The Girls Academy (GA) is the premier youth development soccer league in the United States. With 11 conferences spanning the country and over 20,000 athletes, the league is now partnering with PhotoShelter to transform how it captures, manages, and shares the stories of its players and teams.
Driven by a passion for the sport and a commitment to female empowerment , GA needed a new approach to scale their marketing content and make a bigger impact.
With events and matches taking place nationwide, the GA team faced a significant hurdle: their best content was scattered across Google Drives, SharePoint, and freelancers’ hard drives. Currently, the team only uses about ten percent of the content they shoot for social media, while the rest remains untouched. To fix this, they needed a reliable DAM and distribution platform that could serve the league, the teams, and the athletes.
“I think searchability and having all of our content in one place was a big opportunity for us,” Eric explained. “We have such great history… but we really don’t have a capability right now to go back and say, ‘Okay, this former GA player was amazing today, but look when she was 13 or 14, playing with us.'”
“There are so many stories here, it’s almost overwhelming. We have around 20,000 athletes that play in Girls Academy and I wish I could tell wonderful stories about every single one of them. So now we’re figuring out how we can use this wonderful technology to allow them to do that.”
Now, with an automated workflow, GA will use PhotoShelter AI to identify and tag athletes and team logos to seamlessly deliver content to clubs, players, and partners without manual searching. With this process in place, highlighting the many stories in their community will be simple and scalable. Girls Academy will be able to get content into the hands of 20,000 athletes, giving them the tools they need to build their own brands.
“We’re proud to support Girls Academy’s meaningful mission and usher in a new chapter for the league,” said PhotoShelter CEO Andrew Fingerman. “Together, we’ll help elevate these young athletes by making it easier to deliver their stories to communities around the country.”
“The Girls Academy was founded on a belief that young women deserve platforms that elevate not only their performance, but their voices, their journeys, and their impact beyond the field,” said Patricia Hughes, Commissioner at Girls Academy. “This partnership with PhotoShelter represents a groundbreaking step forward in youth sports, allowing us to amplify athlete storytelling in ways that have never been done at this level. Together, we are creating opportunities for our players to be seen, heard, and celebrated, while empowering them to take ownership of their narratives and inspire communities across the country.”