Athletes Unlimited and Boardwalk Pictures Give Women’s Sports Their Welcome to Wrexham

Sports documentaries are booming, but some athletes’ stories have been relegated to the bench.

The sports documentary series is having a bit of a moment. Fans seek closer connections to players and teams and leagues look for ways to market their sport to fans that don’t seem forced. Driven by a desire for authenticity and amplified by the pandemic’s digital distance, series including Netflix and Formula 1’s Drive to Survive, FX and English soccer’s Welcome to Wrexham, HBO and the National Football League’s Hard Knocks and Amazon and multiple sports’ (NFL, English Premier League, Italy’s Serie A, international soccer, college football) All or Nothing provide sports and their brand sponsors behind-the-scenes, semi-filtered content built for the social media era.

As such documentary series multiply to include more sports, one group of athletes has been largely left out of the narrative: Women.

This year, that’s going to change significantly. Netflix’s pro tennis and golf series launched this year each feature men and women from each sport. HBO Max’s Angel City just launched its look inside the National Women’s Soccer League’s franchise in Los Angles. Just as significantly, the Athletes United women’s professional softball, volleyball, lacrosse and basketball leagues entered an agreement with Boardwalk Pictures—the production company behind Welcome to Wrexham—to produce a documentary about the league and its athletes. While Boardwalk has also produced Cheer—a Netflix series about competitive cheerleading that’s been one of the few to spotlight female athletes to this point—this documentary would be the first of its streaming siblings to place its spotlight solely on women’s sports and delve into leagues run by the athletes themselves through player executive committees.

“Character is everything … that’s how an audience is going to connect to the story,” Caitlin McGinty, head of brand storytelling at Boardwalk Pictures.

Documenting results

After Welcome to Wrexham debuted last year, Wrexham A.F.C. gained nearly 1 million new followers on social media and saw merchandise sales increase sixfold within 12 months. Much of the second season of Cheer was dedicated to how the first season made the Navarro College Bulldogs team into stars and increased social media followers, commercial opportunities, Cameo fan videos and Dancing with the Stars appearances. Five seasons into Drive to Survive, Formula 1 has added two U.S. races, increased viewership on ESPN and wooed U.S. sponsors. 

Looking at the success of those series and others, Athletes Unlimited sees a similar partnership with Boardwalk Pictures as an opportunity to grow women’s professional sports through the personal, behind-the-scenes digital video its leagues have used online since their inception.

“When you see these documentary-type films, it’s exactly what endears people to the players themselves and I’m confident it will endear them to Athletes Unlimited,” said Cheri Kempf, senior vice president of Athletes Unlimited.

Kempf and the AU team were impressed with Boardwalk’s previous work, but also with McGinty and Boardwalk CEO Andrew Fried. Boardwalk sent three representatives out to San Diego during AU’s AUX Softball season last summer and let them immerse themselves in players’ lives. They spent time with the players in their temporary home at San Diego State University, they sat in at the team workouts, went to the games and got an idea of what set the league apart.

For example, AU athletes compile points based on both team wins and individual performance—so every play results in points. The top four athletes on the leaderboard serve as captains and draft their own teams, which change on a weekly basis. The league hands an individual championship to the player with the most points at the end of five weeks, but players collectively name a representative to AU’s board of directors and share in the company’s long-term profits. 

So when AU draws a broadcast partner like ESPN or sponsors including Gatorade, Geico, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Nike, players ideally have a stake in the deal.

“One thing that struck us about the athletes when we were in San Diego, was the way that they’re simultaneously thinking about the past, the present and the future all at once,” McGinty said.

The full picture

Throughout Boardwalk Pictures’ sports projects including Wrexham, Cheer and Last Chance U—a Netflix series looking at junior-college football and community college basketball—the spotlight has revealed a few blemishes.

Welcome to Wrexham dedicates an entire episode to fan violence. Cheer dedicated episode 5 of its second season to the federal sexual misconduct charges against Navarro cheerleader Jerry Harris—who was later convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The first season of Last Chance U included a game-ending brawl that made national headlines.

With many of AU’s players already highly visible through TikTok, Instagram and other social media followings they’ve been building since college—where female athletes have a distinct engagement advantage over their male counterparts—Kempf and AU aren’t overly concerned with how their leagues will appear in a documentary.

“We have a whole lot of confidence in our players, and who they are on and off the court and the field,” Kempf said. “The players are going to have moments throughout the season that aren’t always delightful for them, but we have a lot of confidence in telling those stories—the positive parts, and the parts that turn into a struggle.”

Though AU and Boardwalk haven’t specified which sport the documentary will feature, AU noted that part of the reason it’s comfortable moving forward with the project is the conversations its staff have had with Boardwalk. While looking for the stories, angles and characters that would give Athletes Unlimited a cohesive on-screen narrative, McGinty noted that her crew’s experience has made this particular effort something of a passion project—filled with potential and fueled by confidence in what the finished product could achieve.

“Storytelling is a team sport,” McGinty said. “Partnership, communication and expectations are paramount … how we make the project is as important to us as what we end up with.”