The Data Says Women Athletes Speak Up. I Finally Did.

New research from e.l.f. Beauty and Parity explores how the skills girls learn through sports shape the way women show up at work. As a professional athlete who helped bring the report to life, I realized I had spent years carrying those lessons off the water, until the season I finally brought them back.

I have always envied effortless athletes.

You know the ones. They come out of nowhere with an unforgettable performance, blow everyone out of the water (pun very much intended) and remain dominant for decades.

I am no such athlete.

As cliché as it is, my career has been built through blood, sweat, and tears. Probably an indecent, embarrassing amount of each. Don’t get me wrong: I have had my highs, and I have celebrated them thoroughly. But I never got that singular, cinematic “I’ve arrived” moment.

I would venture to guess most people are in the same boat as me. Hey, we can’t all be wunderkinds.

I learned a long time ago to expect hard work from my life.

And then this season happened.

Without pomp, circumstance, or ceremony, the career goals I had been chasing for nearly a decade started falling like dominoes.

After the 2025 season — probably my entire career, if we are being honest — wreaked havoc on my mental health, I was gun-shy (read: horrified) about entering the first Waterski Pro Tour stop of 2026.

Then, two days before prelims, I had one of my favorite familiarization practices of my career. With a driver I adore and another skier I could not admire more sitting in the boat, I skied LIGHTS OUT. I ran a full six buoys at 39 off, or 10.75 meters. For context, 39 off is the hardest pass pro women skiers currently complete in competition.

My familiarization sets do not usually go like that.

I told myself that regardless of what happened in the tournament, that practice was the win. I had already done something for myself. And for once, I was not going to mentally move the finish line quickly enough to erase the evidence.

Then prelims arrived. It was colder and windier than expected at 8 a.m. None of us visualize a “chilly” prelim in central Florida. The weather was uncooperative, my nervous system still had receipts from 2025, and I was making my tournament debut with a new ski sponsor. A new season, a new partnership, and a very public first impression. Nothing like easing back into competition, hey? But I have been around the block. How many cold mornings had I skied? How many imperfect sets had I survived? How many times had I felt the weight of needing to prove myself, and skied anyway?

During that first round, I came alive again. In conditions no one had ordered, carrying more pressure than I wanted to admit, I discovered exactly who I was.

I was not over.

A couple of weeks later, I won the U.S. Masters Last Chance Qualifier and earned my invitation to the U.S. Masters — a goal I had set nine years earlier. Seven days later, I became the 13th woman in history to run 39 off in a record-capable tournament, catapulting me to a world ranking of No. 5. Two more nine-year goals: check and check. Another week later, I placed third at a Tour stop in Morocco. The following weekend in Monaco, I mounted an epic second-round comeback to secure my place in the finals. Seven days after that, I placed second in France. The next week, I ran another 39 off in practice in Spain.

Then, another seven days later, I had to face my white whale: Italy, and the very lake that had broken my spirit the year before.

It took 306 days, but I made it right. I wore the exact same bikini and gloves as the year before because, if nothing else, I love a story. I wanted a do-over, with a dramatically different ending. I came home from Italy with a third-place finish and ranked No. 3 on the Waterski Pro Tour.

So, after nearly a decade of chasing these goals, why did everything start coming together in 306 days?

Anyone in corporate America — or any working professional, for that matter — knows that 306 days is not actually very long. In the land of spreadsheets, production-runs, five-year projects, and ten-year plans, 306 days is a few drops in the bucket. You probably have professional accomplishments of your own that took years to knock down.

You know this to be especially true if you ever played sports, at any level.

The honest answer to what changed begins with a sentence that does not come wrapped in particularly inspirational packaging:

I fired most of my team.

I was done being talked out of what I could feel under my own feet. Done being told what I was experiencing on my ski, how I should interpret it, how I should think, how I should feel, and even how I should look or present myself.

I had spent years accumulating a body of knowledge no one else could fully access. Every pass, turn, crash, adjustment, injury, breakthrough, and spectacular implosion had given me data about my own skiing. My experience was not an inconvenient anecdote; it was evidence.

So I started treating it that way.

I chose a new ski sponsor. I made sweeping changes to my technique, my equipment, my training, and the people I allowed into my inner circle. I stopped searching for guidance and started making educated decisions I could actually believe in.

That did not mean I stopped listening. It meant I stopped confusing listening with obedience. I still sought expertise, absorbed feedback, and remained curious. But I was no longer willing to outsource final authority over my own body, my own skiing, or my own career.

I skied how I wanted, when I wanted, and with whom I wanted. I trusted my gut, backed it with years of experience, and advocated for myself.

And it worked.

I do not say all of this proudly or flippantly. Changing a team is uncomfortable. Trusting yourself enough to make that change is even more uncomfortable. But at some point, being coachable had curdled into something closer to compliance. I had become so accustomed to looking outside myself for answers that I was treating other people’s certainty as more authoritative than my own experience in my own body.

This season still required hard work. It still required discipline, adaptability, and resilience. What changed was that I became more discerning about where I directed those qualities, and whose voices I allowed close enough to shape them.

At the same time, in my professional life at Parity, I had been helping bring to life a landmark research project with e.l.f. Beauty: Girls Who Play Change the Game.

Together, e.l.f. Beauty and Parity set out to understand, with actual data, how sports change the game for the broader population of workplace leaders. The resulting research reflects more than 9,500 respondents across the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It includes Everyday Athletes, pro women athletes, board members, and women who played less or no sports.

The report defines an Everyday Athlete as a woman who played sports for at least three years before the end of high or secondary school and who works, or recently worked, full time. She did not have to play in college. She did not have to go pro. She simply spent enough time in sports for the experience to become part of how she learned, grew, and moved through the world.

The results were beyond our wildest dreams.

Of Everyday Athletes just beginning their careers, 94% say that professional skills they learned through sports have helped them navigate workplace challenges. Among Everyday Athletes who have worked at least five years, 69% say the lessons they learned in sports are more important than ever in today’s workplace.

Those lessons are not abstract. Ninety-two percent of Everyday Athletes say they learned at least one key characteristic from sports, most commonly confidence, resilience, trust in self, and mental strength.

And then there is advocacy.

Eighty-one percent of Everyday Athletes say they learned advocacy through sports, including 73% who say sports helped them learn how to advocate for themselves.

The finding that lodged itself most firmly in my brain, however, was this: 98% of the pro women athletes surveyed say sports helped prepare them to compete in life beyond their playing career.

I understood that immediately. There are countless times I have applied what I learned on the water to my non-playing professional career. Sport taught me how to communicate, perform under pressure, navigate disappointment, adapt, speak up, and keep moving through ambiguity. I carried those skills into meetings, projects, negotiations, and every other place adults like to pretend does not involve competition.

But this year, I did something different.

I applied all those skills back to sports.

I reversed the current.

I took the confidence, resilience, self-trust, mental strength, and advocacy that sport had taught me — and that I had learned to use in the workplace — and returned them to the place they came from.

Sport taught me to trust myself. This year, I trusted the skier.

Sport taught me to adapt. This year, I changed the environment around me.

Sport taught me to advocate. This year, I said what I needed, changed who occupied the boat and put the ski on my feet, and built a team that allowed me to ski like myself.

Sport taught me resilience. This year, I went back to Italy.

The report is careful not to overclaim. Its comparisons are descriptive and reflect correlation, not definitive causation. So am I. A research report cannot isolate precisely why I ran 39 off or climbed the rankings. Sports are unpredictable. Bodies are unpredictable. Minds and seasons and weather are unpredictable.

But the data gives me language for what happened.

Confidence is not the certainty that everything will go well. It is the willingness to act when it might not.

Resilience is not a mandate to suffer indefinitely. Sometimes it is the conviction to change what is making you suffer.

Self-trust does not mean refusing advice. It means knowing yourself well enough to decide which advice belongs to you.

And advocacy is not merely something you say. Sometimes it is a decision about your team, your training, your boundaries, or the people you want in the boat.

I wish I could say this is an incredible story about discovering some secret reserve of talent. It is not. I did not wake up a phenom. I did not stumble upon a magic training set. I still ride my back foot more than any of my peers. I did not suddenly become one of those effortless athletes I had spent my career envying.

I am simply a particularly vivid example of the data.

For years, I assumed the most important benefits of sports were the ones athletes carried away from competition and into the rest of their lives. This season taught me that the exchange can go both ways. We can bring those hard-won skills home. We can use them to change not only how we work, but how we play.

Maybe that is inspiring after all, not because I transformed into an effortless athlete, but because I did not.

I am not a wunderkind. I am something less mythic and, I think, more useful: a woman who spent years learning how to get back up, speak up, and trust herself, and who finally realized those lessons belonged to her on the water, too.

I do not know what will happen next. But based on my track record, and now the research, I will probably get where I want to go.

It may take blood, sweat, tears, an uncomfortable conversation, a reconfigured boat, and a few hundred more days, but that’s fine. I have been around the block. I know how to come back.

Girls who play change the game. Sometimes, the game they change is their own.