to meet the person clocking in for a shift; you’re there to meet the character who lives only in those bright lights, the roar of the crowd, and the moments that stick with you long after the final score. Some things deserve to stay larger than life.

Cory Field knows this better than almost anyone. His current work in Toronto sports falls firmly under what he calls “a cone of silence.” In other words, he can’t name the teams, can’t share details of his performances, and can’t even confirm when he steps out in front of tens of thousands of fans. But he doesn’t mind. In fact, he insists on it.

“That’s how the magic stays alive. Once you retire from a role, fine, you can talk about it all you want. But any active position? Cone of silence. You don’t ruin the show for the people who are still coming to see it.”

His respect for that line comes from a deeply personal lesson, one that shifted how he saw mascotting forever. Growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, he was born a twin, but he and his brother Chad could not have been more different.

“I was always the extrovert. People knew exactly who I was the second I walked into a room.”

For years, that energy was focused entirely on the Hamilton Bulldogs, which was then an American Hockey League team and is now the Ontario Hockey League’s Brantford Bulldogs.

“I went so crazy at those games. I would dress up in morph suits. I would put masks on. I’d run around the arena trying to get on camera. It got to a point where even their own mascot was like, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’”

That mascot was Bruiser, a tough, playful bulldog who became Cory’s first real hero of the arena. For years, Bruiser was just Bruiser. Cory never gave much thought to who might be inside the suit. That changed the day he found out who was beneath that bulldog head.

“That was the first time I thought, ‘Wow, this is more secretive than I realized,’ because it ruined the magic for me.”

It’s a paradox he still carries with him today: he knows the name and face of nearly every professional mascot in North America, every NHL, NFL, MLB, and CFL character, yet that one reveal, about the mascot he’d loved most as a kid, stung more than all the rest.

“It’s silly, right? I know exactly who’s underneath almost every other suit. But Bruiser was mine. He was the one who made me fall in love with this whole world. Knowing the person inside just… shrank him a little bit. That’s when I understood: the mystery isn’t just a rule. It’s the point.”

Few jobs hold onto that sense of wonder and deliberate mystique the way mascotting does. It’s like the “innie and outie” divide from Severance; the work is mysterious and important without the horrible mind-splitting self-erasure. When you’re in the suit, you’re only the character. When you take the head off, you’re only yourself.

For years, Cory never imagined he’d be the one wearing the suit. His sights were set firmly on baseball. He was a standout pitcher, competing at the highest youth levels and earning a spot on Team Ontario, where he played for four years. When an offer came to play at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, New York, he jumped at the chance, even though he committed just two weeks before move-in day.

“It was the best last-minute decision I ever made. I believe everything happens for a reason, and that choice set every other part of my life in motion.”

At college, he was something of an anomaly: a starting pitcher who was also a dedicated theater student.

“I was the only theater kid on the baseball team, and the only athlete in the theater program. Everyone else would talk about their business classes or sports management seminars. I’d be rambling about blocking, or character motivation, or how to project emotion without saying a word. It raised a few eyebrows, for sure, but looking back, it was the perfect training for what I’d end up doing.”

Three weeks into his first semester, a friend made an offhand comment:

“You know, the school doesn’t even have a mascot. You do theater, you’re outgoing, why don’t you give it a shot?”

If it had been even a few years later, a friend would have probably looked at Cory and seen a baseball player and a theatre kid and made a different suggestion, but while Banana Ball existed, it hadn’t blown up to the scale it has now. And mascotting? Cory brushed it off at first. It sounded silly, like something he’d do for a laugh, not something that could matter. But a few days later, when he crossed paths with one of the school’s athletic directors, he mentioned the idea. A week later, he stepped into a hawk suit, no training, no script, no idea what he was doing… for a game with barely 26 fans in the stands.

“I thought I’d look ridiculous. But I started messing around, dancing, high-fiving the few kids who were there, stealing snacks from the bench. And people were laughing, really laughing. Not polite chuckles, but full-on howling. That’s when I realized, this wasn’t just goofing off. This was connecting.”

He kept doing small campus events for a few months, still thinking of mascotting as nothing more than a fun side gig. Then came the invitation that changed everything. The Utica Comets, the AHL affiliate of the New Jersey Devils, were hosting a regional mascot showcase, and they wanted him there as Mo the Hawk.

“They invited every big name in the Northeast. There was Otto the Orange from Syracuse, mascots from New Jersey, professional performers who’d been doing this for decades. I was just some kid from a tiny community college.”

By the end of the day, all anyone could talk about was the unknown hawk. A few weeks later, while he was playing intramural basketball, his phone rang. It was a New Jersey number.

“‘Our regular mascot got stuck in a crash on the highway,’ the voice on the line said. ‘We have a game in 35 minutes. Can you get here?’”

Cory raced to the arena, where a team of staff rushed him downstairs, wrapped him in layers of fur, strapped on the oversized head, and pushed him toward the ice.

“I had no clue how to see properly, how to breathe right, or where I was even supposed to stand. I looked out and saw 6,000 people, and my brain just went blank. I thought for sure I’d ruined the whole night.”

After the game, he headed back to the locker room, already apologetic…until Adam Pawlick, the team’s vice president and general manager, walked in. They wanted him back.

At first, the team still called in their usual performer from Syracuse, a 40-minute drive away. But after a few more shifts, they told Cory he was their guy. He was “Naudie.”

Over the next three seasons, Naudie became more than a mascot; he became a fixture of Utica. One section of the arena claimed him as their own, dubbing themselves the “Naudie Squad.” Every single game, without fail, Cory would climb the stairs and dump an entire bag of popcorn over them.

“They’d show up with ponchos, with extra bags, with signs daring me to do it. It became our little ritual. I never missed it.”

The character seeped into the whole city. Cory’s face, actually, Naudie’s, appeared on the back of city buses, and the team stores added entire sections of Naudie merchandise: plushies, shirts, kids’ hats, things that had never existed before.

“I’d walk into a shop and see a little kid holding a stuffed version of the character I’d just been wearing the night before. That’s when it hit me. This isn’t just a side job. This is something that matters.”

But it wasn’t easy. Early on, money was tight. He lived out of his car for weeks in upstate New York, couch-surfing in dorms when he could. I immediately grew concerned, because upstate New York, like the parts of Ontario Cory and I are from, has seasons. And he was talking about mascotting for a hockey team, which I associate with winter and ice. We’re talking negative degrees with windchill.

“It was fall, so it wasn’t freezing, but it was still hard. I’d show up to events in the suit, no one knowing I didn’t have a place to sleep that night. You can’t let that show; you have to be the character, no matter what’s going on for you.”

Eventually, a former baseball teammate named Kyle Korrie told his parents about Cory’s situation. The Korries invited him to stay in their basement for free, covering groceries and everything else.

“They didn’t know me well, but they just said, ‘You’re part of this team, so you’re part of our family.’ That kindness kept me going. It’s the reason I still believe in paying it forward now.”

At the same time, he was taking on more work than almost anyone in the industry: he suited up for both the Utica Comets and the Syracuse Crunch, bitter rivals in the AHL.

“You’re not supposed to do that. But back then, no one knew who I was. I’d drive 50 miles between games on the same day, play for one team in the morning and the other at night. Fans would yell insults at the ‘other’ team’s mascot, never guessing it was the same person inside.”

I immediately said this was only possible because mascots stay at their home arenas… but then I just watched a video of a bunch of the WNBA mascots show up for Lightning’s birthday at a game in Dallas (no Ellie though, despite the opposing team being the Liberty), so it could have gotten messy if those teams had wanted to have a mascot face-off.

He also suited up for Utica City FC in the Major Arena Soccer League, and for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the CFL back home, eventually spending four seasons with them. All told, he’s performed in more than 20 different mascot suits across North America.

“People ask how I keep them all straight. It’s like playing 20 different characters on stage. Each one has its own walk, its own signature, its own way of high-fiving, its own way of hugging. No mascot speaks. That’s another unwritten rule. So, every single thing you do has to tell the story. If I’m rushing past a kid who wants an autograph, I know exactly which signature to use for that team, exactly how to hold the marker so it looks like the character is signing it. Sometimes I catch myself doing a move that belongs to Naudie when I’m supposed to be someone else, and I have to snap out of it fast. It’s a lot to keep track of, but that’s the craft.”

By 2023, Cory had hung up his baseball jersey for good. After years of playing semi-pro with the Brantford Red Sox, he decided to give mascotting everything he had. He moved to New York on a work visa, committed to building his career full-time.

First came a call from the New York Yankees: they wanted him as King Ripple, the mascot for their Single-A affiliate, the Tampa Tarpons, and to work spring training operations.

“I was over the moon. I’d grown up watching these players on TV, and suddenly I was sharing a locker room with Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, washing my mascot suit right next to their lockers. It felt like a dream.”

His first-ever shift with the Yankees organization was at a Savannah Bananas game, when the famous exhibition team came to Florida. Now this is what I’m talking about. When he brought up that it was because he was a theatre kid and pitcher that he should go into mascotting, that’s not where my head went. It went to High School Musical… and it went to the Bananas.

“People have been telling me I should work for the Bananas for years. I’m a pitcher, I love over-the-top entertainment, I can balance almost anything on my face… everyone says I’d fit right in. That first shift with them felt like a tiny preview of what could be.”

Are you listening, Berry Aldridge? Tampa quickly became one of Cory’s favorite places. He formed a tight bond with his handler, Josh, and the two remain close friends. They’ve since traveled together, even riding camels in the Sahara Desert. But then came the audition he’d barely dared to hope for: Captain Fear, the pirate mascot of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“I didn’t think I had a chance. This is the NFL, one of the biggest teams in the league, playing in front of 65,000 people. I had minor league experience, but nothing like this.”

While he was washing his suit at the Yankees facility, he was told he got the job.

“I was so excited I started throwing players’ gear around the locker room. I didn’t care who saw.”

He was earning $60 an hour for events, working regular appearances, visiting children’s hospitals, and preparing for his first-ever NFL game. But even with steady work, money stayed tight, and he once again was living in his car, only this time in the sweltering Florida summer. Until a staff member from the Yankees organization connected him with a local Spanish family.

“They met me for dinner, said they liked my energy, and welcomed me in like I was their own son. I had my own room, went to every family birthday, taught their son how to fish, drove their daughter to the grocery store. I wasn’t just a boarder. I was family. That’s the kind of kindness you never forget.”

We often romanticize these struggles. And it can be difficult to understand how someone can struggle to make rent when they are essentially representatives for massive sports franchises. But the employment is generally based on appearance. When there aren’t games or if your character isn’t as wildly popular as an Ellie, Gritty, or Phillie Phanatic, there aren’t as many outside appearances, and certainly not enough for rent, especially in the NFL, despite its dominance in the US market, because of its limited number of home games.

He was just days away from his Buccaneers debut when disaster struck. On August 25, 2024, he was hiking in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee with Josh when his phone rang. It was a call from Homeland Security and Buccaneers HR: his work visa was no longer valid, and he had to return to Canada by Wednesday. A call that those working on visas are afraid to get, because often, even with an employer, as Cory had, it’s hard to get another or different type of visa sponsored.

“I was six states away from home, holding the phone, and everything I’d worked for had just crumbled. It was the hardest day of my life. I’d gone from living my dream in the NFL to being told I had to leave, with nothing to show for it but a few thousand dollars and a packed car.”

He was allowed to suit up for his first and only Buccaneers game. Walking out to 60,000 cheering fans, he paused for a moment on the field, taking it all in.

“It was the most amazing feeling I’ve ever had… and the most heartbreaking. I knew this was it. But I also knew I’d given everything I had.”

A day later, he packed up his car and drove north, back to his dad’s house in Hamilton. He was depressed. I don’t blame him if I had just achieved those heights that he talked about only to have them snatched away, but still getting a taste of what I lost… I would be Elle Woods in her bed with all the chocolate after her non-proposal. But Cory also knew he couldn’t fight what happened; it was how the system worked.

Slowly, things began to turn around. He did a pair of interviews with CHCH News in Hamilton, sharing his story, and word spread quickly.

“I can’t talk about the specifics, but I can say this: I’m home, and I’m doing what I love. I have my own place now, I’m financially stable, and I get to keep performing in front of the best fans in the world.”

He also still acts: he appeared in the TV series Love on Ice, which has found a huge audience across Asia, and takes on other contract roles whenever he can.

“I still love performing as myself. Mascotting is incredible, but there’s nothing quite like stepping out on stage as Cory.”

Most importantly, he’s paying forward the kindness he received in Utica and Tampa. He has a roommate from Japan, and Cory treats him exactly like the Korries and his Florida host family treated him: bringing him to family dinners, showing him around Toronto, and planning trips to the city’s most iconic spots.

“I know what it feels like to be thousands of miles from home with no one you know. I want him to feel like he belongs here, just like people made me feel like I belonged there.”

He sees the next generation of mascot fans the same way someone perhaps saw it in that kid in the morph suit.

“There’s a little girl I held up to the glass at Comets games when she was just a baby. Her parents would hand her to me every time, and I’d lift her so she could see the ice better. Last month, they brought her to Toronto to see me. She’s talking in full sentences now. It blows my mind.”

Sometimes he’ll spot a familiar face in a Walmart or a grocery store, a kid who used to cheer for Naudie, Bruiser, King Ripple, etc.

“I know exactly who they are, but they don’t know me. It’s better that way. I don’t want to break their version of the magic. I just want them to carry that feeling of excitement with them, wherever they go.”

For Cory, that magic is what ties everything together. So, if you came to read this hoping for a reveal on who's in the Ellie suit. I didn’t ask. Cory probably knows, but I hope he wouldn’t tell me even if I did ask. It’s the same reason why he protects the identities of his current roles and why he still gets chills when he sees a kid light up at the sight of a mascot.

“People ask what the difference is between mascotting and being an athlete. It’s really not that different. You’re performing, you’re practicing, you’re giving everything you have to make the crowd happy. The only difference is I get to wear a cooler costume. And I never have to speak.”

He still dreams of the Savannah Bananas, of suiting up for the most fun team in baseball, and of combining his two greatest loves: pitching and performance. But for now, he’s exactly where he needs to be, joyfully keeping the magic alive, one suit, one high-five, and one secret at a time.

By Cara-Lynn Branch

It became the rallying cry for Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother and for those who’d adopt his philosophy of setting themselves apart from the t-shirt-and-jeans crowd. You wouldn’t think it, but this philosophy has existed in the world of sports long before Barney’s utterance.

While we might associate athletes with jerseys that bear their numbers or colors, there’s been a long tradition of the “fit” outside of the arena, court, or field of play. But how players dress coming and going from their sporting event can be just as noteworthy. I’m thinking right now of Erling Haaland exiting a plane with his D&G bag over one arm, a taxidermy raccoon under the other, and his relaxed black sweats.

I wore my first tie for my school choir; I still have it. There were 200 of us; the ties made us uniform, and we loosened or untied them the second we were offstage, but we kept them on our bodies, creating our own style and being playful with them. And I discovered I loved a tie.

There’s a long tradition in men’s sports of suiting up before games to project a “team” look. But now that sports have evolved, so have arrival looks, with fits that show off a player’s personal style and personality. The suits have changed, and so has their signature accessory: the tie.

When I met with Heather Saldivar, founder of W Tie, Barney would accuse us of not suiting up. Heather was in a Seattle Storm sweater, and I was in a Hawaiian-style button-up. But who defines what it means to suit up? A man on a sitcom?

Heather’s fit was a nod to a team she once worked for, and to her love for the WNBA as a whole. Mine was a shirt from Peau de Loup, a Canadian company specializing in gender-neutral and upcycled clothing, and now has a WNBA line. In fact, when Heather was spotlighting other companies doing it right, Peau de Loup was one of the first she brought up.

As we sat there chatting, our mutual obsession with the tie as a modern statement piece became the heartbeat of our conversation. Seeing Heather hold her designs up to the camera made it instantly clear that W Tie isn’t just about merchandising; it’s about giving a classic, historically rigid accessory a completely new, playful lease on life.

To understand the soul of W Tie, you have to understand Heather’s journey. She grew up playing basketball. But by the time high school graduation rolled around, a secondary passion began to pull her in: fashion.

“I started falling in love with fashion a little bit more than basketball in high school, and went towards that route.”

Yet, she never left the game behind. Her walls were plastered with posters of her favorite team, the legendary Houston Comets. She rocked a Cynthia Cooper jersey and wore Sheryl Swoopes’ signature shoes.

After studying fashion marketing in college, Heather built an impressive sports retail resume, working with the Seattle Seahawks and Seattle Sounders. That path eventually led her to a five-year tenure as the Seattle Storm’s Sr. Merchandise Manager. She arrived at a chaotic time; the Seattle SuperSonics had just departed, leaving the Storm with virtually no team store and minimal merchandise infrastructure.

“We had no team shop... We would literally set up every game day, pull out fixtures on the concourse, and make our own store.”

That very year, 2010, the Storm won the WNBA Championship. Heather found herself thrown into the deep end, having to buy championship gear overnight. Decades later, looking at the visual merchandising in Climate Pledge Arena, she marvels at how far the league’s retail space has come.

After transitioning into brand partnerships and freelance marketing for sports performance brands, corporate life threw her a curveball in June 2025. She was laid off in an organizational restructuring.

“I’d just told a friend I was made for something bigger, more of an impact. I felt like I was losing myself a little bit, losing my creativity.”

That unexpected change in direction, or sudden drop, can mess up many players in baseball and life, but if you adjust your swing and embrace that change, hitting an off-speed pitch can be exactly what sets you apart from the pack. For Heather, this allowed her to step more into an artist and creative role.

“Women’s sports is just such a big community of women who want to see you win, just as much as I want to see them win. It’s such a special place to be.”

When you transition from being a die-hard fan to working in a front office, an unspoken rule takes over: you have to play it cool. As someone who’s worked a lot of background and done a lot of press, I know a lot about being around people you once only saw on screen, and then having to be professional. Sometimes you have to let out the squees internally.

During her tenure at the Storm, Heather was surrounded by legends during the iconic Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson era. Among them was Comets legend Tina Thompson, who played for Seattle toward the end of her career. For a kid who grew up with Comets posters on her wall, this was monumental.

“When you work in sports, you don’t want to act so excited. You have to kind of downplay it. I never was like, ‘Can I get a photo with you?’ I just never felt that was professional.”

It took her marketing manager dragging her over on media day during photo shoots to break her composure.

“She was like, ‘Go, go take a photo with Tina.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no, it’s okay.’ She’s like, ‘No, go get your photo!’”

That photo remains Heather’s only professional picture from all her media days, a cherished memory of a “kind and great human.”

Decades later, the universe would laugh: she went from having Sheryl Swoopes’ shoes on her feet as a teenager to Swoopes wearing her upcycled tie courtside.

“Tina and now Sheryl, making her ties... It’s a full-circle moment that feels just so crazy.”

Heather’s creative awakening wasn’t just sparked by a career shift; it was deeply intertwined with a profound personal evolution. About four years ago, following a divorce, Heather came out.

“I had a few different things happen where I just really leaned in and did a lot of inner work. It’s a crazy thing when you really step into who you are and lean into all of that. It’s like, oh, this is how it was supposed to be.”

As her internal world aligned, her outward self-expression shifted, too.

“Style and things evolved with that. It is constantly evolving.”

For both of us, discovering our identities later in life brought a deep appreciation for the visible representation in women’s sports. While nobody owes the public their personal life, there is a quiet magic in seeing icons live out loud. It creates a blueprint.

For Heather, that blueprint was Sue Bird.

Years after her front-office days, at a Phoenix All-Star weekend event, Heather stood in line at a wine activation just to have a moment of raw, human connection with her former point guard.

“I said something to her. I was like, ‘I just came out, and you inspire me. When you see it in athletes and people you look up to living in their truth, it makes it feel…not easy, but a little bit easier to do the same.”

That deep reverence made Sue Bird’s retirement in 2022 a heavy emotional event. Heather was in the arena for that final, heartbreaking playoff loss to the Las Vegas Aces.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever recovered from Sue retiring. My heart’s always been a little bit broken since then. We were playing the Aces, and we were so close. I was like, let’s just give her one more championship. But it was still beautiful to celebrate her, to give her her flowers. And now she has a statue. She is just so beloved.”

As the WNBA undergoes expansions and relocation, the conversation naturally turns to changing allegiances. When I picked a WNBA team, I chose the Sparks; they’ve been a steady team, and I had California ties even before I was living here, and there was no team in Canada, let alone Toronto… But now my beloved Toronto has the Tempo, and my allegiance… well, it’s been split. With a team slated to return to Houston, Heather’s original roots are calling.

“Seattle, I love you, but the Comets were my first love. They deserve to have their team back.”

Though much like me, I don’t think Heather will ever fully abandon Seattle now. Good thing fashion is malleable, and we can choose to rock both teams’ colors. As a great meme once said, why not both?

When pressed to name her personal G.O.A.T.s, the sheer volume of talent in the league gave her pause.

“My top three are probably Sheryl Swoopes and Sue... I actually don’t even want to say, because I can’t even decide! There are so many incredible, legendary players. We were very blessed to watch these players who are retired now play the game, and now, we continue to be blessed to watch A’ja and Paige. I’m tapping out. We are just blessed to watch them.”

And much like there is so much talent to watch on the court, what makes W Tie’s corner of the sports fashion world so vibrant is that Heather isn’t creating in a vacuum. The women’s sports merchandising landscape is being forged by a tight-knit community of creators who champion each other’s success.

Two key names Heather names are:
* Monarch Commerce: A progressive force doing incredibly thoughtful, curated merchandise and marketing for teams like the Atlanta Dream. “What they are doing is really cool and forward-looking. They work to find brands and artists who create really thoughtful, curated assortments.”
* Lift and Legacy: A queer-owned brand founded by former basketball players, Ande and Shaylee, specializing in ultra-premium embroidered hats.

While talking, I pulled up Lift and Legacy’s website. “Very, very cool embroidered hats,” I noted.

“Yeah, they’re really nice, quality-wise. They’re friends of mine, but we’ve been on this journey together. Well, we met through our journeys of creating for women’s sports. They make hats, and they’re some of the best quality. They’re not licensed yet with the league, but I believe they work with the WNBPA. They just did an exclusive Pride drop for the Seattle Storm; it was a special hat just for the Pride game. They’re also queer, too, so that’s another, yeah...”

Heather’s desire to speak about other creators and spotlight their work is the stuff I can’t get enough of. I love people who are passionate about their work. But the folks who are passionate about others show me that you just want there to be amazing stuff out there. And with all these creatives putting out amazing and interesting stuff, it also makes the league and its fans step up their game-day fits. You can still rock your favorite player’s jersey, but there are other options out there.

Showing off one such option, Heather reached behind her toward a large box, pulling out a freshly minted design for the Los Angeles Sparks, who are celebrating their 30th anniversary. It’s stunning. A tactile piece of art featuring a lush palm pattern running down the front, and the design carries over onto the back. And having looked at it on the website, the digital image doesn’t do the physical tie justice. It looks so much better when you can see some movement.

“I did just send one to Erica Wheeler, actually.”

Wheeler is known for her high-energy play, and her sharp tunnel fits. Her stylist was immediately on board with the tie.

“‘Oh my gosh, Erica’s gonna know where these came from, we’re gonna tag you, and show love... I can’t wait to curate her outfit with these ties.’”

Next, she holds up the new designs for the Golden State Valkyries. One is a clean, classic cut with subtle hints of branding. The other is a gorgeous, two-tone, with the Valkyries purple getting a nice pop.

The expansion franchises are certainly leaning into the power of a distinct aesthetic. Between the Valkyries and the Tempo, expansion teams are commanding the merchandise conversation. We find ourselves lamenting how hard it is to get our hands on the best pieces.

I bring up how the Tempo should sell us their shorts. Not their rebel shorts, which they’ve done, but their coveted Bordeaux colorway.

“Oh, yeah. Those would be so fire. And those would look so good. I’m really loving this look right now with, like, athletic little Umbro shorts or basketball shorts that are a little shorter, a button-up, a tie, and loafers. I just think that look is so nice.”

But alas. The Tempo refuses to take my money and make those shorts. And our conversation quickly shifted to the philosophy of the tie itself. For decades, the tie was a symbol of corporate conformity, a mandatory piece of uniform. But in the hands of women, non-binary, and queer communities, it’s become a tool for self-expression.

I told Heather about my own recent outfit for a bar mitzvah: a purple paisley thrifted tie paired with a green tie-dye shirt and blue suspenders. When I went thrifting for the event, I was looking for something very specific to match my aesthetic. I got lucky and found two: the paisley one and a stripey one.

“Ugh, that’s always the best feeling! Do you go for a certain material when you’re thrifting?”

Silk. Obviously.

“We know what to look for when you’re looking for a good tie.”

Yet, as “tie people,” we agree there’s always a place for compromise when the vision demands it. If you need to construct a highly specific fit on a tight timeline, polyester or mixed-material ties work perfectly for a temporary look. But for a “forever tie,” silk is the gold standard. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from grabbing thrift store gold mines.

“Sometimes you find ones where you’re like, ‘Ooh, it’s a Christian Dior, it’s like $5.’ Sure, I don’t need this one, but I’m gonna buy it because why would I not?”

The magic of W Tie lies heavily in its origin story, which is deeply rooted in community and sustainability. Heather’s first drop consisted entirely of one-of-one upcycled ties.

Her greatest collaborator in those early days? Her 95-year-old neighbor, Bob.

Having spent a lifetime wearing beautiful Nordstrom ties to work, Bob no longer had a use for them, but he loved Heather’s vision. He didn’t just donate his pristine collection to her; he was the one who actually taught her how to tie them.

The cosmic payoff of that neighborly bond came spectacularly:

“The one Sheryl Swoopes wore the first time she wore one, Courtside at the Aces game, that was one of my 95-year-old neighbor’s ties he donated. So, that’s what I upcycled hers with.”

Unfortunately, to meet demands, upcycling and thrifting aren’t something she’s able to do at this time, but she hopes she might be able to do them again in the future. Giving those vintage patterns a second life by blending them with the modern WNBA aesthetic is a labor-intensive process. She last did it when the Seattle Storm ordered a batch of vintage upcycled ties for a local pop-up. Heather embarked on a massive treasure hunt.

She spent days thrifting across Washington State, driving a two-hour corridor from Bellingham to South Seattle, hunting for a specific color palette of greens, blues, yellow hints, grays, and blacks to match the iconic Storm brand.

“Finding neutrals is a whole thing on its own because when you’re thrifting, it’s hard to find any neutral type of tie.”

Once found, every single tie had to be meticulously cleaned, prepared, and sent off for custom embroidery. She showed me her own Storm tie, one that perhaps had a little more character than the ones she thrifted on this venture, one that was paisley. Love a paisley.

“I personally think women rock ties way better. They just rock it better to me... It’s so basic when men wear them.”

I had to agree. Guys, for the most part, aren’t trying to be playful. They take a tie too seriously. It is basically a straitjacket. Whereas, with women, it’s an accessory and a statement.

For Heather, having fun with it means wearing ties with casual fits, draping them over t-shirts, or taking inspiration from her friend TJ, who wears her ties open and threaded through her belt loops. It’s an effortless, simple elevation.

“Every outfit you put on with one, it just elevates it so much.”

To step beyond the standard tie, however, requires an entirely different level of swagger. Particularly, bolo ties and bow ties, we agreed on. Most people feel silly in a bow tie. My own bow tie collection, mostly vintage Brooks Brothers, was born during my days doing background work on Glee. We had a whole little nerd posse, and we’d rotate who wore a bow tie. We all basically wanted to be mini-Blaines, and we actually learned how to tie them. None of us was wearing the pre-tied ones.

That barrier to entry is exactly what keeps many people away from the style.

“I have people reach out, and they’re like, ‘Heather, I got one of your ties, but I don’t know how to tie it. Can you tell me how?’ I literally have a video of my neighbor tying it. I’m like, ‘Here you go, here’s my neighbor Bob, and you can learn how to tie a tie in under a minute.’”

As for the knot itself? Heather admits she is still aiming to master the classic Windsor knot, sticking mostly to a simple knot for now. She tells me about a friend who attended the Women’s Sports Summit in Las Vegas the previous year, one of the first to receive a W Tie, whose husband had to teach her how to tie a Windsor knot.

Thanks to a partnership with Round21 and the belief of its founder, Jasmine Maietta, Heather was able to design and launch officially licensed WNBA ties for W Tie. But W Tie is far more than an apparel brand; it is a living archive of community, history, and radical self-expression. By transforming Bob’s classic Nordstrom silks into courtside statements for icons like Sheryl Swoopes, Heather Saldivar is doing what the queer sports community has always done best: taking something rigid, rewriting its rules, and carrying it forward with love.

As the WNBA’s fashion landscape continues to explode alongside its roster of teams, the tie is no longer a corporate straitjacket. In the hands of creators like Heather, it has become a canvas of joy, a vibrant, upcycled testament to what happens when you finally stop trying to “play it cool” and wholeheartedly suit up as yourself.

Check Out W Tie Here!

By Cara-Lynn Branch

To be an athlete is to be a contradiction. You are otherworldly because psychologically and physically, you live as multiple people at once. How do you explain that to those who don’t willingly break their bodies down, shave a couple of years off their lives, and generally choose strenuous activity just because they can?

The word elemental is often overused in the context of athletics because it reduces an athlete to simpler, more relatable terms. In the dictionary, it is synonymous with words such as fundamental. As if waking up every morning at the crack of dawn, logging countless miles and reps throughout the day, and masking serious injuries with KT tape and ice baths is simple. We’re all just doing it, am I right?

I’d like to challenge all of us, myself included, on this purist definition of the word. Elemental could also mean something majestic and epic. On paper, its several definitions should never fit together. And yet, it exists.

I’ve known of Kendall Ellis for a long time, slightly as a matter of convenience. She is just three years older than me and went to USC, and from my vantage point as a young Californian athlete, she was always… just there. I both know of her and don’t know her at all.

Today, she meets me, wrapped in her duvet covers, in bed. Yet, she carries herself with an unspoken aura, the kind of confidence that only a seasoned professional athlete with multiple awards and records, two Olympic teams, and two Olympic medals could have. At 30, Ellis not only knows who she is but doesn’t seem to care if the world does, too.

Until this moment, I believed that she was from California, a mistake that, apparently, I am not the first to make. Her story begins far away from USC’s Felix Field and Loker Stadium, in Pembroke Pines, Florida.

“I think a lot of times, people have a stereotypical perception of Florida itself. They think Northern Florida is more country, redneck, a bit. And then South Florida, they think it is Broward County and Dade County. And I’m told a lot that, ‘You don’t seem like you’re from Florida or you don’t have an accent,’ because they’re automatically thinking of Miami.”

Thank God I didn’t mention my usual Floridian small-talk trifecta of Pitbull, Inter Miami CF, and alligators.

“And I’m not from Miami. I’m from Pembroke Pines, which is very much suburban, white picket fence, pool in the backyard.”

That perfectly foreshadowed Ellis’s future career in a sport where discipline and repetition are the only true pillars in your control. But back then, the day-to-day looked like one thing: Publix.

“It’s the pub subs, it’s the chicken wings, it’s the cake. Growing up, you always had a birthday cake from Publix. They always had a buy-one, get-one sale. If you didn’t know what to get for dinner, go and get a box of chicken from Publix with a lemonade, a sweet tea, the bread, and you’re good.”

This might be the perfect time for me to clear up one grave misconception about running: that athletes eat from a very meticulous, highly nutritious meal plan. Sugar is sugar. And that is fuel. So, Skittles are to an apple as sweet tea is to protein shakes. Consider that the next time you’re serious about buying that expensive pack of race gels.

The athlete’s origin story has great mythology associated with it. It’s always told with a dramatic flourish, either following the bootstrap or nepotism narrative. There’s a lot of pain and suffering and attaining glory. Everything is spoken about in terms of a Rocky-esque training montage. Usually, there’s talk of a two-year-old prodigy, while every other fellow toddler is still trying to walk. But what if this tabula rasa thing is complete crap, and actually, athletes don’t become who they are just because of instinct? Sometimes, it’s about how the situation presents.

Ellis was naturally fast as a kid, but even something as mundane as her first set of spikes was already chosen for her.

“They were boy spikes. They were hand-me-downs from a friend. And he was an 800m and a 400m runner. So I was wearing mid-distance spikes for a large portion of my career until I got older. Then somebody pointed out, ‘She’s a sprinter. She should be in sprint spikes.’”

When I ask her about the color, she closes her eyes as if she’s trying to conjure them in front of us.

“They were red and gray. I don’t know the brand. It was either Asics or Brooks.”

The spirit of that sentiment has continued into adulthood and the senior level of professional track and field. Where other athletes are quick to put their spikes on a Louboutin heel-esque pedestal, Ellis couldn’t be less bothered.

“I am uniquely not picky about my spikes. And maybe that’s because I grew up finding spikes at Marshalls and being excited. I think if you gave me a brand new pair of shoes tomorrow and said, ‘Okay, go race in these,’ I’d do it.”

When something as innocuous as footwear becomes larger than life, it becomes part of a pattern of giving credit for effort to everything but effort itself. Talent, shoes, weather, tracks. In some ways, talent, as a concept, is erasure. Of course, she won. She’s talented after all! Or my personal favorite: Of course, she won! It’s in her DNA!

“I was running 5Ks over the summer, and my parents supported me because they were like, ‘Well, she runs. So that’s what she does.’ Other people were getting private personal training and working on their starts. That wasn’t me growing up.”

Sometimes, talent is discovered. And sometimes, it’s built. I’m not quite sure where Ellis lies on that spectrum. Did the sheer fact that her parents supported her early running aspirations constitute a form of discovery? Did Ellis build an athletic version of self despite a lack of resources or because of it? Neither answer points toward the existence of a sole innate talent.

What about instinct? Is it taught, is it learned, or is it… just there? The word intuition is one of the buzziest terms, dating back to the 2010s Tumblr era. But in a sport like track and field, there’s no such thing as spontaneity. Stadiums might see athletes who respond to evolving situations almost immediately. The thing is, instinct isn’t something that magically occurs to them in the moment. It’s been trained, practiced, and repeated until it becomes second nature.

“I can pinpoint my coach, Quincy Watts’ voice quite easily. Quincy Watts. And I know where he’s going to be. He’ll be at the 200. So I expect to hear him tell me something, whether it’s ‘All right, you’re in a good position, or pick it up a little bit.’ I can hear his voice in a crowd quite easily.”

I’d wager that even if Coach Watts’ voice weren’t a distinct baritone register, she’d still be able to spot him. That’s what years of training under the same coach, with the same program, and in the same environment do. It hones intuition. Ellis’ next move on the track is elemental to her because it’s been practiced that way.

My mother, a former sprinter, once told me that the 400m was the most paradoxical event. It’s equal parts speed and endurance, strategy and spontaneity. To those watching from the stands, it looks like an all-out sprint for an entire lap. But to those on the track, it’s much more elaborate. If it weren’t, then everybody would die somewhere between the start and the first turn.

“For the most part, everyone’s going to get out hard to 45m. You’re going to push out of the curve. If you want to blow out the first 200m, go for it; you’re going to die. But most people at this [advanced] level have a point where they’re going to settle into a rhythm. Most people do the same push into the curve, push out of a curve. The difference is not in speed, but in who has speed endurance. Who’s the least tired? Who still has more to give. Who has the strongest kick?”

In distance events, everything comes down to a sprint. My coach’s only warning to me before every race was not to get out-kicked at the end. We belonged to the endurance events, so the greatest differentiator was having a sprinter’s quick twitch. But in Ellis’ world, sprint is restraint. And that restraint is based on two things: a race plan that maps out where and when the athlete should hit top speed, and the conviction that they’ll keep it. That’s why she’s never able to recount the details of her race after she crosses the finish line. The 400m is, by far, one of the most calculated pursuits in the sport. It’s similar to Formula 1; an innately fast car can only get you so far.

“After a race, I’ll remember something random about the race. Sometimes it’s like ‘my nails are chipped’. Or my uniform shifted a certain way, or the bib number was flapping. I never remember the actual race.”

In a sport that hosts competitions across a multitude of climates and countries and decides its victors solely based on a few seconds or minutes of performance, few things are predictable. And almost none are in the athlete’s control. That’s why we hold onto the things that feel familiar, even if they aren’t ideal.
“I go into every race filled with anxiety. That’s the norm. I know that I’m going into a stressful situation.”

Ellis’s laugh sounds like a mix of acceptance and exhaustion. It’s the kind of emotion you hear from somebody at the most senior stage of sport; these are the ruminations of the twilight years.

“I’m so curious what that sensation will be like when I don’t have my Saturdays filled with a sort of dread of what’s to come and my stomach in knots. I don’t know what I’d do. That will just feel so odd to me.”

I ask her the most quintessential question, but I decide to frame it within a different context. It’s not: What has been the most memorable race of your career? It’s: Have you ever shown up for a race without anxiety as your primary source of fuel? I fully expect her to tell me about her youth in AAU; she doesn’t.

“The 2024 US Olympic Trials [in Eugene, Oregon]. I remember before the race, I was like, ‘Well, I already PR’d, God. So if I get nothing else from this entire meet, I’m satisfied.’ I wanted to make the team. I wanted to go to the Olympics, but I had run the fastest I’ve ever run in my life. And I PR’d for the first time in five years. So I was like, ‘Is there anything after this? Is there a cherry on top of the cake?’ And so I went into that race so free and excited to see what I would do.”

It’s fascinating because the conditions were exactly what they would have been in 2021. The anxiety was still palpable, the athletes were still out for blood, and Ellis still had something to prove. But the fundamental difference was that experience kicked in and told her that, in the end, all that mattered was what she could control. It’s a practiced, learned stoicism. If I spoke to 20-year-old Ellis, there’s a chance that clarity would not be present.

Her 20-year-old self would also have been unaware of how professional sports are akin to reality TV; they’re both scripted. Of late, I’ve been hearing the word meritocracy thrown around, particularly in run club circles. There is this idea that the sport involves lacing up some shoes and running out the front door. And maybe it is to a certain extent. But there are obvious limitations that come with turning a passion into a profession. Once money is on the table, all bets are off. George Carlin once said, “It’s called the American Dream ‘cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”

“You have some agents that are liked and that are disliked. You have some directors who really have a good relationship with that agent or that shoe brand, and they want that athlete in.”

And then there’s the kind of revelation that would only occur to you if you were a professional track athlete. That is to say, if you were meant to know.

“If you’re kind of within the top five or top 10 [in Ellis’s event], there’s a little more fluctuation of ‘Well, we’ll take this 50 point, something runner because she is European versus the 50.0 runner, because there’s not a huge distinction between them, but she has the European crowd, and she has these eyes on her.”

As spectators and fans, we don’t see the fastest people in the world compete against each other; we see the fastest people who were chosen to compete against each other. That might seem like taking an ax to an iron gate, but the reality is that even the most objectively measured result, crossing the finish line first, is a product of artificial construction. And that’s a difficult pill to swallow for athletes in particular. We’re raised and trained to believe that as long as we show up on race day and run to the best of our abilities, we can make it onto a podium or onto a team. But what if you couldn’t even make it to race day? What if the buck stopped at elemental talent and started at fame, celebrity, and followers?

It’s one of the many revelations that Ellis reflects on with each passing year. When she was a youth competing in AAU, a teenager in Pembroke Pines, and a collegiate superstar at USC, the only consideration that mattered was being the best athlete that she could be. Back then, the definition of the word athlete meant performance on the track, speed, endurance, and strength. Nowadays, it’s still about endurance, surviving both injuries and the rapid disappearance of systems and environments that she always thought she’d have. And that includes teammates.

“There was me, Mike [Team USA Olympian Michael Norman], and Rai [Team USA Olympian Rai Benjamin]. We went pro together in the same year. We called ourselves ‘OG3.’ We trained together from 2018 to 2024. And so that’s six, seven years of going to practice together every single day. We went through COVID together. We have seen each other at our very best and at our very worst. Michael moved to Texas and trains there, and Rai now trains at UCLA. We thought we would finish our careers together. We’re still very good friends. We still talk and stuff, but it’s such a different experience than being side-by-side every single day. That makes me so sad. I thought that we would be together until I retired first.”

I inadvertently find myself caught off guard, both by a wave of emotion from Ellis and from within myself. We’re told it’s the top 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% that makes it to the professional stage. So, of course, it makes sense that with each threshold crossed, there are fewer people alongside you. On paper, track is an individual sport. It’s you, the finish line, and whatever higher power you believe in. Rarely do we consider the ecosystem around the athlete. The coaches, the training partners, and the track itself. These are the only consistent elements in the sport. The most unshakable element that Ellis currently faces is time itself. For someone who has always been at odds with it and attempted to both expand and shrink it based on whether she was racing or training, there’s now a looming sense of finality in the air. In 2028, she will be 32. She speaks out loud an unspoken truth.

“I won’t be in the sport for longer than five years. And even that’s stretching it. 2028 will likely be my last Olympics.”

We sit in an awkward silence for a moment. I’m shocked about the prospect that an elite athlete, one of the biggest names in our sport, just told me that retirement is something in the near future. And she is shocked both by my very visible reaction and the fact that she said it out loud to someone other than her training circle.

“That used to really excite me in the early years of my career. I couldn’t wait to be done and go do things that I’m interested in. And now I’m like, ‘I need more time. There are still things I want to accomplish!’”

Maybe that’s the most elemental aspect about Kendall Ellis, both the athlete and person. Her talent, speed, training environment, philosophy, and even her concept of time have all been cultivated. In art, creativity often coincides with constraint. In athletics, talent collides with time. They are extremely contradictory, and yet, they shape each other. One simply could not exist without the other.

It’s why, amidst her beret-wearing and baguette-loving teammates, she can unapologetically say:

“I loved Tokyo more. I hate Paris. I don’t like the city. I don’t like going there. I was so disappointed when they said that’s where the Olympics would be.”

The last time someone made such a definitive statement about a city was singer Reneé Rapp when she decided that Boston was her natural-born enemy. I get the sense that Ellis wouldn’t be particularly afraid of putting up a billboard expressing a similar sentiment.

It’s also why I’m unfazed by her bold declaration that her favorite track is the Ansin Sports Complex in Miramar, Florida, or that her personality is best described by her current favorites: the Hailey Bieber smoothie at Erewhon, Headlines by Drake, Kennedy Ryan novels, and hating on UCLA’s “super wide” track.

Elemental is a subjective term. What appears contradictory to the world, a collision of different passions, colors, and flavors, is intrinsic to Kendall Ellis and only to Kendall Ellis.

“When I’m done with the season, I’m watching YouTube, and I’m eating as many processed foods as I can!”

Visit our site to read a digital version of ATL MAG VOLUME 3 - SUMMER 2026 - KENDALL ELLIS: ELEMENTAL.

By Niki Iyer

Barbie would’ve killed for this hot pink toilet. It’s not every day that you see a toilet and think ooh, sunshine and rainbows. I mean, I guess you would if you went for a long run right after downing two cups of coffee, but you get my point. The toilet sits at the edge of a pool, and from its bright blue (probably excessively chlorinated) water, a single arm emerges, resting on the toilet seat. I’ve seen this image at least a half a dozen times in undergrad. Only, instead of an empty can of White Claw in the hand, there’s a… basketball.

Flagrant Magazine’s fourth issue once again subverted stereotypes in its typical 1970’s bold colors that meet 1990’s anti-fashion and counterculture aesthetic. But as I look through each issue, including my personal favorite, number six, I find myself hovering over the pink toilet, which represents both a reinvention of trash talk and street roots. It makes a stink.

I first came across Flagrant Mag during the pandemic because my eyeballs were literally drying up from being glued to yet another Love Island episode, and I needed a reprieve. Around this time, the options were the following: join a run club, bake sourdough, or scroll through TikTok. Who would’ve known that all of us being trapped at home would mark the renaissance of the written word? Enter the Substack boom.

When I was a kid, Complex and Sports Illustrated reigned supreme. And as I looked at my Kobe Bryant’s The Most Hated issue from Complex Mag’s… whatever the hell that issue number was… I considered how much potential had been left off the table. Don’t get me wrong, I still see the makers of those magazines as among the trailblazers who brought sports into the mainstream media conversation. But dare I ask, for all of the zine platforms out there building culture, where, or rather, what, is it? We keep hearing about culture and community, the putting together of so-called third spaces, to the extent that it feels like they’re being commodified and monetized. Yet, nobody has been able to define the word for me.

“‘Culture’ is something that people can come together around, and they understand the why and what makes it special. Culture is being co-opted by a lot of corporations because they have the money. At some point, it’s not going to be culture. It’s corporate.”

Ashtyn Butuso’s reputation has preceded her name in almost every conversation I’ve had about her. Even one of my mentors, whose taste aligns with the simple, 90s SportsCenter-style graphics, is high praise. I gathered that there’s no real way to describe what Butuso, founder and editor-in-chief of Flagrant Mag, has built with the media platform. Is it a community? Is it an ecosystem? Is it a media juggernaut? Is it a magazine? By the time we sit down for this conversation, what I do know is that it exemplifies her definition of the word culture.

Butuso greets me from her home office in New York City after a whirlwind Cannes Lions experience. Perhaps the only event that outmatched the chaos for marketing professionals and, apparently, Lando Norris, was the Knicks NBA Championship parade that took over her city a few weeks ago.

“Oh my god, I’m so excited to be here, to be in one place. I can’t even explain how excited I am to not be leaving for at least… I think I have to travel at the end of July, but I have got a couple of weeks.”

She’s been on the other side of the microphone, interviewing countless athletes and artists for OffBall, but I can’t imagine that she’s any more enthusiastic about recounting her experiences. We all love what we do, but burnout has an interesting way of squashing even the most passionate. Even her Persian cat (who currently sports a lion cut that makes him… hairless), Karl-Anthony Towns, gives a weary nod as he saunters by.

I decide to throw a softball, a question about a recent segment she did with WNBA standout Azzi Fudd. Fudd’s been asked the typical performance-centric and gossip-focused questions several times. Whether or not she thinks of it on the spot, Butuso redirects her, causing her to stop, smile, and reflect. She’s curious about her most intrusive thoughts during press interactions.

“Intrusive thoughts are so interesting to me, because sometimes they’re very dark, other times they’re so silly, and I’m just like, where do these come from? What is the psychological explanation for these?”

We joke about what we’d want to do during exhausting press junkets while admiring the level of professionalism with which the current crop of elite athletes carry themselves. They’re always on, but Butuso is intent on digging past the what to get to the why, or perhaps even the who. It’s the kind of thought process that allows her to rapidly shift between fun, hot-take moments and heavy emotional reflection. In that way, her mind seems like a perfect representation of her overstimulated, constantly moving, rapidly evolving environment; it’s one that she is both deeply embedded in and eager to distance herself from.

Nowhere has that crossroads been more visible than with the recent flurry of sports excitement in her city. Butuso’s husband went to Villanova, so both Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart have been household names since their collegiate days. She managed to grab a few pictures among all the crowds, some of which have appeared on OffBall’s newsletter and social media. But there’s one in particular that she keeps coming back to.

“It’s the image of fans standing up on light posts, street signs, and subway station overhangs. It’s not always true that taking a photo of a moment shows you exactly what it feels like, but those images really do. You can look at them and actually understand the magnitude of the moment, and how New York celebrated it.

We were talking to people at the parade, a couple of older men who were just like, ‘We’ve waited for this,’ in a way that you can’t even imagine. And you’ve just seen the struggle that Knicks fans have gone through. So having all of that context and seeing an image that’s just people, as far as the eye can see, climbing on s***, waiting for the floats to come down—it was such a beautiful, really emotional thing.”

Sparing no detail, she describes everything from the crowds to the specifics of how she and her husband managed to go the whole day without eating, having walked from Park Slope to the Manhattan Bridge, only to realize that they were getting sick. Not once does she mention anything remotely celebrity-related. It’s a striking counter to the flurry of posts I’ve seen from other sports media platforms that have all focused on Jalen Brunson’s wife, the celebrities who’ve suddenly become Knicks fans, or the tenth odd post of Timothée Chalamet (which touché, I know he’s a lifelong Knicks fan and not a bandwagon supporter, but still).

There’s something authentic in the way Butuso captures the feeling of sport, because she’s focused on the things she actually finds interesting. Where most media entrepreneurs build a platform for a pre-existing audience, it occurs to me that, other than the desire to create a community for women to be fans of sport, she has no clearly defined demographic. Her approach hasn’t been too dissimilar from the 2026 Knicks branding team in that way. An audience has come together out of a shared experience, a culture. In the Knicks case, that is professional basketball; in Butuso’s case, the culture is Flagrant Mag itself.

And that’s why it’s wrong to claim that Flagrant Mag’s story began in 2019. Twenty-five years ago, before she became a New York transplant, Butuso was raised in a household that avidly consumed football, soccer, and NASCAR. As she and her family were either always at a sporting event or glued to the TV, Butuso became exposed to basketball. Specifically, the Portland Trailblazers.

“My very first memory would probably be the 2000 Western Conference Finals. The Blazers were playing the Lakers, and my parents were going to the games and renting out spaces for all of us to watch. That was a very competitive series and ended in our heartbreak. I was like eight, I think. And that’s when I first learned about the gravity that sports have and that they can ruin people’s days.

You play along, and you feel those things as well, but you don’t really know what you’re playing along with. And I think that week always stuck with me. That team–Brian Grant, Damon Stoudamire, all those guys—was pretty formative when I learned, ‘Oh, there’s such emotion tied to this.’”

Instead of asking her about her most fond memory from any individual games of that season, I try my hand at an Ashtyn Butuso-style question and ask her… about the jerseys. It’s a topic borne out of a major retail crisis we’re seeing at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Everything is more expensive, but does the quality live up to the price point?

“If something feels a little bit uncool because it feels out of date, I sort of like that vibe. So I’m always going to be drawn to the old jerseys. Our championship team had jerseys with a very cool, rounded font and script. Those are probably our coolest.

I also think there’s an oversaturation of jerseys in the market. I don’t think we need city jerseys every single year. I think we should let things breathe and make them more exciting moments. But obviously, Adam Silver is not going to do that.”

I’m reminded of a previous conversation I had with someone in grassroots European football whose complaint about the current price of Manchester United kits led to a broader philosophical question of: who exactly is this for? Historically, sports have been a democratic, accessible institution to a certain degree. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone can afford VIP or box tickets. But becoming a sports fan hasn’t always had the craziest barrier to entry. Nowadays, to be a sports fan, you must buy the jersey, pay for exorbitantly-priced tickets, and score special event passes to experiences like F1’s annual showcase. For goodness sake, cricket in this country has become a luxury institution.

I take this opportunity to scroll through Flagrant Mag’s catalogue. Apart from their magazine, they also operate their own retail line, which includes shirts and their all too famous basketball shorts. The colors immediately stick out in their retro glory. Butuso is particularly excited about a muted pistachio color she believes is emblematic of “having a good time.” But what I’m left mulling over is that the logo itself has been stitched on. In recent times, how many clothing items have you purchased that use high-quality fabric, feature interesting colors, and have embroidered lettering? Sure, the general public can’t afford non-essential purchases any more than they could during the pandemic, but we’ve learned that for the right quality, many will click the buy now button. It’s not about whether the professional football jersey is too expensive; it’s about whether the quality merits the price point or if owning the item brings you into a culture, a shared experience with others. And often, the answer is no to both.

Which leads us to Butuso’s largest critique of storytelling and narrative building in sport. Throwing around the word culture without defining it for yourself. She and I both find agreement that the word does not carry any singular meaning. For instance, I perceive it, in the sports context, to mean everything that happens off the field, court, and track. But her criticism is less about the individual denotation and more about this monotonous aesthetic that has resulted from it. Everyone wants to do culture, which means that everyone looks… the same.

While she doesn’t quite remember the Kobe cover I reference, she does think about a similar one from that era that features both Shaq and Kobe and points out just how similar my description and hers are.

“I am less drawn to magazines—and any kind of storytelling—that feel a little contrived. I feel like these magazines that do culture and sport, or just culture, have sort of a homogenous feel about them in the way things are shot and colorized, the photography, and the way the photos are edited. Yes, we’re culture, but do we exist just to exist? Or are we actually telling stories that maybe mean something?”

Lately, it feels like everyone is going for a suave, sleek look. Or uses cooler tones and looks edgy. Not everything has to look like a BTS album cover, y’all. Now, in truth, some magazines sport a minimalistic aesthetic because it aligns with the kind of stories they tell and articles they publish. But there’s almost a social conditioning, a Pavlovian-style response taking place; the more we define culture as a singular aesthetic, the more that sports fans and audiences come to either accept that as the standard or leave because they don’t. Unfortunately, women are disproportionately affected by the latter.

Going back to her earlier definition of the term, Butuso rejects culture as an aesthetic or commodity. She doesn’t even see it as a community, at least not in the corporate sense of the word. It’s about deriving meaning out of an experience.

“To me, I think culture is almost a synonym for cool or taste. Take the Met Gala, for example. Now it’s about to be pretty uncool, I would say. I think people are starting to tire of it. But I think most people would still say, ‘Oh, that’s a cultural tent pole.’

Culture shouldn’t mean you’re repackaging Taylor Swift posts and calling it culture. It has to feel like it means something. Because if you break down what a culture actually is, it’s a shared collective of things that mean something to people. It’s so much more than just fashion, music, movies.”

Not to bring the Knicks back into this conversation (god forbid someone from home sees this piece because I hail from deep Warriors territory), but there’s something to be said about how a team based in New York City has managed to connect with little kids in Mumbai, India. They’re not wearing the Jalen Brunson jerseys as some kind of fashion statement, nor are they retweeting Timothée Chalamet memes because they watched Marty Supreme. As Butuso mentioned, the photographs she took at the parade, the jersey, and the meme evoke a feeling that connects with the people who come across them. Maybe it’s the way Brunson represents endurance and resilience. Or Chalamet’s general unseriousness, offering humor during a very dark time in the history of our world. Perhaps it’s even witnessing thousands of people coming together, including the likes of Ben Stiller and Mariska Hargitay, to rally for a team’s victory and the hope that collective support inspires. That is what disruption looks like.

I find myself questioning the meaning of the word flagrant, almost as much as I am curious about Butuso’s interpretation of the term culture.

“I’m so sick of the word unapologetically. I swear that’s just another word that we’re just saying. But being flagrant is causing a stink, or making a scene. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re putting toilets on the cover, or we’re including trans people in the magazine. We want to be a little bit controversial. We want to be standing up for the things that we believe in. And we want to be outwardly making certain people uncomfortable or mad in that way, because that’s the point of all of this.”

Butuso doesn’t inherently take any issue with the phrasing; her problem is the weird grandstanding, the intentional abstraction that a lot of sports media indulges in. We never quite know what they’re talking about, and that gives them the power to attain mass appeal; they’re for everyone because they’re not really for anyone. While I don’t ask her outright, I consider that Butuso knows that Flagrant Mag’s visual aesthetic, color palettes, or choice in themes are not going to be universally approved. But for the people that they’re for, they’re 100% for.
Flagrant Mag’s most recent issue, titled Married to the Game, on paper, is a celebration of the WNBA’s 30th season. Butuso mentions that “of course, we wanted to do some stuff with pearls,” as if I would know what that means.

“Everyone says ‘They’re married to the game.’ One of the articles in it, we talked to probably a dozen W players, technically they were Unrivaled players, and we asked them when they first fell in love with basketball, and how they keep the spark alive.”

It’s the second part of Butuso’s editorial vision that catches me off guard. The players are married to the game. But what about their wives?

“We’re not anti-WAG culture. There is a level of the game being the focus for these people. That is their relationship. Their relationship is basketball. The flagrant part is that while it’s not a groundbreaking thing to say that these women are not just housewives, it’s still something worth saying.”

The most obvious WAG that comes to my mind is a certain billionaire whose wedding is taking place this upcoming weekend. In true Ashtyn Butuso fashion, a single mention of Taylor Swift turns into a 10-minute tangent. Man, is it worth it. We trade theories about the nuptials. My theory is that the wedding has already taken place a la Tomdaya. Hers is that it’s actually taking place at MSG. We talk about the castle and the red carpet, the security and the guests, the crazy traffic, and the fact that Butuso cannot seem to catch a single breath even on her off-week from travel.

As she speaks about Taylor’s positioning in this conversation about, dare I say, WAG culture, we find ourselves back at her original point. Obviously, everyone knows that Taylor has a life outside of American football and the Kansas City Chiefs. And while that might not be groundbreaking to say, Butuso would most likely frame that as a relationship story between the spouse and the sport.

Most of Flagrant Mag’s direct competitors are still trying to find a seat at the table. In fact, they’re fighting over the same seat. That’s what it means to fit into a culture, rather than building one. It occurs to me that much of Butuso’s current job boils down to a single task: testing how far she can go, the furthest she can travel to before she falls over the edge. Visually, that has looked like rejecting the sleek, suave, clean aesthetic that’s expected of sports media.

“We’re very maximalist, and that is maybe like our main North star is just sort of being over the top about something, whether that’s color or number of objects in a shot or a ridiculous concept. Married to the Game’s shoot was ridiculous and funny. So I think we’re just over the top, and whatever that results in is what it is.

We definitely try not to play cool. There’s usually like a little joke, a visual joke, sort of woven throughout it, or sometimes things take on a more activist lens as well. But yeah, I’d say overall just maximalist, over-the-top, and sort of ridiculous.”

The last part describes Butuso’s personality to a T. Her storytelling style, from the anecdotes that she unleashes to her sense of humor, is all maximalist, over-the-top, and sort of ridiculous. But more importantly, you’re in it with her. When she cracks a joke about some insane piece of gossip she’s heard courtside, you’re right there with her. I guess that what a community, or perhaps even a culture, boils down to: people coming together to be in on something, whether that’s a joke, a shared piece of history, or a sports team. Flagrant Mag’s Discord community has a bit of a chicken-or-egg story in that regard. Truthfully, the origin story of its existence is something that Butuso is either not able to recall or simply doesn’t find memorable. The one thing she does note is that it has grown in an era where digital media has become a double-edged sword.

“In the past, people didn’t feel so empowered to degrade everyone else’s knowledge or everyone’s feelings about their team. The internet has created a space where everyone can do so, whereas it was previously a select few. Now, anyone can take that role on, and it’s made everything a darker, less fun place to be.

But it’s also a double—not a double-edged sword. It’s a catch-22. Not really. It’s something, I’m not sure.”

She laughs, struggling to figure out the correct idiom, proverb, or something. I’m not sure.

“Because obviously so much has been born of the internet as well. We have an entire Discord community. They all hang out in real life now because they’ve all met on the internet, and we met them on the internet, and it’s all very lovely. I just wish people would use that power for good.”

Butuso mentioned the word unapologetically as the trendiest marketing word of the hour, but I’m convinced that the crown goes to authenticity. In an attempt to universalize every experience, every team, and every athlete, we’ve distilled people’s unique eccentricities to something more commodified.

“Everybody needs to be in on this one thing, where maybe it’s not even interesting to them, and maybe it shouldn’t be. But now everybody has to have their hand in everything—especially sports. And it feels like that just makes it a little bit less special. I don’t think sports will ever lose its heart, but I do think corporations would love to try to make that happen.”

It’s an artful balance between preserving the spirit of sport and gatekeeping. I jokingly mention how everyone has become both a Knicks supporter and a BTS fan in the past year. But I understand Butuso’s point. Not everything has been designed for everyone; a lot of people glued to their screens for the World Cup wouldn’t bat an eye at a single NBA game. And why should they? The point is to foster dialogue and connection so people naturally find the spaces that they actually see themselves in. I might be the target audience for Flagrant Mag’s shorts and Discord community, but my neighbor will die on the hill that is the beige pilates princess aesthetic. The damn shorts were not made for her, so why should she buy them?

I’m intrigued by the kind of retro look that Butuso and her team have gone for, considering that I never quite get the sense that she dwells on nostalgia. I find myself corrected.

“I’m always longing for the past. I just feel like we have lost the plot so much. I think about 2016, and I’m like, ‘God, I miss her. What a year,’ you know? And it wasn’t even that long ago, but I’m always longing—to a detriment, to an unrealistic expectation. Like, I know that things weren’t as good as I’m imagining, but it’s just that s*** sucks so much these days.

And that’s obviously not the truth, but I find myself longing constantly. Longing for a flip phone. Longing for a world where we didn’t know where each other were all the time. Longing to not have the habitual need to pull out my phone for no reason and then be like, ‘Why did I just pull out my phone again? What’s going on?’ And I think that’s part of where Flagrant Mag was born. I think it’s that longing and the remembering that being analog and sitting down with something and reading it can feel that good.”

God, every trend feels so exhausting these days. It’s like we live in one never-ending overstimulation crisis. A black shirt with a tombstone that reads Here Lies Digital catches my eye on the website. It feels ironic considering that it exists on a… digital website. But perhaps that’s the point. However you feel about the current state of media, you can’t help but acknowledge how disruptive that statement is. It’s making a stink.

Karl-Anthony Towns walks into the frame again, not too dissimilar to how his namesake makes his appearances on the basketball court. Butuso already knows this is going to be a busy news cycle with the combination of America’s 250th anniversary, the TnT wedding, and the regular onslaught of matches happening throughout the summer. After the World Cup is some other… thing. Curaçao has been on her mind; the story of this incredibly small island’s debut on the world’s largest stage for football practically writes itself.

I tell her about a grandmother in Pondicherry in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India who owns a small clothing stall. Like so many people, she was selling jerseys of major football stars. Ronaldo. Beckham. Mbappé. And Lamine Yamal. She’d proudly hold them up to the camera and smile as she talked about them. Except Ronaldo became ‘Naruto,’ Beckham became ‘B Com,’ Mbappé became ‘Mappala’ (which translates to son-in-law in Tamil), and Yamal… well. He became ‘Lakshmi Ammal,’ a goddess. And thanks to her, not only has Lamine Yamal become venerated by the locals as some kind of divine figure, but her business has exploded thanks to the virality of the clips. Today, she still performs arthi for Yamal, a teenager from Spain, who probably wouldn’t have the slightest idea about what is going on with this grandma, her clothing stall, and the religious platform she has given him. In deep Messi territory, Lakshmi Ammal has become the new symbol of hope.

“That’s so hilarious! I’m on her Instagram. She has 83,000 followers.”

Butuso immediately makes note of it. It’s the kind of story that reminds her of what culture actually is. I guess that its gravity rests in just how unplanned and accidental it is. This grandma is getting more traction during the World Cup cycle than many prominent retail brands in the giant buildings across the street from her.

Making a stink is not about making a larger statement about the world or being intentionally provocative for the sake of being provocative. Disruption, in Flagrant Mag’s case, boils down to one simple thing: it’s simply what Butuso and her team actually like. And the culture is built on it. One pink toilet (and surviving the weekend madness of what is being called the American Royal Wedding) at a time.

“I don’t know if it’s the castle or the red carpet, but every new piece of information that comes out, it feels like we’re getting further away from something that could be real.”

By Niki Iyer

It’s June 23rd, which means that somewhere in Foxborough, Massachusetts, the English football team will face Ghana in an attempt to… honestly, I’m not quite sure how one salvages a reputation that they don’t have, but sure, let’s just say that they’re trying to prove themselves not to be the worst of the lot. Elsewhere in the Somerset Hills, a group of men will gather at the King William Inn (also known as The King Willie) solely to catch the match on one of the few television screens. It’s simply yet another great day for some food, family, and football, and watching a bunch of blokes having fun kicking a ball around.

Home to The King Willie, the small village of Tunley has been known for its rich coal-mining history dating back to the 19th century. While the industrial period may have come to a screeching halt, it has retained much of its original architecture, both the physical bath stones and the tight-knit community that formed around it. Tunley is somehow at the intersection of preserving cultural and historical legacy, while rapidly growing to include new faces, some of whom are from all the way across the pond.

Social media manager Denise Cook is not just another American expat who found herself trading her busy Texas lifestyle for the folksy Tunley community. She gave up one kind of football for another. Why? Truthfully, Cook’s unable to answer the question pointedly, but refers to someone who might be able to provide me with some insight into a local, grassroots football team, the slightly mythical village it belongs to, and the story that led it to become featured on Specsavers’ series Best Worst Team. Welcome to The Miners’ pitch.

Cook piqued my curiosity when she introduced me to Tunley AFC’s Chairman, Craig Doughty. The way she initially described him, he was a ruthless optimist, hilarious, funny, driven, but most importantly, extremely passionate about a sport that runs through his veins.

“Tunley is literally a telephone box, a pub, and our pitch is hidden away behind some houses that you wouldn’t even know it was there.”

I expect some kind of variation of Ted Lasso or, at the very least, the character that Rob Mac puts on in Welcome to Wrexham. And Doughty kind of delivers. You know, if Ted Lasso was at times sarcastic.

It’s an early start for me this morning as I sit down with Doughty, who, even after a long day, still has to attend an AGM meeting, erupts with a deep belly laugh that makes him seem much older than he actually is. You know how they say that some people smile with their eyes? Doughty laughs with his entire body.

“We’ve got the AGM tonight at half past seven, and then we’re all going out to watch England football.”

I inadvertently say out loud that it is a very masochistic pursuit.

“It’s to support the pub.”

That ends up being the foundation for our entire conversation around professional football, which currently sits at a $80 Billion valuation, and is almost only spoken about in terms of franchises and larger corporate bodies. Doughty and his team of miners (but really, most are plumbers, electricians, or some hybrid of the two) aren’t loyal to any particular organization other than Tunley AFC. And that’s because the latter’s not as much about football as it is about family. In a system now dominated by sports betting machinery, billionaire ownership structures, and everything but the game itself, it’s easy to root for Tunley AFC. They’re the underdogs.

As this World Cup tournament progresses, Doughty’s been musing on the level of superstardom that footballers like Ronaldo and Messi have attained.

“I think with football, we’ve been lucky to have Ronaldo and Messi at the same time. I think once they retire, people will realize how good they actually were. I think Ronaldo is close to getting a thousand goals in football. And I think when they retire, and then other people try and hit their targets, it’s never going to happen.”

Especially as social media and evolving youth-to-professional pipelines have paved the way for the emergence of a new kind of football star: the performer.

“Football was always about skillful players; you could do what you wanted on a pitch. Now, the players are coming up through at 16, 17, and have to be more of a machine. You have to fit a system. You can’t just take players on like they did. So I don’t think you’ll ever have those kinds of footballers again because it’s all about organization and keeping your position.”

Even if we did, it’s not like the fans can afford to support them. After my writer told me about the price of a small burger at the World Cup, I started to wonder just how normalized the exorbitant prices for merchandise, tickets, and travel are. At some point, one has to ask, “Who is football being designed for?”

“When I first started watching football with my dad, you could buy a Man United shirt for cheap. I think a Man United shirt now is a hundred pounds, 105 pounds. How can a normal family on a normal wage afford this? We’ve got a friend who went and watched Chelsea and Chelsea’s in the middle of London, so it’s expensive. For the train and tickets, I think he said it was about 400 pounds. When you look at Man City, they won the league, what, the last couple of years apart from this one, and they can’t even sell their stadium tickets. There was never a time when a champion would not fill their stadium.

You’re pricing people out of the market. I think there is going to be a bit of a boom one day where people just can’t afford it, and clubs are too greedy. And I think it helps grassroots because more people are enjoying it now. It feels old school.”

I notice how little Doughty longs for the so-called old school feeling. That is surely in part because Tunley has never left that era. I also get the sense he’s not a fan of talking about nostalgia like it’s the only reason someone should pay attention to any sport, let alone football. He’s focused on presenting Tunley AFC in 2026 and letting its history speak through the club’s presence in the community rather than some performative spiel.

Ted Lasso first arrives in Richmond, all the way from Kansas City, Missouri. It’s the typical fish-out-of-water story as a relentlessly optimistic, American football-loving Lasso sticks out like a sore thumb amidst a failing team of Englishmen, unwilling to accept him into their home. Doughty’s story couldn’t be any more different.

“I’m from a big footballing family. My dad always played, and he was really good. So even at a young, young age, and obviously times were different back then, Matt [Doughty’s brother] and I would go along and be ball boys for the local side. After, we’d go into the changing rooms and have a shower. We’d be with all the blokes, and we were six and eight, and we’d have a shower and go to the club after. Our dad would buy us a Coke and a packet of crisps.

Back in the day, dad would say, ‘You didn’t get married in the football season. You didn’t have holidays in the football season.’ At the time we were born, babies would be taken to football matches. Wherever dad was, we were there. Later, me brother played, I’ve played, and his kids play football now. Our family is just football.”

His father would later become a manager after playing in the 70s. And before him, Doughty’s grampy, also played. I wonder out loud whether that levies some kind of impossible expectation and pressure on Doughty, or if any of that is healthy.

“I don’t know what it would be like coming across and finding a life without football. I would just be bored. And that is probably very British, though, as well. But everything links back to just family. Every single person at our club is linked in some way. I think Matt and I, funny enough, are the only outsiders of Tunley that come into Tunley.”

He tells me about Yvonne Dix, Tunley AFC’s secretary, whose grandfather started the club in 1912. At 72, Dix has not only become central to the club’s history, but her family has steadily built its future legacy.

“She was born in the pub [referencing King William Inn], which is where we’ll all drink tonight. Her grandfather was a miner, and the miners started it back in the day. Then Yvonne’s mum became the president of the football club. She ran it for years and years. And then she joined the Somerset FA as the first lady to be a vice president of the Somerset. She got an MBE from the Queen [referencing Queen Elizabeth II] for her duties to football.”

Now Dix’s daughter has assumed treasurer responsibilities. In that way, the history of a club is actually the history of a family. It’s the kind of storyline that transforms football from a franchise into an actual culture.

In his namesake series, Ted Lasso forms bonds with the players, integrating himself into a shared history he has no connection to, through… banter. He allows himself to be the butt of several jokes, never taking anything too personally or too seriously. And even though “everybody knows everybody,” lightening the mood with banter is something that Doughty has found to be the cornerstone of the club’s ethos. Winning is something, but it is not everything.

“British banter is quite to the point. We are quite brutal with each other. But I’ll be like, ‘Duncan [in reference to Duncan Fear, the club’s past manager and current Vice President], you’re so lazy. You’re so old now. When are you actually going to finish the referees’ changing rooms?’ And then he’d turn around and be like, ‘You’re so fat, you could help me if you weren’t so fat.’ It’s stuff like that. You don’t take anything too personally in that regard, I suppose.

It’s a bit like brothers and sisters and mums and stuff. You know what you can say to people, and you know you can get away with stuff. Obviously, when Denise joined the club, everybody made her feel welcome. But no one bantered with her to start with, because it’s not right to just start attacking someone.”

It may be that I just finished the final season of Hacks, but lately, I’ve been considering the role that comedy plays in social interaction. If the horror genre represents society’s current fears, my theory is that the comedy genre represents our reactions to said fears. The Office and Parks and Rec were projects in direct response to economic instability, the monotony of corporate structures, and the mundaneness of ordinary life. It seems to me that the humor Doughty and his crew employ isn’t only a means to bring levity to a club that has nearly folded a couple of times in recent years, but to foster trust in a community that truly is trying to get by. The thought takes me back to something Doughty said at the top of the conversation regarding the superstardom in global football.

“These people are working all day with all their friends and mates, and then they’re coming to watch them play. They’re not like prima donnas on half a million that need water breaks every 20 minutes, and are training only two hours a day. These stars probably say that three games a week is too much. I can remember when we were younger, I played under-18s, Sunday football, and for the reserves and the first team at Radstock. And we had, I think, at one point, 12 games in 16 days at the end of the season. And that was as well as working like 50 hours a week.”

Looking past the Danny Rojas Fútbol Is Life!/ vibes, I get what Doughty is implying. When you strip back all the glitz and glamor, all that is really needed for the game is a pitch and a couple of people, dedicated and excited enough to play together. That’s the purist version of sport, one that so many corporate brands have been trying to artificially construct through brand campaigns in this FIFA World Cup cycle.

Add to this the fact that Tunley AFC is run on volunteers, and you can see why humor has to become the backbone of every conversation. In fact, all of the players have to pay to compete on the team.

“You don’t want to have serious conversations with people too much, because all of us are volunteers. All of us are doing it in our own free time. So how can you tell someone that they need to get something done now when they’re doing it in their own free time? Some of the stuff they supply themselves, like Duncan fitting toilets in the referee’s room. He’s decorating, he’s going to put a window in, and smash a wall out because he’s a builder. How can you go to him and say, ‘Right, you need to speed up with this, Duncan?’ I mean, you could say that in a funny way, and then the message gets across without anybody getting upset.”

And in acknowledging Duncan Fear’s incredible support of the team, Doughty can’t help but mention Duncan’s father, Peter Fear. Peter has been with the club for over 70 years. Duncan would go on to manage Tunley AFC for nearly 10 seasons. It was a particular challenge for him to take on despite the community’s passion for football. The game doesn’t exist without players.

“There were about 16 players who all joined at the same age. They stayed at Tunley all their life and did really well, and Tunley was a good side. And then when they were all in their forties, they all left at the same time. We had no other players coming in, so that’s when Duncan came in and managed the side to try and save us. He managed it for 10 years, and we had 10 years of just trying to survive the end of the season.

And I remember me and Yvonne, I reckon we had four meetings, and we were probably a week away from folding the club. Because Duncan was having to put his boots on at like 55. We were getting smashed.”

One of the team’s players, Tyler Davis, submitted the squad to Specsavers’ Best Worst Team series.

“When we spoke to the producers, and I gave them all our different stories, like about Yvonne and her mum, we won it easy. They were like, ‘You’ve got so many stories, and obviously you need major help. We’d love to show your story.’ Because of that, we’re inundated with players.

This season, we started a reserve side because we’ve got that many players. Next season, we’ve got an under-18 side starting as well. Our committee used to have six people to run things, and now it has 28 people. For a local football club, that’s massive.”

And that is how losing saved Tunley AFC. Even as he describes how this team was resurrected from the dead, I notice no wishful thinking here. Doughty’s not overly optimistic, nor does he romanticize his team’s struggle. And that’s what makes him a fascinating character in this universe. He’s not giving lofty motivational speeches. He clearly has no problem hitting below the belt (there was a certain political joke that I won’t repeat here). His favorite language is sarcasm. In that way, he truly is the worst Ted Lasso, but is somehow the best at embodying his values. You can literally hear the passion pouring out of him as he describes the feeling of being recognized for his connection to the team.

“What happens is people start watching the show, get connected to the club, get connected to the players, and the people behind the scenes who are a bit crazy. And then over the space of the series, they think they know the people at the club. They’ve never even been to the club.

Funny enough, me and Yvonne went into Bath, and we had to go into a Specsavers store. There’s me, just a local bumpkin, you know, who stays in Radstock, doesn’t leave the place. We were going through Bath, and everybody was going, ‘Oh look, it’s Tunley! Oh look, it’s Tunley!’ They have never been to Tunley, but they’ve obviously watched the series and got interested in it.”

And in every conversation he has, Doughty is more likely to share information about the actual people powering the club rather than the number of cups they’ve lifted and titles they’ve accrued. He loves that Peter extended the changing rooms nearly 45 years ago, as he was a builder. Or that Josh Ayers changed some of the lighting, as he is an electrician. Most recently, a carpenter on the team, Martin Lewis, started making new benches. Doughty isn’t kidding when he says that the history of this football team is the history of a family (or two).

I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s arrived with a notebook full of anecdotes that he’s meticulously researched from the annals of Tunley AFC’s history. And yet, I am because of the way he starts each sentence, I never quite know how it is going to end.

“In the 1930s, there was a Mrs. Eagles who used to watch Tunley. And if the attacking fight was going on, she would run out and trip [the opposing team] over with her umbrella. She was probably in her fifties.

There was also a George Sands. He was 16, and he played for Tunley. In 1919, so that was seven years after the club started, he was fined five shillings for riding his bike at half past 10 at night without lights on.”

I’m pleased to find that this faceless Englishman from the 1900s, whom I’d previously never heard of, made it to the game. That’s credit to how Doughty relays these anecdotes; there is a folklorish vibe that brings to life a culture and community of people that otherwise would seem a world apart from me. Everyone feels real, and the village itself seems lived in. It might seem nothing out of the ordinary to the people of Tunley, but to me, this feels like a forgotten world. I might not remember a thing about the points table or even what the Somerset County League is, but I sure as hell will never forget the story about the woman who tripped the opposition team with an umbrella just because she could.

“The team used to travel on a horse and carriage. Before one of the games, the tire broke, and they couldn’t get to the game. It took them about four hours or something. And I think the game didn’t happen in the end because the tire then fell off.”

There might not be horse and buggies anymore, but you can catch the odd tractor parked outside the pitch. The sight of which may have been one of the first times Tunley AFC social media manager Cook understood that she really wasn’t in Texas suburbia anymore.

Throughout his tales, Doughty’s laugh echoes. Of course, he wants his team to do well and the players to go out on the pitch with a winning mindset. But I notice something new on his face when he talks about the team’s history: pride. He’s proud of their heritage, past, and most importantly, how they’ve shown up even when they were losing.

“One of the things that people say about a player is that ‘He’s not trying.’ And I hate that saying. Because no one goes on a football pitch, pays five pounds to play, and doesn’t try.”

He reiterates that most of the men are knackered after long days of manual labor, but still find a way to pay to play the game that they all love. And it’s the perfect counter to the previous prima donna comment he made about professional football. He sees the people before the athletes, not because it’s the quirky, counter-culture thing to do, but because loyalty is more important than legacy. I consider, in this moment, how every anecdote has baked into it a commitment, a steadfast allegiance to the team and the people of Tunley itself. Ms. Eagles tripped the opposition team because she wanted Tunley AFC to win. George Sands paid his fine without protest so he could keep playing. The team only forfeited the game when their broken tire turned into a dangerous carriage breakdown. Even if this team were to earn a berth in the Premier League one day, I’d wager that its players and the community that supports it will not change a thing about their culture.

“We’ve got three new kits this year. We’re getting all our teams out in the same kit. We’ve always been green and white, but we’ve done things a bit differently this year. So in the green, they’ve got pickaxes for the miners. So that’s really nice. We run all our kit designs by the people that sponsor us, because we obviously need sponsors. A kit for us is £750. And for a grassroots football club, that is quite a cost.

And Peter Fear, who’s been with the club for 70 years, I think he’s coming up to 90 now, has sponsored the kit for 50 years. When Specsavers was coming in, one of the contract agreements was that they would sponsor a new kit. So I even went to the meeting with the top ones and said, ‘Right, I’ve got no problems with you sponsoring a kit. But Peter’s name has to be on it.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, we’re not sure if that’s allowed.’ And I was like, well, ‘We’re not having a new kit then.’”

It’s refreshing because he doesn’t try to cover up his language in faux politeness. This team was always helmed by its people. And it doesn’t matter if one of the club’s longtime supporters is ninety freaking years old; his name is going to be on that damn kit.

“I said, ‘Because you’re coming in and want a series with us for a season, and then you’ll leave. Peter’s been doing it for 50 years.’ There’s no way that Tunley, a family club that looks after its own, is going to push Peter to one side for one year. And the higher-ups knew that they weren’t going to win that battle against us. That’s why on the show, you’ve got Specsavers on the front. And then on the back, you’ve got ‘Peter Fear.’”

Since Best Worst Team first aired, Doughty has been in the same room as the Gary Nevilles, Harry Redknapps, and Luke Littlers of the world. The same men he grew up watching and idolizing are now sharing in the lore of Tunley village. It might seem like a pinch-me moment, but Doughty leans back in his chair with a kind of I always knew we’d make it energy. I consider that it might be because he never defined the it. As long as the pitch exists and the players keep coming out, Tunley AFC will live forever. Most professional football teams in higher leagues cannot say the same.

“During one of our committee meetings, we were talking about our plans and getting our changing rooms done, the dugouts done, stuff like that. And Ryan Edmunds, who is our goalkeeper, asked ‘Oh yeah, we could do with Dr. Pepper behind the bar. Right?’

We’re now talking about big thousand-pound jobs, you know, brand new showers and that. And his biggest problem at Tunley was that we didn’t have Dr. Pepper cans behind the bar. Imagine then, with all of us in there, we ripped him. Any chance we have, we’ve sort of gone, ‘Oh, well, if the only problem in the world is not having Dr. Pepper, we’re in a really good place.’”

They would end up presenting Edmunds with a Dr. Pepper jacket during one of the team’s banquet dinners.

For all the passion he has for the game, Craig Doughty is the best worst Ted Lasso. And why wouldn’t he be? Ted’s goal was to instill a positive spirit that would rejuvenate a team into winning. Doughty took a losing team, but instead of pushing them to win… simply pushed them to be more of themselves. If they lose, they will lose in true Tunley fashion, tractors and all. Perhaps that is what football, and to a larger extent, professional sport, is all about. Bantering, bickering, and all.

“Everything could be blown up tomorrow. But, you know, we’ve got Dr. Pepper behind the bar now.”

By Niki Iyer

I grew up in Toronto in a culture where everyone loved and ragged on the Leafs in equal measure, with most of us only having grandparents who could remember the last time the Leafs hoisted the cup. I was determined to be contrary, so I wasn’t going to like the Leafs or hockey… and yet, if there were a game of ball hockey on the street or the court at school (because yes, the playground at my school had a ball hockey court), I’d join in. Despite myself, I nurtured a love for the game, and years later, I find myself a fan.

Similarly, Ryan Chu-Tachikawa cannot recall when he got his love for hockey, as his earliest memories are going to Sharks games with his dad or watching him play at the rink. It feels like he was born into it.

“Some of my favorite childhood memories would be going to skate with my dad early in the morning on Sundays before his pickup game. I’d have 30 minutes out on the ice, and just being at the rink helped me fall in love with the game.”

Ryan, who is from Cupertino, California, would go on to play on the East Coast for years, building on his love of the game. Hockey allowed him to experience a different part of the US outside of his West Coast community. On the West Coast, he was never the token Asian player. On the East Coast, playing in the juniors, he felt like a foreigner in his own country. His experience is reflective of the sport presently at the higher levels, with the NHL currently having around 5% of players identifying as non-white. A lot of this comes down to access, but it also comes down to exposure. Regardless of the barriers to access (hockey is an expensive sport, and to make it to the higher levels requires a significant investment that’s harder to do in regions that don’t have outdoor public rinks), if kids are not being exposed to the sport when they are young, it’s unlikely they will fall in love with the sport.

That’s where Ryan comes in, in his role as Community, Hockey Development, and Events Supervisor for the Los Angeles Kings. And right now, that looks like championing a ball hockey initiative. I know, an ice hockey team promoting ball hockey, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense in Los Angeles, a city where access to ice is a luxury itself. Los Angeles isn’t like Toronto, where it often felt like winter and outdoor rinks lasted half the year, even when it didn’t. It’s much easier to grow the love of the game if the sport is easily accessible and can be played anywhere; that is something I can relate to, as it’s where my love bloomed even as I swore off the sport. I have a distinct memory of placing 2nd in a shootout competition in gym class, despite many of the boys being on hockey teams. It’s hard to feign indifference after moments like that.

When we think of hockey in North America, we’re thinking of ice hockey. In Canada, I know it’s because it’s part of the culture; in the US, is it because of movies like Miracle and The Mighty Ducks? I know I’m guilty of this thinking, but in many other countries, hockey means field hockey. So perhaps it’s time to expand our conception of hockey to include all kinds of hockey, including roller hockey and street or ball hockey.

“I think street hockey is still hockey. Roller hockey still counts. Those people, at the end of the day, are still Kings fans. Yes, I want to grow access to ice hockey, but for here in LA, it’s growing access to hockey period. So, we do that through ball hockey or street hockey.”

Growing the game this way is the best way to do it in a place like Los Angeles because to play ball hockey, you don’t need to know how to skate. You don’t even need to live near a rink. And once you eliminate the rink, you eliminate the cost of ice time. You also get rid of the cost of equipment. The cost of equipment for ice hockey is ridiculous, but for ball hockey, all you need is shoes you can run in and a stick.

“We’re able to give people a taste of what it’s like to be in a hockey game. And from there, if they want to continue their hockey journey, whether it’s staying in ball hockey or taking that step into ice hockey, we’re able to help them navigate that journey.”

But the first step is introducing them to hockey because the thing is, Los Angeles isn’t Toronto. So, when Ryan goes to schools and asks the kids if they’ve heard of the LA Kings, sometimes he won’t see any hands go up. Now, whether that’s because the kids are shy and just don’t want to raise their hand (it can be tough being the first one), chances are, if asked if they knew who the Dodgers are, hands would go flying up. It speaks to an unfamiliarity with the sport and the exact reason why these types of initiatives are important.

“We want kids to know what hockey is, and hopefully, they try it with us, and they fall in love with it, and from there, they become kind of fans of the game themselves.”

Ryan sees ball hockey like flag football; while there are many who probably still look at it as lesser than tackle football, it provides an opportunity for people to play the game who love the sport but perhaps don’t like the tackle aspect. And now flag football is debuting at the 2028 Olympics, giving it greater legitimacy. Flag football is growing through exposure, and it’s been rewarded with recognition. Kids now play games in parks as they do in Little League games. And that’s where the LA Kings Street Program comes in.

“We want kids to get exposed to that way, too. Like, we want there to be leagues in parks, in YMCAs, and in after-school programs. That way, they get exposed, and they’re like, “Oh, what is this?” And if they get signed up for it, that’s a new hockey player.”

Visibility is the name of the game. Because that’s how you get kids wanting to participate, and eventually, how it becomes part of the culture, like it was in my childhood. Kids can’t take part in a game they don’t see, but when it’s everywhere, it becomes hard to ignore, even if you’re determined not to like it. I would know, I now can be found watching many PWHL games and have attended more Kings games than I ever did Leafs ones.

Ryan believes ball hockey is more than just an introduction to the sport; it’s also one of the best ways to develop hockey skills away from the rink. Some of the best shooters I know spent countless hours firing pucks (or balls) at targets in driveways, schoolyards, and empty parking lots. Ball hockey provides an opportunity to build those skills without the expense of ice time.

“Ice time is so expensive. Getting on the ice isn’t easy, but one thing we do have is really good weather, so kids can go outside and play ball hockey or roller hockey all the time.”

For many kids, ball hockey may be the beginning of their hockey journey. And if that’s the case, they have another initiative that offers beginner hockey and a kit for $350. For others, it may be the destination. Ryan is equally enthusiastic about both outcomes.

“Some families don’t have that $350 to get into ice hockey, so we want ball hockey to grow into its own thing where kids can still stay involved and have fun.”

That distinction is important. Growing hockey doesn’t have to mean funneling everyone toward ice hockey. It can simply mean creating more opportunities for people to participate in whatever version of the sport works for them.

“If you want to play hockey, you should be able to play hockey. We don’t want things like money, gender, race, or where you live to be roadblocks.”

Part of Ryan’s job involves teaching coaches, like those at the YMCA, who’ll eventually teach the kids. After all, the Kings can’t be everywhere at once.

“We can’t be out there coaching every kid, so we coach the coaches.”

Because if instructors aren’t comfortable with the game themselves, it’s difficult to pass along enthusiasm for it.

“If the coaches don’t feel comfortable doing the skills themselves, we can’t really expect them to teach the kids and make them enjoy it either.”

Those workshops often begin with a lot of learning… and unlearning. Many participants have never held a hockey stick before. And some instinctively grip it like a broom. And this is hockey, not curling, another beloved pastime of Canadians, which I now wonder if it’s because of this reason; I’ll have to ask my mother.

“Everyone knows how to sweep, so when we hand them a stick, a lot of people hold it like a broomstick.”

Ryan laughs about what he calls the “broomstick method,” a habit instructors spend plenty of time trying to correct.

“I call it the broomstick method. We spend a lot of time trying to break people of that habit.”

Ironically, it’s usually less of an issue with kids. We joked that maybe it’s because they haven’t spent years sweeping floors, so when someone shows them how to hold a hockey stick, they simply accept it.

The coaches, like many participants, start a little hesitant. Hockey is unfamiliar. The equipment feels awkward. And nobody wants to look silly. Then the scrimmage starts.

“Once we get into the scrimmage, that competitive side just kicks in.”

And suddenly, nobody is thinking about whether they’re holding the stick correctly.

“They’re high-fiving each other after they score. It’s a really fun game, and once people get into it, they’re having a blast.”

That kind of enthusiasm is contagious. We’ve all had teachers, coaches, or instructors who clearly didn’t want to be there, and it’s difficult to care about something when the person teaching it doesn’t seem to care either. Passion works the opposite way. When someone genuinely loves what they’re doing, people around them tend to get swept up in it. And kids, especially, have a way of carrying that passion with them long after the organized program ends.

“Kids are super creative. Maybe they don’t have sticks; they’ll find broomsticks and play hockey.”

I remember doing something similar at recess. If we didn’t have sticks, we’d invent some hybrid version of hockey and soccer and play anyway. The details hardly mattered. We just wanted to play. That’s ultimately what Ryan is trying to create: opportunities for kids to discover hockey and make it their own.

“We just want to create access and make ball hockey so common around LA that kids are naturally running into it.”

Because growing a game begins with access. Any kind of access. And if Ryan succeeds, perhaps one day there will be kids in Los Angeles who grow up the way I did in Toronto, not necessarily loving hockey at first, maybe even insisting they don’t care about it at all, only to find themselves joining a game. After all, hockey has a funny way of finding people… and before you know it, you’re lacing up, grabbing your stick, and hitting whatever surface you can play on.

“I might be biased, but I think hockey is such a fun sport, and it’s for everybody, and anyone who wants to play should be able to.”

By Cara-Lynn Branch

Maybe it’s the fact that the third and final season of Euphoria just wrapped, but lately, I’ve been wondering if anybody feels anything anymore. Somewhere between political instability, social issues, and economic insecurity, have we all become nihilists? The previous generation was the risk-takers. We’re the risk-avoiders. And man, does that show.

Look, I’ll be the first one to say it. S*** is not looking good for most of us daily, so how on earth can we be expected to embrace uncertainty, even in something as intangible as art? Studios will not greenlight projects that don’t follow a predictable, formulaic model. Design agencies won’t commission the same genre-defying artists whom they lauded just five years ago. It’s a classic case of chicken-or-egg, and nobody knows what to solve first.

When a creative director friend introduces me to artist and designer Fu Le, I scan through the descriptors:

From Shanghai
Lives in Singapore
Used to do brand design for Nike.
Previously involved with World Table Tennis.

That’s a lot of ‘what’s,’ but where’s the ‘who’? There are perhaps only one or two other careers that so heavily require someone to put themselves, their emotions, values, and perspectives into their work. Creative design is one of them.

The first time Fu Le appears on my screen, dialing in from a small white room in Singapore, she’s got a massive smile plastered on her face. It’s early morning for her, so all I can think about is: what the hell does she possibly have to be so happy about? It’s ironic. Because I quickly learn that her name means happiness.

“When I was little, I hated this name. I didn’t like it at all. Because you can imagine that, for a lot of girls, their name is related to flowers, to beauty, and to art. It sounds so elegant.”

We immediately bond over this, considering that I was named after the titular character of La Femme Nikita and developed neither her version of femininity nor badassery. Also, I’m not blonde. Or white. I muse out loud that perhaps it was my father’s wishful thinking that one day I, the daughter of a nerdy guy who went to IIT, would grow up to be some kind of brave assassin. You know, without the killing part.

“I think in Chinese culture, a name means, ‘Oh, this is what your parents want you to be. But I’ve realized that ‘Fu Le’ actually contains my parents’ deepest love for me. What they want is for me just to be happy.”

Happiness, in itself, is an incredibly open-ended term with no real values ascribed to it. It entirely depends on the metrics you establish for yourself, even if society has its own arbitrary standards. Fu Le positions happiness as aspirational, yet has never desired to define it in concrete terms. Even if she can’t understand something, she wants to feel it. That is happiness.

For someone whose life has seen her globetrot from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and Utrecht, Netherlands, to Shanghai and now Singapore, her name serves as a kind of permission structure. She might not understand every cultural nuance or even language, but she knows good design when she sees it because it’s moved her in some way. Fu Le jokes about how that’s partly why she finds herself cheering for Messi and Argentina in this year’s FIFA World Cup. Her only cultural connection to both is that her son idolizes the legendary football player.

It’s the kind of accidental finding that harkens back to her childhood when Fu Le’s first discovery of the beauty of uncertainty and imperfection in art involved clay and dirt.

“Clay reminds me of soil. It’s something from nature. When you play with it, you build your connection with nature. And if you think about nature, nothing’s perfect. Nothing’s the same; everything is unique.”

While Fu Le doesn’t find herself playing with clay these days, her connection to nature remains intact. Some of her best ideas occur to her during hikes at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. The movement alone proves to be her most meditative state: she no longer thinks, she feels.

As she speaks about the mountains and small animals at Bukit Timah, I see her shoulders drop, and for the first time, she doesn’t nod enthusiastically in response to my questions. She simply … exists. Which is particularly staggering when I consider that at one point, this person was at the forefront of a major evolution in sports branding and design in China. We all saw the advertising and branding from the famed Nike Run Club era. Fu Le was one of the masterminds behind said campaigns. But the most interesting part of the story is not what she did. It’s why she left.

“I was at AKQA for over three years. I was very lucky. I joined the team supporting Nike and was promoted twice. And another very real opportunity at that stage was that we could work with AKQA’s US team directly, which was very unusual at that moment in China. So everyone felt like, ‘Oh, you guys did the most successful Nike event in China.’ Everyone felt like they were going to stay.

But I don’t know why, at that moment, I just felt like, ‘Huh, the project has become easier because I know the whole process. I know the workflow. I’ve lost the feeling of novelty.’ So then I decided to quit.”

At the time, a colossal shift in the tides was repositioning Adidas, the long-term king of the international market, into second place in China, as Nike rapidly expanded its digital footprint. Fu Le doesn’t deny that there potentially could’ve been a larger opportunity waiting had she stayed.

“But I feel like at the end of the day, you can’t fool yourself. If I feel like I’m just repeating, like I’ve lost my excitement, like there’s nothing I can bring, there’s nothing I can learn, I have to go.”

Make no mistake, she isn’t talking about ‘boredom’ in the most obvious sense. This is unbridled intuition.

“I think intuition comes from listening. That is the difference between kids and adults, right? We learn too much. We learn a lot. We have so many rules. We have so many things on our minds. A lot of people take a job based on salary, nice co-workers, and a boss who is not bad. I listen to my heart because it knows when it feels something wrong.”

In America, we’ve been taught that intuition is derived from the word instinct. You either have it or you don’t. Fu Le, on the other hand, considers it to be something practiced and observed. Part of me wants to push back on the idea of walking away from something because it doesn’t excite or motivate you. Truly, how practical is that when most people are working to simply put food on the table?

But I reconcile that with the fact that in the media industry, perhaps being an artist is an inherent privilege. And within those parameters and guardrails, when you get into the car, you have to floor it. Sometimes, the only answer is to just do it.

This is a particularly interesting time to be a Nike fan. It’s not the return-to-form story of New Balance, nor does it tread in the same lane as a young prodigy like Bandit. I imagine the feeling is akin to being an Arsenal or NY Knicks fan in the 2010s. Or a Warriors one in 2026. America’s pioneering sports retailer, founded in Oregon, no longer holds the throne in the kingdom it built. For the first time in the company’s history, not only do fewer people clamor over Nike products, but they simply no longer know what the company is. Just Do It was never meant to be just a brand slogan.

“Nike’s activities in China at that moment were all based on Just Do It as a company philosophy. For example, they started to build the running club. So we found the runners online, and then we helped them to gather together to run at night, especially for female users. It was all based on the idea that ‘anytime you want to do it, you do it.’”

I’m struggling to understand the issue for retailers like Nike. On paper, the conditions in the 2020s seem to be the same as they were nearly a decade ago. A group of people who connect primarily through digital settings. And post-pandemic, they’re all looking for third spaces, even if the ways they go about their searches are different. If anything, this current era in sports lifestyle and recreation should prove to be the easiest to capitalize on.

“Everything’s a part of a net. When users touch this net, they touch the brand. You never know from which part, or from which point. That’s why when we design, we don’t design a product. We design a system, and we design a net. If this net is strong enough, no matter from which point the user touches it, they’re going to love this brand.”

As global media has expanded its digital footprint, it has become simultaneously more democratized and less accessible. More options might be available, but that doesn’t necessarily result in more touchpoints. Especially not if every brand uses the same kind of net. Just take a look at the sports lifestyle and apparel market currently. Truthfully, I don’t think I can distinguish between the array of brands. Like the influencers they’ve tasked to represent them, they all look the same. There’s a larger focus on coming up with creative slogans than on designing products and platforms that exemplify the core philosophy.

“A company that wants to bring its core philosophy to the people should encourage them to live by that. But suddenly, they care more about the price of sneakers. You know it’s not right. The fans expect something different.”

Conversely, Fu Le mentions a brand she believes is still following the idea of ‘designing a net.’ And it has nothing to do with sports.

“So there is a bubble tea brand called Hey Tea. It’s so popular. Bubble tea is a huge thing in Asia, right? But this is the first brand to make bubble tea look high-end. I would say maybe not high-end like a luxury brand, but it’s not something cheap because previously, you thought bubble tea was like, ‘Ah, you just grab it from the [local] store.’ Hey Tea is the first brand to make bubble tea feel like coffee.”

Coffee sits at an extremely interesting crossroads. No matter the price or design, the experience around it is still categorized as functional and ritualistic. It’s a daily event that evokes a cozy aura around it, whether at a Blue Bottle Coffee price point or a Peet’s one. I’d reckon that a major reason for bubble tea’s explosion in international markets is the novelty of the beverage. As Fu Le mentions, of course, it’s in every store in China. But that’s not the case in the US. This then allows stores to reinvent the experience around it as they see fit. That’s the approach sports like cricket (a street sport in India, a luxury one in the US) and motorsport (a luxury sport abroad, and a more no-frills one in the US) have taken. And then there’s the interesting counterexample of yoga.

“With Lululemon, I think now people are thinking, ‘How is it going to go? In the first several years, it was about bringing yoga to a lot of people. But does it still keep the same mission?”

I think the collection of studio spaces, celebrity ambassadors, and activations at music festivals would beg to differ. I personally don’t think about yoga when I imagine brands like Lululemon and Alo. I associate them more closely with Erewhon, Pilates studios, and quiet luxury. Which makes sense because that’s the moment we’re currently living in. Pilates is a subculture. Fu Le’s previous question sticks with me. The moment always changes. In the 2020s, that change happened in a matter of days. What’s to say that yoga and Pilates will continue to occupy the same space in social conversation one or even five years from now? Today’s brands are built to excite, not to endure.

“A lot of brands die very fast. Michael Jordan is too special in that space. He didn’t just own a brand, and he is not just the GOAT; he changed the NBA. If you think back, actually, Jordan was a very stylish man. He had great taste. He showed that a basketball player could be so cool, so amazing, and so funny. He changed the image of a basketball player. That’s why the image of Jordan [brand] is based on him. That’s why the products and the activities are still strongly rooted in him. You rarely find this case in a lot of sports. If you look back in a few years, you’re going to feel how crazy the Jordan Brand was.”

Many of the kids sporting the Jordan brand today were born long after its namesake retired from the sport. The brand has endured through several generations, evolving to meet the tastes of each without compromising on core philosophies like Our Turn, You Can’t Ban Greatness, Be Legendary, and Too Easy. Is that what today’s brands are missing? I’m not sure the answer is in finding figures to anchor onto.

If the movie Air was even remotely accurate, we know that the Jordan brand was designed to become a movement. It was never about capturing MJ, the basketball legend at the height of his dominance; it was about positioning his grit and relentless quest for greatness as a philosophy that survives his time on the court.

For Fu Le, the recent athlete standouts have been because their larger brand harkens back to the Jordan approach.

“Ni Xia Lian is a table tennis player who was 61 years old when she represented China at the Paris Olympics. But her story is more than this. In her youth, she represented China at the Olympics. When she was in her early 30s, she married, and she moved to Europe. And then she started representing Luxembourg. Usually, that is huge in Asia, because then you’re changing your nationality.

You’re gonna receive a lot of hate and threats. But she’s different. Because for a lot of people, male or female, we feel that if at 60 you’re still on the Olympic team and doing something you love, it’s so inspiring. So, even the Chinese fans who watched the match cheered for her. They felt that she represents pure love.”

Fu Le laughs.

“I hope when I’m that age, I can still do something I love.”

Similarly, she speaks about swimmer Fu Yuanhui, whose team came in fourth in the relay at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The expectation was that she’d come out of the pool, exasperated and apologetic about her failure. Instead, she shocked both China and the world by walking up to the cameras with a huge smile plastered on her face.

“She smiled to the camera and said, ‘I tried my best, and I got fourth. Oh my God, I’m so lucky.’ It went viral, and people loved it because she showed that athletes can be human too.”

All three of her examples, Michael Jordan, Ni Xia Lian, and Fu Yuanhui, fall back on one core theme: they make people care about something greater than the sport. They make you feel something. As she watches the 2026 FIFA World Cup, her eyes glued to the Argentinian matches, she’s been particularly excited, not just about the retail and kit designs, but about how the brands have been constructed around certain teams.

“I’m not sure if you saw that all of the French players have different luxury bags. It’s not the design of their merchandise, but it’s the image of this team that I think is so cool. I don’t think they even pay the athletes to do it. But because the net has been designed so well, and the brand is so strong, they just do it naturally. The image just happens, and it is so French.”

The Jacquemus apparel was no different than anything they’ve sported in previous World Cup years. Certainly, they were no Haiti in that regard. And yet, their image, as Fu Le rightfully points out, was both exciting and satisfying because it evoked the meaning of the French National Soccer Team. Elegance, class, and quiet luxury. That’s what Les Bleus is supposed to make you feel.

We wrap for the day with Fu Le asking me about the recent upgrade to Across The Line’s logo. And I proudly tell her that it wasn’t me. Our Head of Brand, Evelyn Harding, was the brain behind it. Thank god for that. Because, regardless of what the logo makes you feel, it makes you feel something. Great designers aren’t crafting a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing image. They’re stirring emotion.

Fu Le’s name might mean ‘happiness.’ But she is on a quest to be emotionally alive.

“You need to make people feel something. It doesn’t matter if this feeling is anger, happiness, or sadness. If you’ve made the majority of people feel something, you’ve succeeded.”

By Niki Iyer

“I don’t speak dip****.” I may have never seen the series Yellowstone, but even I know who Beth Dutton is. Whether it be her hilarious one-liners, trademark reads (which are eclipsed only by the incredible work of Elektra Evangelista on Pose), or her general disdain for weaponized incompetence and laziness, Beth is audacious, calculated, and bold. What she is not is… fearless. Beth not only accepts that she fears things, but she also acknowledges them openly, and then… gets the job done despite them. Fear doesn’t paralyze her; it sharpens her instincts, guiding her much as a compass would. That’s what makes her terrifyingly real.

When I meet canoe-slalom star Ria Sribar, she’s dialing in from Slovenia, amidst a busy season of training and competing. The former collegiate athlete has done the unthinkable: she’s managed to graduate from UCLA on time despite almost everyone in her orbit betting against her. The hoodie and sweats do a decent job of masking her muscular 5’9’’ stature, but absolutely nothing can conceal the Beth Dutton energy rising through her. That and the fact that she simply cannot wait to watch Dutton Ranch when she finally gets a break from training.

“I think I gravitate towards Yellowstone because I really love powerful female characters. I’m obsessed with Beth. I start acting like her a lot. We’re fixers. We’re both going to fix the world.”

It’s ambitious thinking from a young athlete in her early twenties, but her audacity is a refreshing counter to the cliché of the polished female professional athlete the media loves to hold as a gold standard: while everyone still assesses, she reacts.

As we trace Sribar’s love for Yellowstone, I discover that its roots lie far beyond Beth Dutton. Beth had a John. And Sribar has had her father, Rok.

“My dad grew up paddling everywhere. When he was in college, he’d be in Turkey. Or in Corsica. The plot of his life was ‘make money, go kayaking.’ He really wanted to share that passion with us. And when my mom got pregnant, he was already telling all his friends, ‘My kids are going to be kayakers.’ He put me in a boat before I could speak. I was independent in my own vessel, running a waterfall at six years old.”

Sribar laughs as she speaks of her destiny, one that was predetermined even before her birth. There is something to be said about the difference between falling in love with a sport through your own discovery and adopting someone else’s passion as your own. I’m not convinced that even Sribar can identify with one perspective versus the other.

Her earliest memory of a kayaking trip was on the Rogue River in Oregon. But when I ask her about the details of the trip, she’s quick to point out every detail except the kayaking itself.

“I was so excited. They told me that I might see a bear. We had bears in our neighborhood, but I had never seen one in the wild. And then I saw a bear cub across the river, and I started sprinting as fast as my six-year-old self could sprint.”

Sribar’s eyes grow wider, a wide smile plastered across her face as she slips back into this moment. A young child chasing after a huge black bear. Partially shaped by her father and substantially of her own accord, her sense of normalcy was defined by risk-taking and obsession from a young age.

I wonder how much of this ability to override fear with instinct is simply childhood. We learn to be terrified as children. That’s why a baby might not react in the presence of a snake like an adult would. Sribar was presented with a world that was wild and uncontrolled at a young age. And that’s what enabled her to see threats as something to address, a problem to solve, and a situation to fix. When interrogated in her father’s kitchen by his new girlfriend, Beth Dutton doesn’t shrink away; she leans in with a knife in hand. And Sribar paddles straight through the gates, even as the water thrashes around her, threatening to send her off course at any moment. It’s all part of a river philosophy that she inherited from her father.

“Growing up, my dad would always say, ‘If someone tells you they’re not scared in a big river, you don’t want to be in that group of paddlers because they’re lying. If someone doesn’t respect the river and if someone doesn’t feel fear, they’re not a safe person to paddle with.’”

Sribar’s marriage of the word fear with respect is particularly interesting, but not in the broad sense that to respect something or someone, we must fear them. She and her father have taken a word usually associated with weakness or deficiency and turned it into something much more advantageous and powerful: information. In the Sribar household, externalizing fear is a good thing because it can then be addressed. And once it’s addressed, it ceases to be a limitation.

“I have many fears. I’m terrified of heights, which is funny because I love to skydive. But if I’m afraid of something, I want to do it because I don’t want to be afraid of it.”

There’s no sense of hesitation as she speaks. Whether it is about her sport, her love for Yellowstone, hot takes about the culture of canoe-slalom, or gossip. What I previously misread as unbridled audacity is actually a refusal to lose momentum. Sribar simply will not let fear settle into her mind long enough for it to paralyze her. And when someone is ready to respond in any situation, they no longer need to be in control of everything. That’s the lesson she learns repeatedly on the water.

“No one is stronger than water. Water is always going to overpower you. Your job is to look at how the water is going to help you get to where you need to go because it’s an uphill battle battling against it.”

When restraints are moved, water floods, overwhelms, crashes, and surrounds. Modern civilization has spent so much time engineering ways to control it that it has forgotten our ancestors learned how to move with it. In some ways, competitive athletes like Sribar are a reminder of the past. We were better responders then.

In Sribar’s case, becoming a better responder hasn’t been without its struggles. Adaptability is costly. At 12, she was sitting in the stands at the Canoe Slalom World Championships, watching Slovenian athletes compete.

“There were two guys that we [Sribar and her father] were hanging out with during the weekend who became World Champions. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I know these people.’ I had viewed them as untouchable.”

She was mesmerized not just by their high-level performances but by how unapologetically human they had been. Their mere existence was proof to a young Ria Sribar that she, too, could be a champion like them. Shortly thereafter, Sribar’s parents called her school to inform them that she would not be returning. First up was a brief stay in DC.

“My dad bought all my gear at once. And I was sent with these people I’d never met before to go live at their house and train for two weeks.”

She went from a passionate kayaker in suburban California to a high-performance athlete in DC within a matter of days. Even as a twenty-something, she struggles to appreciate the true magnitude of that transition. Her parents sacrificed a lot for her to have the privilege of studying online and training full-time. That is what she remembers ahead of: I gave up a normal childhood for a professional career.

From DC, it was another round of packing before Sribar headed to Europe.

“I don’t think I give off shy right now, but I was a really shy kid. The first week, I didn’t speak.”

As if predicting that I might chime in with a counter, she immediately follows up with:

“I was traveling around Europe with adults who were responsible for feeding themselves and doing their own laundry. All of a sudden, I was an adult. Well, not really, but I was viewed as one.”

I’ve struggled to articulate this sentiment in conversations with individuals who haven’t experienced this caliber of athlete life in their youth. It’s the simultaneous hyper-maturation and infantilization of the child star. The expectation that professional behavior matches that of a seasoned athlete, someone at least a few decades older. But this manufactured adult is not allowed to speak like one; they must retain the vibrancy and joyfulness of youth, both because it is more marketable and because they’re much easier to control.

Much like Beth Dutton’s retreat inwards following a disastrous health situation, then teenage Sribar found herself battling loneliness in silence.

“I didn’t call my mom for two months straight because I found it easier to pretend my family didn’t exist than to admit that I was having a hard time. Now that I’ve finished my psych degree, I’m like, ‘Wow, that was wild. I was alone.’”

Sribar speaks with the clarity of someone who knows there’s no regret in decisions made in situations you cannot control. It was in that context that her instinct sharpened, and her readiness to respond became perfected.

She adds, as an aside, a particularly vulnerable truth.

“It took me about five and a half years to finish high school. I would end up pushing everything to the last month. And I would work like 15 hours a day and not sleep enough while training.”

School is more than just pedagogy and formal education. It is also important for social development. I consider the ramifications attending slightly above the mandatory school days had on my own social abilities. To this day, I find it much easier to converse with either older individuals or strictly in professional settings. At this point, I notice Sribar physically cower, and realize that for the first time in our conversations, she is… retreating.

Her independence is something that she has had to construct, much like the vessels that she competes in. As a people-first person, it’s been terribly draining.

“If I don’t have good people around me, like it doesn’t matter how much I’ve trained. It doesn’t matter how fit I am. If I don’t have good people around me, it’s really hard for me to perform.”

The most prevalent assumption is that tough women, the frontier girls like Beth Dutton, are without vulnerability. They carry descriptors like cold and detached. They choose to be without. The truth is that there was never a choice. They become fixers not just because they’re excited to address a problem in front of them; they fix because they don’t trust.

“Compared to the average athlete in our sport, I’ve had a lot of coaches.”

She valiantly attempts to manually count the number of coaches she’s had throughout her career, but somewhere between eight and twenty, she settles for an estimate. 10.
With new coaches come new training styles. Performance doesn’t matter when alignment is an issue. And even as Sribar dances around the root of her struggles, I identify it in silence. Trust. Does, or rather, can Ria Sribar trust people?

“Every coach has different opinions, different strategies, and different approaches. When it’s a one-coach/one-athlete, dynamic, compatibility matters a lot more.”

I consider this in relation to my own experiences. At the junior and even high school levels, I almost exclusively trained sans a group. My team was effectively just myself and my coach (along with a robust set of professionals). Every dream, every hope, every expectation pinned on just you. It’s the curse of being one of one.

“You spend so much time with them, it becomes really personal.”

A coach not only guides your professional progress, but they also see you in your most vulnerable moments. For someone as wild and adventurous in personality as Sribar, the cumulative effect of such intrusion was claustrophobia, resulting in the decision to retire from the sport during her freshman year of college.

She doesn’t mince words or offer any romanticized explanations.

“I was done. The sport reminded me of too many toxic things.”

I’m quick to point out that she was, in fact, not done. Sribar ended up trying out for the rowing team at UCLA. When I press her about it, she shifts nervously in her seat before shrugging. “I didn’t choose to quit because I wanted to. I was just really hurt then.”

Rowing didn’t just become her redemption story and introduce her to a new set of teammates that she otherwise would not have found. It became her gateway back to her main sport. Sribar loved kayaking and competing in canoe slalom. She simply needed to be reminded of that fact. There’s some kind of psychology to this that I don’t think I will ever understand as someone who did not return to her sport after retiring. It’s the switch that enabled Michael Phelps to return for one last Olympics in 2016 or for Allyson Felix to announce a comeback in 2028 after retiring one full Olympic cycle ago.

But perhaps for Sribar, that psychology makes a lot of sense when you consider that she isn’t just competing against other athletes; she’s competing against water. And water does not care about any of your plans.

“I think people think that we can plan more. Obviously, you want to visualize, and if you can have a good visualization and run it through correctly and then do it and perform it, that’s amazing. But because water is variable, you can set it up perfectly and then a wave comes out of nowhere, and you have to know how to respond to it.”

Of course, her sport is measured against speed. It’s about getting in and out of gates as quickly and precisely as possible. But Sribar argues that the most underrated quality both in her sport and in life as a whole is adaptability.

“I still struggle with that because I’m sometimes like, ‘This was not in the plan.’ Versus one of my teammates, she just goes. There’s not a thought.”

As she has continued to move up the pecking order with the sport, attaining new titles and making it onto national teams, hesitation has become less of a concern. Emphasis on less rather than none.

“Two weeks ago, I was in Italy, and I messed up a little. It wasn’t a major race. But I still messed up, and I fully froze because I was not locked in. I was not tunneled. I just watched myself float away from where I was supposed to be. The gate was to the left of me. And I was fully a meter to the right of it, watching it go by. I did nothing to move left. I just watched it. And I was like, ‘Wow, that really blows.’”

Sribar’s entire life has been dictated by one thing: momentum. When she’s locked in, she’s really locked in. When she’s not, she’s quite literally floating away. There’s no happy medium, no middle ground on the water. It’s perhaps the most unforgiving of elements. So instead of focusing on feigning fearlessness or planning her races from start to finish, she relies on her ability to adapt.

When she stood on the podium at the 2024 ICF Canoe Slalom World Cup in Kraków, Sribar knew she was holding her medal for a reason. And it wasn’t because she had the perfect race.

“When I medaled in Kraków, I messed up at the top pretty early on, and I handled it, and I kept going.”

Most sports reward speed and stamina. Hers rewards responsiveness and reaction. Is that the pull? Come to think of it, maybe that’s what athletics is actually about. It doesn’t matter if you’re the strongest or the fastest; on that day, competition is about adapting to the situation you’re presented with.

Post-graduation, life has looked a bit different. With greater flexibility and more freedom, she’s now thinking more about her travels. She’s training in Eastern Europe before she returns to the US later this summer. But if she didn’t have anywhere to be, where would she go?

“If I could live in Switzerland, I would. I love Zurich. It’s a beautiful city. Did you know they swim in the summer to and from work? This is a thing people genuinely do. It’s not a gimmick to get tourists to do it. People straight up go home from work, put all their stuff in a dry baggie, and float down the river to wherever they live. If I ever win the lottery, I’m buying a ranch in Switzerland with ornamental Highland cows.”

It’s not couture. It’s not luxurious shopping adventures. It’s the simple pleasures of life. It’s the black bear that six-year-old Sribar ran after. She craves the freedom to chase the things she’s actually curious about. That might be the most Beth Dutton aspect of her personality. Nothing is more important than being free.

Lately, she’s taken that word to new heights. Literally.

“Last summer, my family and I had just come back from U23 Worlds in the South of France, and I went skydiving with my sister and my dad. I was talking with the guy who was filming me, and he asked, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ And I said, ‘I’m a psych major, but I don’t know. I once thought about flying a helicopter.’He said, ‘My wife is a helicopter pilot. Here’s this guy’s number. You should call him. And I did. The next week, I was flying a helicopter.”

I may not have known Sribar for long, but I realize how I effortlessly nod in agreement. Of course, Ria Sribar would be actively pursuing a helicopter license after accidentally stumbling upon it while skydiving. I never knew there was a feeling more extraordinary than adrenaline. And then Sribar articulated the concept of acknowledgment to me. She acknowledges her fears, accepts them, and turns them into action. As her father once said:

“If someone tells you they’re not scared in a big river, you don’t want to be in that group of paddlers because they’re lying.”

Sribar has had many things to fear in life. Whether it be battling the elements as part of her sport, leaving home at a young age, overcoming trust issues, or something as truly ludicrous as skydiving and piloting, she refuses to delude herself into believing that her fears do not exist. In true Beth Dutton fashion, she turns fear into focus. There is no outmaneuvering a frontier woman unafraid to grab the rope and rein in the bull, even as it thrashes wildly about.

“If I’m afraid of something, I want to do it because I don’t want to be afraid of it.”

By Niki Iyer