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When the Women's United Soccer Association, the professional league that gave the Bay Area its first women's pro soccer team, folded in 2003, a group of athletes and sports leaders decided the connection between women athletes and their community was too valuable to lose. Twenty-one years later, the organization they built, the Bay Area Women's Sports Initiative (BAWSI, pronounced "bossy"), mobilizes professional and college women athletes as coaches and mentors for children and youth from under-resourced neighborhoods across the region. For that work, BAWSI is the recipient of the Sports Business Advocate Award at the inaugural Bay Area Sports Business Awards.

“BAWSI is honored to be recognized by Santa Clara University and the San Francisco Chronicle, and we share this award with the thousands of girls from under-resourced neighborhoods and children with disabilities who have stepped onto a BAWSI playground and discovered that they belong," said Dr. Dana Weintraub, CEO of BAWSI. "BAWSI's founders believed in the power of women athletes to change the world, starting in their own backyard. For more than 20 years, women athletes have shown up on BAWSI playgrounds as coaches, mentors, and role models. Now, BAWSI alumni are returning as coaches, staff, and board members and leading in their communities. If they can see her, they can be her!”

Presented by Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle, the new annual awards honor the people and organizations shaping the region's sports economy. The Sports Business Advocate Award recognizes bold thinkers who have reshaped how the industry operates and cleared a path for those coming up behind them. Like every award in the program, it carries no cash prize; instead, a donation is made in the recipient's honor to a charity or to a scholarship fund for Leavey's MS in Sports Business program. BAWSI will be honored with the rest of the inaugural class at an awards gala in San Francisco on November 9.

Recipients were selected by a finalist judging panel that included eight Bay Area sports leaders: Billy Beane, senior advisor and former general manager of the Athletics; Brandi Chastain, co-founder of Bay FC, three-time Olympian and two-time FIFA Women's World Cup champion; Stu Jackson, commissioner of the West Coast Conference; Tom Kelley, global general manager of Jordan Brand Golf at Nike; Ann Killion, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; Heather Owen, director of athletics at Santa Clara University; Bill Schlough, chief information officer of the San Francisco Giants; and Kerri Walsh Jennings, five-time Olympian and founding owner and chief impact officer of the NorCal Rumble.

"BAWSI saw something the sports industry is only now fully recognizing: that women athletes are leaders whose influence extends far beyond the field," said Ravi Bapna, dean of the Leavey School of Business. "For two decades, it has turned that belief into a model that develops athletes as mentors and opens the door to sport for thousands of children who might otherwise never have walked through it. That is exactly the kind of path-clearing advocacy this award was created to celebrate."

Clearing a path for the next generation

Long before women's sports became one of the fastest-growing segments of the industry, BAWSI was betting on a simple idea: women athletes are leaders, and their influence can extend far beyond the field. Its model turns that idea into a pipeline. High school, college and professional athletes serve as coaches and mentors, building their own leadership skills while giving children who are often shut out of organized sports a chance to play, and a role model who looks like them.

The need is real. Girls have fewer opportunities to play sports than boys, a gap that is wider for girls of color, and adolescent girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys. Yet the benefits of staying in the game are significant: girls who play sports tend to have better physical and mental health and graduate at higher rates, and the vast majority of women in executive leadership played sports through high school. By widening the entry point, BAWSI is helping build the next generation of athletes, fans and leaders, including the next generation of sports business leaders.

Born from a league's collapse

The 1999 Women's World Cup gave women's sports a new place in American culture, and the Women's United Soccer Association was created in its wake. When the league folded in 2003, Marlene Bjornsrud, former general manager of the league champion San Jose CyberRays and a former assistant athletics director at Santa Clara University, joined U.S. women's national team stars Brandi Chastain and Julie Foudy in looking for a way to preserve the deep community connections the league had built.

In May 2005, together with a group of community and sports leaders, they founded BAWSI as a nonprofit. Its first initiative brought athletes to girls who had little or no access to organized sports or physical education, in communities facing high rates of obesity and diabetes. Since then, BAWSI has enrolled more than 30,000 children and youth and become a national example of service through sport.

A pathway from second grade to senior year

BAWSI's programs, all free to participants, form what the organization calls a Leadership Accelerator for Girls through Sport, following girls from elementary school through high school.

BAWSI Girls is the foundation. At 11 elementary school sites, about 1,100 girls a year play games that build fitness, coordination, teamwork and goal-setting, coached by women athletes who show them what an athlete and a leader can look like.

The middle and high school leadership track picks up where many girls would otherwise drop out of sports. Middle school participants take part in PE clinics, after-school sports and leadership sessions. High school participants continue their leadership development and pay it forward by volunteering on nearby BAWSI Girls playgrounds. Both levels include College Game Day and Career Game Day field trips that introduce girls to campuses and workplaces.

BAWSI Rollers extends the same opportunity to girls and boys with physical, cognitive or hearing disabilities. Its adaptive sessions build coordination, strength, confidence and independence in an inclusive setting where children focus on what they can do.

The results reach well beyond the playground. An alumni survey led by BAWSI found that more than 90% of BAWSI Girls participants graduated from high school, with most going on to college and continuing to play sports.

Twenty years of girls who play becoming women who lead

BAWSI’s 20th year arrived at a moment its founders could only have imagined in 2005. The Bay Area is now home to Bay FC, the Golden State Valkyries, and a growing roster of professional women’s teams, and girls across the region can watch women compete as pros in packed stadiums and arenas. BAWSI helped lay the groundwork for that moment by insisting, for two decades, that women athletes belong at the center of their communities, and by making sure that all girls have the opportunity to play, lead, and succeed.

Disclosure: Judges with a personal or organizational connection to a finalist recused themselves from ranking that category, and their votes were not counted in it. Recipients in each category were selected by the remaining judges.