Our Story
For Kathy, sports have always been about more than competition. Every team and every field gave her a community. It's where she found her people.
She had long admired The Sports Bra in Portland and what it meant to have a bar built around women's sports. Then she stood with more than 6,000 fans at the Richmond Ivy's first season opener. Seeing the city show up like that, she knew this could really happen here.
Richmond hasn't stopped showing up. The Ivy crowds keep coming, and that's just one team. Women are playing basketball, softball, hockey, volleyball and so much more at the professional level, and the fans who follow them want a place to come together too. Richmond fans deserve a place for us to watch together, where it's the focus not something you have to request.
After months of conversations, research, surveys, and community building and weeks with a small group of brand collaborators, Keepers was born. It's a place for all of Richmond to gather, celebrate, and cheer on our favorite teams together.
Meet Our Keeper
Kathy has always been an athlete. In her words, "if there was a sport around, I played it."
Baseball. Soccer. Basketball. Softball. Volleyball. Track. Tennis. Golf. Gymnastics. At the time, all of those teams were coed, so she played right alongside the boys.
Kathy was a multisport athlete through high school, but soccer became her focus. She played Division 1 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later she was called up from the W-League's Hampton Roads Piranhas to the Washington Freedom. The Freedom played in the WUSA, the first professional women's soccer league in the U.S., and was home to legends like Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach.
After soccer she took up adventure racing. It's an endurance sport where teamwork matters as much as individual performance, and success takes both brains and brawn. She started out joining teams that needed female teammates and eventually built her own. She raced competitively until 2014. Today she races for fun and mentors new racers.
In 2011 Kathy moved to Richmond. Once again, soccer is how she found her people. She formed a 4v4 women's rec team and coached her kids for several years. Recently she got back on the field as a goalkeeper, and she has loved every minute of it.
Outside of sports and her day job, Kathy spends most of her time with her wife and two daughters. She earned a BS in Civil Engineering and an MS in Biology. She puts her passion for environmentalism to work in river restoration and brings collaborators and community together by leading a local World Fish Migration Day event. (See her spotlight in the WFMD documentary Love Flows on YouTube.) She also co-founded Women in Stream Restoration (WiSR), a national professional organization.
Through it all, she saw how much had changed for women in sports and how far there was still to go. Keepers is the place she and so many of her friends, family, and teammates have always wanted. Here, women's sports aren't an afterthought.
They're the main event.