Karen Durkin ’87 reflects on how women’s sports became big business.
The following interview has been edited and condensed and appears in the fall 2024 issue of Rochester Review, the magazine of the University of Rochester.
Karen Durkin ’87
Home: Ormond Beach, Florida
Founder of the marketing, communications, and sponsorship firm The Durkin Agency; former CEO, Women’s Sports Foundation (2008–10); and senior executive in the National Hockey League (2006–08) and the LPGA (1995–2006)
Major at Rochester: Music
On her father’s influence: “My father believed in following your passions but also making sure you knew how to write a good sentence. We used to diagram sentences for fun when I was very young. Thus, my minor in English.”
I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut. I was passionate about the flute and wanted to study music, but I also wanted the full campus experience. I always loved music but being first chair of a symphony was never really my career goal. I took many classes at Eastman, and I graduated with a major in music and a minor in English.
Ours was a sports household. My father was a coach and an athlete and very, very influential in my life. He pitched for Notre Dame and was drafted to try out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He coached CYO basketball and Babe Ruth baseball. I followed him around everywhere.
I started as an athlete very young. I was a competitive swimmer from about the age of four or five and that was all I did, training twice a day, always traveling to meets on weekends. And then I got to be 13, and I wanted to do other things. In high school, I played lots of sports—volleyball, basketball, and softball. And then in college, I started with varsity basketball and in my junior year I switched to varsity swimming. I didn’t even know if I’d sink to the bottom of the pool when I dove in, because it had been a long time—probably a decade! For many years, I also carried a 1.2 golf handicap.
Sports have had lifelong benefits for me personally and professionally. I was a shy kid, so they gave me an outlet and confidence. They’re so key in women’s leadership. About 80 percent of women Fortune 500 CEOs played some kind of organized sports in their younger years. There’s extensive research showing a correlation between women’s participation in sports and leadership in business as well as better health.
If you look at my career track, from the LPGA to the NHL to the Women’s Sports Foundation, those were all underdog brands. In women’s sports, there are so many inequities, and when I came to the NHL, it was the first year back on ice after the 2004–05 lockout. So, the league was really investing in rebuilding.
But there’s no question now that women’s sports are in a boom that none of us has ever experienced before—whether on the fan side, the business side, or the athlete side. Women’s sports are truly now an investment. Media rights, sponsorship revenue, and attendance are all rising, and exponential increases are happening in merchandising, betting, and in team valuations.
When the US women’s soccer team won the World Cup in 1999, that was a seismic shift. We were watching women’s soccer more than men’s. There were so many things that came after that win that were stage setters for what we’re seeing now. Look at the New York Liberty. They got a ticker-tape parade following their victory in the WNBA Championship. The last time that happened for a basketball team was in 1976.
There have been breakthrough women athletes in the past. But what makes someone like Caitlin Clark so powerful is today’s acceptance of women’s sports. Women breakthrough athletes are having a seismic impact on the business, the fans, consumers, and vice versa—the foundation and context for past athletes were very different.
But now that women’s sports is an investment, it’s going to have to show a return. The stakes are higher. There are areas where progress is still very much needed. So, can the boom sustain itself? And so I watch the boom and say: “We’ve got to show the return.”
