are you looking for a queer women's sports community?

the Out of Your League Discord has you covered!

Thanks for being here! I am a full-time freelance sports writer. Paid subscriptions to this newsletter allow me to dedicate more time to this work, including hiring an editor to help me with longer, more involved posts. This financial support will also help me shoulder the costs of my planned move to Beehiiv later this month, which has been a long time coming.

Paid subscribers also have access to a Discord server where we chat queer women’s sports (more about that below), as well as events like our monthly book club. You can upgrade here:

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When I launched the Out of Your League Discord server back in April, I had no idea whether anyone would actually join. Building out the community elements of this newsletter—the book club, the virtual events, the Discord—has felt incredibly vulnerable in a way that starting the newsletter itself never did. Even if no one ever really read what I wrote here, I could still publish it.

But the community events require people to actually show up. And announcing these events to my 3,500+ subscribers and having them fail was something else entirely—like throwing a birthday party that no one shows up to (or, in my case, having a bachelorette party only one person attended). It would also have meant that I had wildly misjudged the interest and engagement my subscribers were looking for. I was having very what if no one actually likes me??? fears. It felt risky!

However, I also had a feeling that the Substack chat function couldn’t contain the kinds of ongoing conversations that sports fans like to have, and I also knew that my readers watched a huge range of different sports—many more than I was able to cater to with our open threads and live watches. I decided to take the leap and launch a Discord server, which would also allow me to build a place for community and conversation that existed outside of Substack for when I moved my newsletter off this platform.

Thankfully, as with the OOYL Book Club, people have shown up. We have 100 members, which is about a quarter of all my paid subscribers. We have nuanced conversations, we shit talk, we shit post, and we watch games together. Some of my favorite journalists (and yours!) are in the community with us, providing insight and answering questions. People who met in the Discord have become IRL friends, attending games together or meeting up at a local bar to watch an event.

The Out of Your League Discord server has quickly become my favorite place on the internet. But don’t take my word for it; take theirs:

@backstagekath@Frankie is cool and the people in their discord are cool and sports are cool #wnba

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Or take this, the gayest thing I’ve ever seen happen: someone mentioned their ex-wife’s current girlfriend… and said girlfriend turned out to also be in the Discord.

You get bonus analysis from me on a Saturday morning, which some people think is worth the price of entry.

And we’ve got inside jokes for days (and yes, a channel for showing off your Lego builds, if that’s your thing).

We’d love it if you joined us; I swear we don’t bite. Just click the link below, and come introduce yourself! We’ll be there.