Haley Rosen retired from soccer at 24, could not find her old teammates’ scores anywhere, and built a company that now reaches 115 million people a month. Angel Reese put up 30 and 16 in a Finals road win on Monday and joined a group bidding for a basketball team in Australia. AK Okereke went undrafted, made the Lakers, and joined another rookie in funding an athlete-finance platform with under $100,000 between them. Welcome back to The Closeout. Let’s get into it.

On October 13, Just Women's Sports acquired Victra Sports, a women's sports technology company founded by Haro Trenkler and Anna Malepeai. Terms were not disclosed. The same day, JWS launched its first mobile app on the App Store and Google Play, built on the technology it had just bought.

Haley Rosen founded Just Women's Sports in January 2020 because she could not find out what her friends were doing.

She had been one of them. Rosen played at Stanford from 2011, winning a national championship as a freshman and making the All-Pac-12 First Team in her redshirt senior season. She signed with the Washington Spirit in the NWSL in 2016, then went to Glasgow City in Scotland. Injuries forced her out of the game in 2017, at 24.

The problem started before she retired. Rosen has said that when she turned professional she felt like a stranger to her own sport, because she knew almost nothing about the teams and players she was about to face. Women's sports were getting roughly 4% of all sports media coverage. There was nothing to read.

She stopped playing and hit the same gap from the other side. She wanted to follow former teammates and could not reliably find a schedule or a score. "I didn't think I was alone in being a genuine fan of women's sports," she said.

She started an Instagram account and a newsletter.

What followed was 6 years of raising money. About $400,000 from Ovo Fund's Eric Chen in January 2020. An Adidas grant for women entrepreneurs that May. A $3.5 million seed in 2021 with Kevin Durant in it, alongside Kelley O'Hara, Elena Delle Donne, Hilary Knight, Sam Mewis and Arike Ogunbowale. Then $6 million in June 2022 led by Blue Pool Capital, the family office of Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai, with Billie Jean King, Allyson Felix, Abby Wambach, Sam Kerr, Lynn Williams, Michele Kang, Paul Rabil and Apolo Ohno on the cap table. Forbes put her on 30 Under 30 in November 2021.

JWS now reaches more than 115 million people a month across digital and social. It is the WNBA's official emerging media partner as of this year and has run an NWSL partnership for longer than that.

Of those 115 million, 6 million are followers JWS owns.

The rest live on platforms that decide what they see.

An app changes that math. A download gives her a push notification and a user record, neither of which needs an algorithm's permission. Rosen was direct about what she is buying: "If JWS can be the utility for the women's sports fan, that will fundamentally change our business."

That is what the app does. Live scores, schedules and statistics. Personalized accounts and push notifications. Original editorial and video sitting next to the box score. She also split the brand into Just Women's Hoops and Just Women's Football, because, as she put it, "other platforms treat the whole of women's sports as a single bucket."

She bought the technology from a company whose founders had already solved the problem, and shipped the app the same day the deal was announced.

Issue #21 of this newsletter ran the WNBA's attendance numbers: 3.79 million fans across 330 games, up 20.5% in a year. That reporting came from Just Women's Sports. The company Rosen started because nobody was covering women's sports is now where the rest of us get the numbers.

115 million people see her work every month. 6 million of them are hers. She bought a company to move the second number.

Jobe Bellingham, the 21-year-old Borussia Dortmund midfielder, led a $10 million round into Rezzil, the Manchester movement-analysis firm already backed by the Premier League, Thierry Henry and Gary Neville.

Tracy McGrady, who founded the 1-on-1 Ones Basketball League in 2022 and handed equity to Jadakiss, Vince Carter and Jaylen Brown, signed a 2-year partnership with NBC Sports that puts his games on Peacock.

David Beckham’s IM8, the health brand he co-founded in 2024, signed a multiyear deal to become the NBA’s official nutrition partner across 9 markets in Australia and Southeast Asia.

AK Okereke, an undrafted Lakers rookie who runs the VC firm Mainstreet with his brother Ike, and Hawks guard RayJ Dennis put up the under $100,000 that funded Prosperity AI, an athlete-finance dashboard now used by more than 300 players.

On Monday night in San Francisco, Angel Reese put up 30 points and 16 rebounds, shot 10-of-16 from the floor and 9-of-11 from the line, and Atlanta beat the Golden State Valkyries 79-65 to tie the WNBA Finals at 1-1.

The Dream held the Valkyries to 9 points in the third quarter. Reese had 18 in the paint, 9 on second chances, and 7 on the break. She finished plus-13 with a 72% true shooting night.

Atlanta has not lost a playoff series yet. It swept Washington in the first round and swept the New York Liberty 3-0 in the semifinals. Game 3 is tonight at home.

Back in March 2026, Reese joined the ownership group bidding to put a WNBL team in Brisbane.

The Brisbane Bullets, who already run a men's club in Australia's NBL, want the WNBL's 10th franchise. The league has said a Brisbane team could start as soon as next season. Reese is part of that group. No stake was disclosed and the terms of her involvement is unknown. What is known is that she isn’t just putting numbers on the board on the court.

Issue #21 ran the attendance numbers that make her worth having on a bid at all. Atlanta averaged 4,480 fans a night last season and 7,000 this one, the largest jump in the league, after the Dream added her. The franchise announced this month that every home game moves to State Farm Arena starting in 2027.

That same issue ran CNBC's $1 billion valuation on the Golden State Valkyries, the first WNBA team to reach it. Those are the 2 franchises now playing for the title.

She took the position in March. The 30 and 16 came 7 months later. One of those has a box score. The other one still needs a number.

Adistar Jellyfish “Red”

Pharrell and adidas release the Adistar Jellyfish in red on Saturday, a heavily layered upper sitting on oversized side structures and a chunky running sole, with black Three Stripes and icy blue against the red. James Harden wore the colorway earlier this year.

October 24, $300, adidas.com and select retailers. The raffle is running through Black Yacht Rock.

Issue #21 covered Joopiter, the auction house he started in 2022. Issue #22 covered Nigo, who co-founded Billionaire Boys Club with him in 2003. 3 weeks, 3 of his businesses.

Tied 1-1. Golden State is a second-year expansion team that swept the defending champion Aces 3-0 to get here. The league moved this game up a day, and the Atlanta Hawks moved their own home opener to clear room for Game 4 on Saturday.

An NBA team rescheduled around this series. Tune in.