The Business of Belief

With the WNFC, Odessa Jenkins is creating more than a women’s football league. She is building a new model for ownership, access and long-term power that could redefine who profits from the future of sports. Odessa “OJ” Jenkins has spent the last seven years building against an absence. As a girl, tackle football was […] The post The Business of Belief appeared first on Waymaker Journal.

Sep 30, 2026 - 10:51

With the WNFC, Odessa Jenkins is creating more than a women’s football league. She is building a new model for ownership, access and long-term power that could redefine who profits from the future of sports.

Odessa “OJ” Jenkins has spent the last seven years building against an absence.

As a girl, tackle football was not one of the futures made visible to her. There were no polished broadcasts, no professional pathways, no mainstream sports conversations that treated women in pads as inevitable. If women’s tackle football appeared at all, it was often treated less like a sport and more like a spectacle. For Jenkins, that lack of visibility was not small. It shaped what girls could imagine for themselves and what the sports industry felt responsible for building.

“When I was a kid, you just never saw women who played tackle football,” Jenkins says. “It just was not a thing. And if it happened to be a thing, it was always a gimmick and never taken seriously.”

That memory has become part of the foundation for the Women’s National Football Conference (WNFC), the professional women’s tackle football league Jenkins founded and now leads as CEO. Heading into its seventh season in 2026, the WNFC has grown into a 16-team league with players from 19 countries, streams games live and free on Victory+, and has brought its IX Cup Championship Game to ESPN2. The league also reaches more than 15 million fans across its social media channels.

For Jenkins, a former D1 athlete, the goal was never simply to prove that women could play football. Women had already been doing that. The task was to make the game look real to the world that had dismissed it, while building the structure that could turn participation into opportunity.

“When we built the WNFC, those were two things that I really wanted to address,” Jenkins says. “I always wanted it to look, feel, and be legitimate. It needed to look like professional football for the purpose of professional football because that would bring legitimacy. And [secondly], there was the awareness piece, the idea that women do want to play football, and there is a business that should be developed around it.”

That last part is where Jenkins’ vision lives because she has proven there is a business.

“I KNEW THE WORLD WASN’T READY TO HELP ME BUILD IT, SO I THOUGHT I’D JUST START WITH WHAT I HAD.”

Women’s sports are now being discussed with the kind of financial language that once seemed reserved for men’s leagues. Deloitte, which provides industry-leading audit services, projects that global revenue for women’s elite sports will reach at least $3 billion in 2026, a 340% increase since 2022. Nielsen reported that 46 billion minutes of women’s sports were consumed in the U.S. in 2025, a 71% increase in women’s sports minutes viewed from 2022 to 2025.

The numbers suggest a market correction, but Jenkins’ work asks a more specific question: If women’s sports are finally being valued, who gets to own that value?

The WNFC CEO saw the current boom before the broader market had language for it. To her, the rise of women’s sports is about more than viewership or sponsorships. It reflects a larger shift in how women are received in the world, especially in spaces historically built around men’s bodies, men’s labor, men’s fandom, and men’s dreams.