​PORTLAND, OR — RAJ Sports and The Collective aren’t looking for a seat at anyone else’s table when it comes to women’s sports. They’re busy building their own and making room for other changemakers and visionaries.Team owners, athletes, investors and executives gathered around a table for the Women’s Sports Brunch during the second annual Epicenter Week in Portland, Oregon, bringing together a “really interesting group of women who are not just talking, but actually doing things to move the industry forward,” Lisa Bhathal Merage, governor and co-owner of the WNBA’s Portland Fire and NWSL’s Portland Thorns, said in her opening remarks on Friday, Aug. 2.As leaders in sports gathered at Han Oak in Portland, attendees shared ideas, built connections and bonded over their collective goal of making sure the momentum around women’s sports continues to grow.”The Collective has always created tables of inclusion and belonging with women and men from across all sorts of different industries that benefit women, but also benefit women’s sports,” Thayer Lavielle, managing director of The Collective at The Team, told USA TODAY Studio IX. “To be able to sit down with new friends and new faces with new ideas and new conversations is really refreshing.”Conversations, like the ones held over the weekend, have yielded ideas that came to fruition during Epicenter Week. Bhathal Merage said The Collective’s 2025 WNBA All-Star party in Indianapolis inspired the Women’s Sports Brunch. Similarly, a conversation over lunch two years ago sparked the idea for the Kaiser Permanente Performance Center in Portland, the first dual-sport practice facility built for professional women athletes that’ll serve as the home of the Thorns and Fire.”We’re making history,” said Karina LeBlanc, 2013 Thorns champion, Olympic bronze medalist and RAJ Sports executive vice president of strategic growth development. “To the women before us who weren’t even allowed to play, to the women who fought, to the next generation who now believe in what’s possible, thank you for showing up for all of us.”LeBlanc added, “Epicenter Week, for those of you who don’t know, was created to bring game changers to Portland. Game changers who didn’t just want to check (boxes), game changers who actually wanted to have conversations that mattered, conversations that elevated, collaborated and activated.”View this post on Instagram’Seeking our value’Lindsay Colas, the executive vice president of women’s sports and Olympics, kicked off the opening remarks at the head of the table. Colas is a pioneer in the women’s representation space. WNBA legend Diana Taurasi credited Colas with being one of the first to believe in women’s sports from a marketing standpoint, saying Colas “was willing to push boundaries when everyone else was afraid.”Colas likes to refer to herself as a “radical optimist” who didn’t want to follow the market, but create it. It’s the same fearlessness and tenacity that will push the industry