- TOGETHXR and Snapchat’s “Snap the Gap” backs 9 female athletes with mentorship, content coaching, and monetization tools.
- Snap’s audience is primed: almost 9 in 10 users engage with sports weekly, and Spotlight logs 25M+ sports minutes daily.
- The program targets a historic visibility gap, letting athletes control their stories—and revenue—on their terms.
- Success hinges on balancing authentic storytelling with platform demands and safeguarding athlete wellness and IP.
- Brands can learn: resource creators, measure community value, and treat athlete content like scalable media, not one-off posts.
TOGETHXR’s partnership arms emerging pros with tools to grow audiences and revenue on Snap’s youth‑heavy platform.
When Houston Dash and Nigeria forward Michelle Alozie says, “Snapchat is a platform I use often, and I’m excited to continue to grow my brand doing something that I genuinely enjoy,” she isn’t just celebrating a new social feature. She’s signaling a structural shift: women athletes are being treated—and treating themselves—as full-fledged creators with distribution, mentorship, and monetization baked in.
That’s the premise of “Snap the Gap,” a first-of-its-kind accelerator from TOGETHXR and Snapchat that selects nine female athletes, gives them direct guidance from Snap’s partnership team, and pairs it with TOGETHXR’s editorial and content coaching to turn everyday athletic journeys into sustainable media businesses.
Why This Partnership, Why Now?
Women’s sports still fight for airtime and ad dollars. TOGETHXR—founded by former elite athletes specifically to correct that imbalance—knows the coverage gap isn’t just about game highlights; it’s about narrative control. Snapchat, meanwhile, has quietly become a hub for sports fandom among younger audiences.
Research Snap released earlier this year found that almost nine in ten Snapchatters engage with sports weekly, and 85% watch sports matches at least monthly. Its Spotlight feed alone racks up more than 25 million minutes of sports content viewership per day. In other words: there’s appetite, there’s attention, and there’s a platform hungry for differentiated sports storytelling. Women athletes just needed a runway.
“Through ‘Snap the Gap’, we’re proud to team up with TOGETHXR to support this standout group of emerging athletes as they find success as creators,” said Emma Wakely, Snapchat’s Sports and Media Partnerships Manager.
The intent is explicit: mentorship, tools, and a “platform built for real storytelling” so athletes can “shape the future of women’s sports—on their terms.”
Inside “Snap the Gap”: More Than a Spotlight, It’s a System
The nine “Snap Stars” span leagues and life stages—NWSL (Alozie, Croix Bethune), the WNBA (Rickea Jackson, Erica Wheeler), NCAA standouts (KK Arnold, Kyrstin Johnson, Mia Rogan), the PWHL (Sarah Fillier), and LOVB volleyball (Haleigh Washington).
That cross‑discipline curation is strategic: women’s sports fandom is increasingly multi-sport, and the program can test what formats resonate across codes—locker-room vlogs, recovery diaries, road-trip chats, skills breakdowns—while nurturing distinct voices.
TOGETHXR supplies content strategy, production guidance, and a values framework so the athletes’ stories stay authentic and mission-driven. Snapchat contributes platform-native growth tactics: how to optimize for Spotlight, lean into AR tools, pace posting cadence, and convert attention into creator revenue streams. It’s not a “post and pray” model; it’s a full stack: brand-building, editorial development, and monetization.
Paula Hughes, TOGETHXR’s Chief Digital Officer, put it plainly: the collaboration “lowers the barrier to entry for revenue opportunities for the athletes, who not only excel in competition, but who are also shaping culture and growing communities across women’s sports.”
That lowering matters. Until now, many women athletes have depended on sporadic sponsorships or generic NIL templates. “Snap the Gap” is a bespoke track to build IP, not just audience numbers.
Athletes as Always-On Media—Without Losing the Athlete
The creator playbook can be brutal: constant posting, algorithm chasing, burnout. One tension this program has to navigate is letting athletes remain athletes. Training, recovery, travel, mental health—those aren’t backdrops, they’re core.
The partnership’s promise is a model where storytelling fits the rhythm of sport rather than interrupts it. Direct mentorship from Snap is crucial here; it’s the difference between “post more” and “here’s how to repurpose your reality into platform-friendly content without compromising performance or privacy.”
TOGETHXR’s involvement also acts as a safeguard against the lowest-common-denominator content trap. Their mission is visibility with integrity—more breadth and depth, not just virality. That means helping athletes find formats that are sustainable: weekly check-ins, episodic arcs around a season, or behind-the-scenes series that can be batched and scheduled.
Why Snapchat Is a Smart Bet for Women’s Sports
Snap’s youth skew is familiar, but what matters here is behavioral nuance: this audience isn’t just scrolling; they’re co-creating, screenshotting, sharing inside tight friend networks. That dynamic favors intimate, first-person narratives—the exact currency women athletes have in abundance but rarely get to monetize. Spotlight’s 25-million-minute daily sports diet shows there’s room for micro-docs, quick Q&As, and raw training clips that feel less polished than TV packages but more immediate than recap reels elsewhere.
Snapchat’s product suite—ephemeral Stories, AR lenses, private groups—also mirrors how women’s sports communities grow: through grassroots enthusiasm, peer recommendation, and niche fandoms that don’t need mass-broadcast sheen to feel real.
If “Snap the Gap” teaches athletes to leverage those mechanics, they’re not just building follower counts; they’re building micro-communities that sponsor dollars will eventually chase.
Closing a Structural Gap, Not Just an Algorithmic One
The visibility problem in women’s sports has never been just about highlights; it’s about the cadence of coverage and the ownership of narrative. Traditional media dips in at championship moments, but creators win loyalty by showing the slog: rehab setbacks, travel hassles, team culture, identity beyond the uniform.
“Snap the Gap” institutionalizes that perspective without leaving athletes to figure it out alone.
It’s also a revenue story. Platform-native monetization—from ad shares to sponsored lenses—gives athletes income that isn’t contingent on federation payouts or endorsement deals skewed by unequal media value. When the content is theirs, the upside is theirs. That’s empowerment that lives beyond a campaign hashtag.
Lessons for Brands and Leagues
For marketers and rights holders watching this play out, a few strategic cues stand out:
- Resource, don’t just recruit. Mentorship, editorial support, and growth tooling matter as much as a payout. Put a program behind the partnership.
- Think cross‑sport and cohort-based. Diversity of disciplines expands reach and tests formats faster. Leverage peer learning among talent.
- Measure community, not just impressions. Snap’s sports numbers prove scale; success here will hinge on repeat viewers, saves, shares, and conversion into tangible outcomes (merch, ticket sales, sponsor lift).
- Protect athlete bandwidth. Build content plans around seasonality and downtime. Batch creation. Use platform features that minimize manual posting.
Where It Goes From Here
“Snap the Gap” is an accelerator, not a one-off. If it works, expect more cohorts, deeper platform integrations, and cross-platform syndication to YouTube or CTV. The athletes become not just participants but mentors for the next wave—compounding impact. And as brands see authentic communities forming around these stories, they’ll look to integrate smartly—sponsoring series, not slapping logos.
Snapchat, for its part, cements itself as more than a messaging app or a TikTok clone. It becomes an early-stage incubator for sports IP—especially in segments mainstream broadcasters ignore.
TOGETHXR gets a scalable template to replicate with other platforms and partners, keeping mission at the center while flexing format.
For the athletes, it’s a chance to own their narrative arc and monetize it in a way aligned with their schedules and values. For women’s sports, it’s another brick in a long-overdue infrastructure: visibility, voice, value.
The courts, rinks, pitches, and mats will still decide legacies. But increasingly, the creator feeds will decide market value. With “Snap the Gap,” TOGETHXR and Snapchat are betting that when women athletes control both, everyone wins.
