Gaming Society is a new company, founded by Kevin Garnett and Jaymee Messler, that focuses on inclusivity in sports betting. It recently added Derek Jeter, Sheryl Swoopes, and Chelsea Gray to its advisory board and formed a partnership with the University of Las Vegas’s International Gaming Institute (IGI) to study the behavior of female sports bettors.
Jeter helped Messler to found The Players’ Tribune in 2014. Swoopes won three Olympic gold medicals in women’s basketball, plus four WNBA championships and a three league MVP awards. Gray, who plays for the Las Vegas Aces, won an Olympic gold medal and is the current WNBA Finals MVP.
Gray said in a press release: “There’s a real need for betting education, not just amongst fans but amongst athletes too.” She added, “The opportunities in the sports betting and gaming space are endless — and women’s sports stand to benefit immensely through this innovative approach to fan engagement.”
IGI Executive Director Brett Abarbanel told US Bets that the UNLV Gaming Society partnership is a natural. “We have aligned goals in exploring how betting can support the growth of women’s sports in a sustainable, responsible manner. We look forward to collaborating on this under-discussed area in our existing educational programs, including IGI’s International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking.”
IGI and Gaming Society began talking about the partnership several months ago. Abarbanel told US Bets, “Dr. Nancy Lough, who runs our sports research and innovation initiative, the managing and marketing side of that, she’d been doing research in women’s sports for her entire career.” Abarbanel said. “She mentioned to me that there was only one dedicated center for the study of women’s sports in the whole U.S. — and that’s more for performance. It’s the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. There’s nothing on the business of women’s sports, and sports management has long been Nancy’s biggest interest.”
They will work with various market research groups “to find out who these women are who are betting on sports, what their motivations are, what they like about different sites,” said Arbarbanel. “Since we made this announcement, I’ve had outreach from a couple different groups offering up their data — everything from player behavior to payments and banking instruments — to think through how women sports bettors spend their money through the broader scope of gambling.”
