About

Hi, I’m Natalie.

I started Dear Sport as a creative outlet for my love of women’s sports, for the athletes; their stories, their perseverance, their talent. I’ve always held deep reverence for elite athletes and the moments they give us. I wanted to harness that reverence and turn it into something tangible: a letter.

Welcome—I’m glad you’re here. If you are as obsessed with women’s sports as I am—

If you’ve felt the weight of a moment like Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick or Lisa Leslie’s first dunk in WNBA’s history, you already know exactly what I mean. This space is for you. For us.

My parents enrolled me in community sports when I was five, and sports became a huge part of my childhood: soccer, summer swim team, tennis, basketball. You name it, I probably played it.

But the 1996 Olympics were my gateway to being enthralled and inspired by watching sports. So much so that I wrote a book report on Dominique Moceanu and briefly took up the sport myself, convinced I was the next Shannon Miller. (I was not.) These were athletes at the pinnacle of their sport, and even as a young girl, I understood that I was witnessing something extraordinary.

I taped every single gymnastics event, a tradition I continued through several Olympics. I meticulously labeled each VHS tape and rewatched them during non-Olympic years. I recently found a box containing 15 of them. What exactly does one do with 15 VHS tapes?

I remember feeling a profound sense of sadness and confusion when the games were over. How can I watch sports 24/7 now? How can I follow these athletes?

Well, nine-year-old me would scour every TV guide (yes, the actual physical guide) to find and tape anything related to my favorite Olympic athletes. It was tedious work, but I’d be damned if Svetlana Khorkina or Mia Hamm competed without me knowing about it.

That obsession never really left. Somewhere along the way, sports crept into almost every facet of my life. These days I work in sports. My best friends are still the women I played college lacrosse with. I sit on the board of a nonprofit that runs LGBTQ+ rec sports leagues. I spend more time researching my draft for my Fantasy Olympics league than I care to admit. Ask me about the WNBA or the USWNT and you will regret it, because I will not stop talking. My son may or may not know that men play sports too because he has only ever seen women play on tv.

I’m also gay. And being a sports fan and being queer have always been tangled together for me. Long before I had the language for any of it, watching women who were out, unapologetic, and exceptionally good at what they did made the world feel a little smaller and a little safer. That’s not a footnote to why I love women’s sports. It’s a lot of the reason.

Through all those hours spent watching women’s sports, I began to notice a pattern: the moments that stayed with me were rarely about the final score. They were about what the moment meant.

WNBA players warming up with “Say Her Name” on their shirts. Megan Rapinoe kneeling before anyone else in her sport dared to. Simone Biles putting her mental health first and pulling out of Tokyo because of the twisties. I kept thinking about those moments long after the games ended—what they meant, what they changed, and why they stayed with me.

The best thing sports have given me, over and over, is a place to belong. Not just the shared high of a good game, but the intentionally built community of people who show up for women’s athletes because we know how hard it was to get here, and how much further there is to go.

That’s what I want Dear Sport to offer: Once a month, we’ll slow down and stay with one moment before the internet moves on. One story, chosen carefully, written honestly, mailed to your door.

If you’ve ever teared up over a game nobody else in the room understood the weight of, this is for you.