Women's Pro Profile: Nashville Nightshade
Meet Jen Stewart, player on the Nashville Nightshade women's professional team, and learn about the exciting story behind their formation. The team was initiated by owner Dave Tourette as a response to community calls for greater gender equity in sports. Watch as Jen shares her vision for creating a sustainable league model that prioritizes player exposure and fan engagement. Joining Jen is Coach Toby Bowser, who discusses the team's unique approach to competition, experimenting with different rules and referee systems to better suit professional women's ultimate. The conversation touches on topics such as equitable playing conditions and the potential for their league to inspire change in the ultimate community. With a focus on growth, fan engagement, and player success, the Nashville Nightshade is poised to make a lasting impact on women's sports.
Watch pro women's disc golfers in action on challenging courses. Get to know Nashville Nightshade competitors like never before.
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my name is Jen Stewart I'm a player on the nightshade this year I've played also my first beat for ten years in Nashville and so I'm excited to have a professional women's team here in my hometown the owner Dave Tourette who owns the Nashville Nightwatch as well basically kind of called on some of the women in the community to have a gender equity kind of meeting and he really wanted to kind of hear what we had to say in terms of how he could contribute to that or be a part of it and this is kind of what came out of it as far as a women's professional team we're really putting forth kind of a business model which other teams can follow and it's really important that we do everything correctly and hopefully we can start to form more structure for a league other cities long term viability and sustainability because people really want to watch it and our players really deserve the chance to play in front of fans especially with the exposure that they need and haven't gotten for years we're now providing that and I think that's so valuable my name is Toby Bowser and I'm one of the coaching staff for the Nashville nightshade well we can actively make that call we've played different rules almost every game that we've played when we played in Indianapolis it was entirely referee game players could not make any calls when we played Atlanta this past weekend referees were there but they were much more like observers and so it's been also great to kind of see what might fit best for professional women as a you know as opposed to just the standard a UDL rules I know there's a lot of debate in ultimate community about what would be equitable and granted you know what we have right now is not completely equitable but it's a heck of a lot better than anything we've had before and you know I'm interested to see kind of how showing that the Night Shade and the Raleigh radiance and these other women's teams can exist and can bring in fans I think will provide a lot of platform for growth maybe a mix maybe in women's maybe also in men's um in the future
