Wave Sports & Entertainment is reaching new heights in podcasting, and not just with Jason and Travis Kelce’s hit show.
The digital content company behind shows like the Kelce brothers’ New Heights (which was acquired by Wondery for $100 million, but which Wave still produces) and Carmelo Anthony’s 7PM in Brooklyn has been riding a wave of interest in sports podcasts. But, like a handful of other companies in the past year or so, the Wave team realized there was some white space to be filled: podcasts by and for women’s sports communities.
That’s not just because of the growing interest in women’s sports among fans—women were already tuning in to Wave’s existing talk shows in a noticeable way.
“What does this slate look like in [terms of] success as we continue to scale?” Tunde St. Matthew-Daniel, Wave’s EVP of original content, told Marketing Brew. “We knew for talk shows, the woman audience is there. We’d seen that on our existing shows as well, even the ones that were male-led.”
Since last fall, Wave, which was recently named one of Time’s most influential companies of 2025, rolled out three new shows—Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce, WNBA star Cameron Brink’s Straight to Cam, and House of Maher featuring Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher and her sisters. All three saw near-immediate advertiser interest: Each show had seven figures in brand deals before any of the content went live, Ryan Jann, head of strategy and revenue, told Marketing Brew.
The no-brainer
When the Wave team decided to get more women behind the mic, they started by keeping it in the family and reached out to Kylie Kelce, a field-hockey coach and wife to Jason Kelce. One of Kylie’s guest appearances on New Heights resulted in a particularly high-performing episode, according to Jann, so giving her a show of her own was “a no-brainer,” St. Matthew-Daniel said.
After its release last winter, Not Gonna Lie reached No.1 on the podcast charts, topping even Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the show, which has landed high-profile guests including Michelle Obama and Kate Hudson, has continued on to average over 26 million social views a week, according to Wave.
The show has also attracted brands like Dunkin’, which saw over 132 million social impressions for a campaign that ran in episodes and on social, per Wave, and Hasbro, which partnered with Not Gonna Lie to announce that Peppa Pig character Mummy Pig was pregnant via a mock-interview segment.
Kristin McKay, SVP and GM of global brands, fashion and preschool, at Hasbro, told us that the timing and brand fit of that campaign “could not have been more perfect.” Kylie was pregnant with her fourth child at the time, and her family are fans of Peppa Pig, McKay said—plus, the crossover between sports and parenting content allowed the Peppa Pig brand to stretch a bit beyond its usual audience reach, she added.
The campaign earned attention from lifestyle and entertainment outlets that “don’t typically cover preschool brands,” and it ultimately generated over 13 billion impressions with over 700 earned media placements, McKay said, making it one of the most “widely talked-about announcements we’ve ever made.”
The straight talker
After Not Gonna Lie took off, Wave rolled out Straight to Cam, the show hosted by Brink, who plays for the Los Angeles Sparks, and Sydel Curry-Lee, a former college volleyball player and Stephen Curry’s sister. Like Kylie, Brink had also previously engaged with Wave as a guest on one of its shows (in her case, Paul George’s Podcast P), and St. Matthew-Daniel said his team started proactively discussing a show with her after that. They also had a sense that a WNBA-related show might perform well, since Wave had partnered with the league a few years ago to create content under Wave’s Buckets basketball vertical, Jann said.
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“We knew women’s sports worked with the audience that we were reaching on social,” he said. “That, along with different marketers and advertisers looking to spend around women’s sports and female-led hosts that touch the sports audience…was a big business reason that we wanted to pursue some more female hosts.”
Straight to Cam saw about 10 million views during the week of its debut alone, with sponsors including Anthropologie and AI search engine Perplexity signing on. Brink shares WNBA and basketball insights on the show, but her stories stretch beyond the W, St. Matthew-Daniel said, and Wave’s social strategies help amplify those stories beyond the podcast.
“We have a great muscle for building new audience pipelines via these social channels,” Jann said. “Straight to Cam is on YouTube for an hour a week, but our team is so good at clipping that out…to drive consistent consumption across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, wherever it might be.”
The yappers
Some hosts are social experts themselves, like Maher and her sisters, who host Wave’s most recently released women’s sports show, House of Maher. That’s part of the reason Wave wanted to work with them, despite having no previous relationship, St. Matthew-Daniel said.
Maher, who has an Olympic bronze medal in rugby sevens, is “one of the most marketable young athletes” in the country, he said, and she has 5 million followers on Instagram and another 3.6 million on TikTok.
“What really stood out to us was less of the athlete stuff, as remarkable as that is, and more of the human side of her and how much she connects with people of all different backgrounds,” St. Matthew-Daniel said. “Her social content at the time showed that.”
There’s plenty of rugby talk on the show, he added, but it largely centers around the Maher sisters’ dynamic, making it as much of a “yap session” as it is a sports podcast. Within two weeks of its release, House of Maher saw over 11 million views across social platforms, and the show landed Samsung as a launch partner with a $1.6 million deal, Jann told us.
The primarily women audiences for the three shows mark a shift from the company’s previous work, but it’s one that the Wave team plans to continue leaning into, St. Matthew-Daniel said. In other words, expect to see more content in the women’s sports space, as well as non-sports content like pop culture and comedy shows, to come.
“It’s got to be shows that we believe in, that are going to have a community and an audience that love them, as well as the business upside,” he said.