Tyler Rutstein, SVP of Global Brand and Americas Marketing at Under Armour, joined the Jr. Sports Marketing Podcast to detail how the brand is competing for the next generation of team sport athletes. Five things worth pulling out:
1. Flag football sits at the center of the football strategy, not the edges. Rutstein said Under Armour treats flag as a primary objective within football. The brand has signed Deanna Flores, captain of Mexico’s national team, along with Team USA’s Ashley Clam and Isabella Galarza, and is funding grants plus coach and referee training ahead of flag’s Olympic debut at LA 2028.
2. The Super Bowl spot was a 20-year callback rebuilt around girls. Rutstein said Under Armour reinvented its Click Clack ad for its 20th anniversary through the lens of women’s flag football, with the athletes texting him how they wanted the game portrayed, including an SEC-level atmosphere in the campaign’s aura sequences.
3. Athlete camps are being produced as content properties. Justin Jefferson’s Flight School convened 25 of the country’s top high school receivers, per Rutstein, with a Cam Ward quarterback camp at Under Armour headquarters and a Bobby Witt Jr. shortstop camp in the pipeline. The stated model is to turn each camp into an episodic YouTube series with social cutdowns, built on an NFL Films style access approach.
4. Under Armour will service athlete IP it does not own. Rutstein pointed to Coach Rack’s Not Your Average Baseball Camp and Deanna Flores’ flag camp in Mexico City, which he said has run three years and hosted roughly 75 girls at its latest edition, as partnerships the brand supports without owning the property.
5. Owned content is framed as a media efficiency play. Rutstein said inviting the NFL, conferences, teams and outlets like Overtime onto set makes media dollars work harder through organic coverage. He named the underlying tension directly: consumers now pay to avoid ads, while his job is to reach them.
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