Objective

The modern sports landscape has produced a new archetype: the athlete-creator. 

Not just a competitor, but a media brand. Someone whose platform extends the reach of sport into culture, community, and commerce. 

Stephania Ergemlidze is one of the clearest expressions of this archetype in women's sports today. 

Stephania has developed a sport-first creator strategy that builds on her athletic credibility while expanding her cultural footprint into the broader sports media and fan engagement ecosystem.

The @basketball platform (yes, she owns @basketball on TikTok and Instagram) is a high-visibility social presence that Stephania cureates and stewards. It has become a central vehicle for Stephania's expansion specifically and that of athlete-creators in general. 

Objectives were: 

1. Build Stephania's individual brand as a top-tier athlete-creator in the women's sports space. 
2. Develop the @basketball platform as a culturally significant destination for basketball fans across genders and demographics. 
3. Secure sport and lifestyle brand partnerships that reflect Stephania's athletic identity and growing influence. 
4. Establish Stephania as a thought leader in the athlete-creator space — someone who models what sports content can look like when it centers women with the same energy and investment as men. 
    

The broader mission: demonstrate that women in sport are not a niche. They are a growth category, and creators like Stephania are the reason why.

Strategy

The strategy for Stephania in the sports category was built around two pillars: platform and positioning. 

To position Stephania within sports culture as a creator whose opinion, personality, and perspective draw audiences regardless of gender, we needed to build a content identity strong enough to carry a major platform handle.  

@Basketball Platform Strategy: Develop content programming for the @basketball handle that reaches the widest possible basketball audience: NBA and WNBA coverage, viral moments, skills content, and cultural commentary. The strategy was to make Stephania's voice synonymous with the platform: not a guest contributor, but the defining personality audiences associate with it. 

Athlete-Creator Identity: Beyond the platform, develop a personal brand content strategy for Stephania that integrates her competitive athletic identity with her creator voice. Training content, game coverage, athlete commentary, and personal storytelling were woven together to create a consistent, compelling presence across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. 

Brand Partnership Development: Identified and secured sport and lifestyle brand partnerships for Stephania that reflected both her athletic credentials and her creator influence. Every deal was negotiated to protect her authenticity and ensure that commercial integrations felt native to her existing content voice. 

Cannes Lions & Industry Positioning: Stephania was actively positioned as a speaker and thought leader in the creator economy and sports marketing space. Her participation in industry events (including Cannes Lions 2026) extends her influence beyond the court and into the rooms where decisions about creator investment, brand partnerships, and women's sports are being made. 

Challenges: One consistent challenge is the perception gap between how sports media values male and female athlete-creators. This was addressed head-on using Stephania's audience data, engagement benchmarks, and the explosive growth of women's sports viewership to make the investment case to brands that had historically underweighted this space. 

Cultural Impact: Stephania's growing presence in sports media is part of a structural shift. It's a proud moment to be building her platform at a moment when the sports industry is finally ready to see what she and athletes like her have always been worth.

Results

Born with a physical disability (severe clubbed feet, told by doctors she'd never walk, let alone play sports), her platform leans heavily on a perseverance narrative.

• She reaches 6M+ followers across platforms, best known for her viral series dragging a portable basketball hoop through city streets for spontaneous 1v1 games.
   
• Following George Floyd's killing, she took her hoop to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Minneapolis (the center of the protests) as a way to unite people through sport, which is more of a social-unity/community angle than a clinical mental health one.
   
• She also runs WeSee Movement and describes her work as "leading a sports for change movement," with stated passions in social impact, female empowerment, and social justice.
   
• Recently won Sports Creator of the Year at the Shorty Awards and has spoken at things like the NBPA Performance Summit in Spain on tech and athlete performance

All contributing to demonstrating that women in sport, championed by athlete-creators, are a growth category.

Media