How fans helped build the Denver Summit FC brand

Denver Summit FC has yet to make its debut on the pitch, but the club has been years in the making.

The Summit, one of the NWSL’s two expansion teams for the 2026 season, wasn’t officially awarded its bid for a franchise until last January, but fans and other stakeholders had been organizing around women’s soccer in the city since at least 2022. By the time the franchise was announced last year, fans were so involved that they went on to help shape the brand of the team, from its name to its ethos, Jen Millet, president of the Denver Summit, said.

“Soccer, I feel like more than any other sport, is very community-minded,” Millet, who was previously COO of Bay FC, told Marketing Brew. “That is definitely true here in Denver, and so really leaning into this community, in a sense, to help crowdsource our visual identity, but also our brand values, [made sense]. The upside of that is being able to put forward a visual identity and a brand narrative that resonates with people, because they were part of the creation of it.”

Given the passion that’s typical of many sports fans, branding or rebranding a team can be a difficult task that risks provoking outrage, as the NWSL community well knows. So far, though, Millet said Denver Summit ticket and merch sales indicate that involving fans in the process can pay off.

Team effort

The origins of Denver Summit started with a volunteer-based community movement called For Denver FC, which was designed to bring women’s pro soccer to the city. So when the team at Skylark, a boutique agency that helped design and promote For Denver FC, started building the Denver Summit brand, they knew they needed to give the Colorado community a say in the process, Skylark Managing Partner Brendan Hannan said.

That was especially true of the name, which is why they put together a poll to pick. Out of more than 15,000 votes, Summit proved a clear favorite, he said.

“Naming anything, whether it’s your dog, or your baby, or a professional soccer club, is certainly challenging,” Hannan told us. “It was really important to the ownership group and to everyone involved to make sure that that feedback was given.”

The club’s colors and logo were not decided by fans, but are still meant to be “very Colorado” to make it easy for the community to identify with the team, Hannan said. Green and white, the colors of Colorado license plates, are both prominent on the crest, which depicts a mountain range, while a less-prominent sandstone color nods to the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheater.

“You can definitely see it as a bumper sticker on the back of a Subaru, or somebody’s wearing a Patagonia vest and they’ve got a Denver Summit FC backpack,” Hannan said. “It blends into the sensibilities that Denver has to offer.”

Keep climbing

Fans didn’t tap out after casting their votes for the name. When the team hosted a block party to introduce the branding in downtown Denver, more than 4,000 people showed up, according to Hannan, and last January, the Denver Summit surpassed 5,000 season-ticket deposits in three days, a record for an NWSL expansion team. The club had more than 16,000 season-ticket deposits by early November, and sold more than 25,000 tickets for its first game at Empower Field at Mile High in just about a week, Millet said.

Merch also flew off the shelves, Millet said. “We worked with our operator to order almost two to three times the [amount of] gear they have seen women’s teams sell in the first month, and we were sold out in a day,” she said.

As for sponsorships, CommonSpirit Health has already locked up the naming rights for the Summit’s performance center, and Millet said she’s hoping to announce some additional partners early this year. In the midst of inking brand deals, she’s not forgetting about the team’s original partners—its fans—and said she is focused on creating the best experiences possible for them at each match of the first season.

“We have some really strong commercial indicators of success, and as much as we’d like to say it’s because we're geniuses…what we’re geniuses about is not messing it up, and being super true to these folks that were the early adopters of the club,” Millet said. “They’re our best brand-builders.”