Growing up as a queer Latina in Southern California, Karina Martinez found comfort in playing sports in high school. Martinez, who came out as queer at 16, felt alone in a school of 700 other kids who were either straight or closeted. But when she played sports, those feelings of standing out went away. “When I played sports for that hour or two a day, I felt like everybody else,” she tells Refinery29 Somos.
The power of sports also aided Jennifer Yepez-Blundel’s personal development. Yepez-Blundel started playing volleyball and softball as a kid and continued to do so in college. When she chose sports marketing as a career, she realized her experiences as an athlete and multicultural perspective as a second-generation Mexican American were important for storytelling in a field that remains mostly white and male.
Despite having such strong connections to this world from an early age, Martinez and Yepez-Blundel didn’t feel represented as Latina women who play and enjoy watching sports. Throughout their adult life, they realized that Latinas are rarely in the spotlight in sports media. They didn’t even seem to exist to the rest of the world. But Martinez and Yepez-Blundel knew from experience that Latina athletes were key to the sports landscape — with their own fervent fans serving as proof of their importance. However, they also face access barriers that are specific to the intersection of gender and ethnicity — this invisibility only makes it more difficult for them to overcome these roadblocks. To address this gap, Martinez and Yepez-Blundel founded Drafted, a media company that focuses on highlighting Latina athletes and creating a community of Latina sports fans, in April 2023.
“As a Latina, you face systemic barriers whether you want to play [a sport] or whether you want to work in the sports industry.”
Jennifer Yepez-Blundel
“As a Latina, you face systemic barriers whether you want to play [a sport] or whether you want to work in the sports industry,” Yepez-Blundel says. “Girls stop playing sports at a younger age than boys; they start dropping off around the age of 14, and the rates for Black and brown girls are even higher. There are core cultural beliefs, stereotypes, and interpersonal messages that really deter the success of girls in sports, and that affects the entire [sports] pipeline. If you’re dropping out at 14, you’re not playing in high school, in college, or at [a] professional level. Beyond that, we know most female executives have a sports background, so there are a lot of barriers in place for Latinas.”
In Drafted’s first attempt to highlight Latinas in sports, Martinez and Yepez-Blundel focused on producing stories about Latina fans. Despite the lack of these stories in sports media, these first few videos, posted on Drafted’s Instagram, didn’t perform as well as they hoped. Martinez and Yepez-Blundel wanted their storytelling to draw in women like them so they could build a community of Latinas who love sports. They eventually wanted to show sports media and brands that Latinas can make a difference in the industry, both as talent and as an audience. But the fan experience angle wasn’t landing.
“We thought: ‘Okay, then what’s the missing piece?’” Yepez-Blundel says. “Then we started to test stories about the Latinas who are actually in the world of sports, whether they work in sports, whether they’re athletes, or coaches. That’s when our community really lit up because there hasn’t been any place where these stories had been told. And for us, as soon as we saw engagement grow and the audience [was] just completely enamored by the stories that we were telling, we knew that we were on the right track.”
“There are core cultural beliefs, stereotypes, and interpersonal messages that really deter the success of girls in sports, and that affects the entire [sports] pipeline.”
JENNIFER YEPEZ-BLUNDEL
Whether it’s highlighting Sharlize Palacios, who Spotlight America recently ranked as the ninth-best softball player, or spotlighting Latina FIFA referee Carolina Briones, Drafted focuses on making the work of Latinas in sports visible. And the feedback from Drafted’s audience indicates that people are hungry for this kind of content.
“The feedback has been honestly overwhelming,” Martinez says. “Jen and I are just constantly humbled because we’re getting daily DMs and emails about what this means to [Latinas] because they never saw this kind of content before. They’ll say, ‘If I knew that there was a Latina sports reporter, maybe I might have changed my major.’ Through our storytelling, they can see a version of [themselves] doing something that has never been shown to them before.”
A key part of Drafted’s mission is building a community of Latina fans and athletes who show that Latinas are a cultural force that the sports industry can do more than harness into brand deals and PR campaigns — they can also hire them. Though the company doesn’t directly address machismo and marianismo in its mission, Yepez-Blundel says it counters those cultural forces by insisting that Latina representation should penetrate the higher echelons of the industry.
“We’re getting daily DMs and emails about what this means to [Latinas] because they never saw this kind of content before.”
Karina Martinez
“We need to be reflected in all spaces, including sports. And if we’re not, it’s a big problem,” Yepez-Blundel says. “Especially if you’re looking at soccer, we do have cultural, sometimes stereotypical, ties to the actual sport. But if you’re looking at the professional sports of soccer right now, specifically on the women’s side, where are all the Latinas? That should be a space that we’re dominating, right? Where is that representation reflected in the executive suites and team ownership? We’re looking at it [from a perspective] of, ‘We exist. We play these sports.’ We love sports brands and teams who are happy to take our money. We need to be in these positions of power. We need to be the players on the field. We need to be reflected everywhere because we exist. We’re here.”
The founders are also invested in expanding Drafted’s storytelling to tell tales different from their own because they recognize that being Latine isn’t a singular experience. They also want to challenge some of the more problematic parts of Latinidad, such as the pervasive issues of colorism and racism. Yepez-Blundel’s background in diversity, equity, and inclusion ensures Drafted’s output is diverse and inclusive, as well as an attitude of cultural humility to understand that Latines have varied experiences.
“We need to be reflected in all spaces, including sports. And if we’re not, it’s a big problem.”
JENNIFER YEPEZ-BLUNDEL
“[We are] really looking at our audience through a wider lens, and [we have] an empathetic mindset of, ‘I only know my lived experience, but that’s not the only experience that exists,’” Yepez-Blundel explained. “We understand as leaders and founders of this company that our Latina experience isn’t the only Latina experience. Latinas are moving in the world and they are facing racism, they are facing colorism, not only outside of the community but also sometimes in the community, on top of gender inequities. We need to have an awareness and a humility about us, we need to showcase everybody’s story.”
Next on the horizon is to build a community of Latinas, both online and in-person. The storytelling was just the bait to attract an audience. In 2024, Martinez and Yepez-Blundel started hosting online and in-person events in L.A. with Latina professionals in the world of sports to show Drafted’s audience how to break into the industry. Their guests talk “intimately” about their experiences in the workplace and in building a career. In the long term, the company hopes to build a prototype to galvanize the resources in one app.
“We work with a Latina professional, and we have intimate conversations about her experience, her journey, and what it’s been like to be the first, or the only, or to break barriers in that role,” Martinez says. “Through in-person events, which we started to do throughout L.A., and will continue to pop up throughout the U.S. for the rest of the year.”
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