GameFace: Sports for Women, Minus the Pink

Women like sports, just not in the same way men do. That, in a sentence, is the idea behind GoGameFace, a new website, launched last week, that hopes to carve out a new niche where others, including Time Inc., have failed.

Founder Erica Boeke calls the site "a smart, non-condescending community for female sports fans" -- who represent quite a large group of consumers, in fact, according to a mountain of research she's happy to cite.

A former editor of the San Francisco Giants' magazine who volunteers as an usher at minor-league baseball games, Boeke believes athletic leagues and sports media have been marketing to female fans in the wrong ways. "I hate that the take a man's New York Yankees jersey and color it pink and expect women to clamor over it," she says. GoGameFace, she promises, will have no pink -- but it will have a sensibility that reflects how she thinks women prefer to think about sports -- with the emphasis on personality and drama rather than on statistics, records, best-of-all-time lists, etc.

"It's not 'sports for dummies,' but it's also not trying to get us to speak the language that men speak," she says. "We're not going to be like, 'Didn't Tom Brady's butt look cute?' We're never going to go there."

The site's content will be organized around newsy blog posts, with regular offerings in the areas of fashion, travel, food, media and "swags" -- sports wives and girlfriends. It will also feature what Boeke calls a "fantasy league lite," in which participants can accrue points not only by picking winning teams but by correctly answering quiz questions such as "Will Jessica show up at the Dallas game?" But there will only be so much of that kind of stuff, says Boeke: "I don't want to be the TMZ of the sports world."

And, new as it is, the brand is already on the verge of multiplatformity: On Sept. 1, Virgin Books published Gameface: The Kick-Ass Guide for Women Who Love Pro Sports. The book's message is similar to the website's, says Boeke: "We are not stupid."

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