Reflecting on her time at the Women In Sport Summit, Angel City FC head of public relations, Steph Rudnick discussed the impact that LA’s newest professional sports team is having on women’s football.

How Angel City is influencing growth of women’s football:

Commenting on what sets Angel City FC apart from the rest, Rudnick said the club uses its influence and action to shine a light on football in multiple ways, where they can have have an impact on and off the field.

“Looking at out impact on the field, you have to ask, ‘how are we going to raise opportunities for our girls to make more money, to get more exposure, which helps raise their own profiles?’ And that trickles down to how bigger stars we can make them in their community, which will result in more people coming out to games,” Rudnick said.

“The other way is making an impact on the community. So, we started the team with three pillars; education, equality, and impact, where everything we did was laddering up to that. We also have all these amazing celebrities, who aren’t just there to lend their names, along with our athlete investors, which includes 14 former women’s national team players, who have a seat at the table to help us make decisions, and they are extremely active,” she said.

Rudnick also said their athlete investors understand the football fan, and it’s a made a large impact in helping the club sell out their 22,000-seater stadium, while the club’s celebrity ownership group has played a huge role in making introductions to land major sponsors and partnerships.

Angel City’s initiatives:

On the initiatives implemented by Angel City FC, Rudnick said the organisation has launched several programs to help grassroots clubs in Southern California, with Angel City also making a large investment in young boys and girls to turn them into the best leaders they can be.

“So sometimes, with a partner like Gatorade, you may or may not know, but there’s a massive drought when it comes to female coaches, and sometimes young players that are in high school don’t really see a pathway in sport for themselves in the game they love playing love so much. So, we’ve created this programme, where we are creating opportunities to train women to become coaches,” Rudnick said.

“We also have a fund that helps train young girls and women to work in the sports business because a lot of people don’t know that you don’t have to play or be a coach. There’s marketing, there’s social, there’s community, there’s so many different avenues.

“We are making a huge investment in not only keeping them playing. For example, with Nike, we donated 22,000 sports bras to girls in need, because we found that most girls would stop playing at around 13 to 15 because they wouldn’t have an adequate sports bra,” she said.

Angel City’s future plans:

On Angel City’s future plans for women’s football, Rudnick said the club hopes to achieve equity for female athletes, including equal wages, the same quality training facilities and anything else women need to succeed as athletes.

“We’ve made massive strides, but we’re never going to stop on that fight and we have this incredible movement, where we’ve got seven supporter groups, all those former players, and then we’ve also got Los Angeles and the world understanding what we’re doing and we’re not going to be quiet,” Rudnick said.

Additionally, Angel City are fighting to create equity in brands’ marketing spending, where they’re encouraging global companies to support women’s football by altering their budget from 80/20 male to female to a more equal value.

To read the previous story about the Women In Sport Summit, where Australian Golf’s Tiffany Cherry discussed the organisation’s ambitions for gender equity in the sport, click here.