Lea B. Olsen loves to love the game.

Basketball and journalism have been the invisible strings that have woven together so many important pieces of her life.

Invisible strings

Lea studied journalism at the University of Minnesota where she also played ball as a Golden Gopher. Her collegiate success was a natural lead-in to her impressive career in sports broadcasting. Lea’s taken on many roles in the world of Minnesota sports working as a broadcast analyst for the Minnesota Lynx and on ESPN’s WNBA coverage and as a sideline reporter for the Timberwolves. 

But one of her favorite gigs as a reporter came when she covered high school basketball state tournaments. 

“There’s an energy to these high school tournaments,” Lea told TeamWomen. “It’s seeing basketball in its purest form. There’s teams and bands that come from all over the state. It reminds me of why I fell in love with the game in the first place.” 

Restarting the heart of the game

Lea’s unique perspective of the game– a player, reporter, and eventually parent of players– revealed the toxic, competitive underbelly that exists in youth sports. 

“I was shocked to see some of the caustic and negative environments we expected our kids to thrive in,” Lea said of her children’s games. 

The negative atmosphere was highly competitive and rooted in disrespect from parents, officials, and team members.  

So she put on her journalism (ball)cap and started researching. 

What she found was a pervasive, nationwide problem. 

“I decided the way I could help was by using my speaking skills,” Lea said. 

Lea leveraged her love of the game with her skills as a broadcaster to formalize her work as a public speaker and create Rethink the Win, a resource for young athletes, parents, coaches, and professionals that challenges everyone to rethink the toxic mentality of  “winning at all costs.”

“This sport has brought so much value to my life,” Lea said. “It brought me confidence as a 6’1 12-year-old girl! There’s so much these young athletes can gain and learn about themselves.”

Rethink the Win aims to help kids and teens do exactly that.  It’s about facing failure and working as a team– all those intangibles that make sports a truly beautiful thing. 

“[Rethink the Win] is a platform for me to use to get into these spaces and serve the community and serve people.”

A champion of teams and women

The invisible strings that tie Lea to TeamWomen are cut from the same cloth. 

Lea has been a part of TeamWomen from the beginning. She worked closely with longtime Gophers basketball coach, Pam Borton, to create the concept for TeamWomen before it launched officially in 2012. 

“We had all these conversations about how women can feel so alone in different phases of their careers, in different phases of life. We wanted to create something that would help women navigate those spaces,” Lea told TeamWomen. “There are so many different questions and needs that are sometimes left unmet without a team like TeamWomen.”

Throughout the years, Lea’s involvement with TeamWomen has evolved, but it was her connection to Executive Director Katy Burke that tied it all together. 

“Katy’s pure commitment to serving women in the community has really inspired me,” Lea said. 

So much, in fact, that Lea has made her work as Emcee of TeamWomen’s Empower Gala part of how she gives back to the community.

This November, she’ll reprise her role as Emcee. 

The Empower Gala is TeamWomen’s biggest fundraiser that helps support women and girls. 

The gala includes speakers from each of TeamWomen’s programs: Leadership Development, Empower Leadership Academy, and the Mentor Program.

Helping women and girls rise together 

The TeamWomen’s  Empower Leadership Academy was created for youth in grades 5-12 that include teams, clubs, and other groups.

The Empower Leadership Academy champions girls and teens to:

• Develop leadership skills
• Build self-confidence
• Speak in public with confidence
• Learn the skills to develop resilience
• Learn to handle stress, pressure, and high expectations
• Develop mental toughness
• Develop emotional intelligence
• Identify strengths and values
• Set and achieve goals  

Each year the Empower Gala hosts a diverse panel as the main program of the event.

The panel features the diversity of the TeamWomen membership, highlighting the members’ wide-ranging experience and many different phases of life. The panel represents all women– from CEOs to young women who attended our Empower Leadership Academy.

“It’s really powerful to me to get those impacted by TeamWomen’s programs on stage together, especially the young girls. To have the hundreds in the audience to see they have the skillset and the confidence to participate in the discussion is exhilarating,” Lea said. “You see them growing up while they’re on the stage talking. They always share these nuggets of wisdom.”

In 2023, the young women on the panel shared their insights about the impacts of social media– how it makes them feel and how it affects their lives. 

“It was impactful,” Lea said. “There was this organic synergy from everyone in the room. To me, that’s the purpose of the mission of TeamWomen at its greatest moment.”

To learn more about TeamWomen’s work with girls and teens, visit our website and learn how to become a member. To learn more about Lea B. Olsen, visit her website.