KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The 2026 Dick’s Varsity Team brought roughly 60 creators, athletes, and Dick’s employees to Tampa for three days at the end of April, year three of the social-first ambassador program.
- The roster ranged from Dancing With the Stars professionals to micro-account running creators to a four-person golf creator collective, with a portion of the group made up of Dick’s employees themselves.
- Seven brand partners (adidas, Under Armour, On, Free People, Stanley, Red Bull, and The North Face) built dedicated, integrated activations rather than sending logo-wrapped swag.
- Adidas’s “Seas the Day” yacht included Samba charm customization and U.S. ’94 World Cup jersey personalization, weeks before the 2026 World Cup kicks off in North America.
- Three brand marketing leaders independently described a “resonance over reach” creator strategy, validating the same philosophy in their own words.
I spent three days in Tampa at the end of April with about 60 other members of the 2026 Dick’s Varsity Team. I came home with new industry friends, plenty of content tips, and a clearer picture of Dick’s brand lifecycle strategy, with creators at the center of it.
There were two things almost everyone in the room had in common. We’d all played some kind of youth sport at some point in our lives, even if some of us were closer to little league grandparenthood than little league itself. And we’d all walked into a Dick’s Sporting Goods in the last year, most of us multiple times, plenty of us with kids in tow. The third thing, which I’ll get to, was that we were all members of the Varsity Team, which is the program that brought us together.
What the Dick’s Varsity Team Actually Is…
The Varsity Team is Dick’s “social-first ambassador program,” in the words of Nicole Marcus, Manager of Influencer Strategy at Dick’s. That description undersells it.
Members of the Varsity Team create content for the brand all year long. They get access to exclusive product drops. They get mentorship from industry pros and top creators. A portion of the team is made up of Dick’s employees themselves, people who work in stores and at corporate. That detail does a lot of quiet work. It means a meaningful chunk of the room is not flying in from a creator agency, they’re flying in from physical Dick’s Sporting Goods locations across the US.
“By bringing them into Varsity Team Orientation, we’re giving them direct, immersive exposure to the brands we carry, so they can take those insights back to the sales floor or corporate office and deliver an even more informed, authentic experience to the athletes we serve,” Marcus said.
The 2026 Team Captains run a wider range than most brand ambassador programs would attempt.
- Olympic gold medalist long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall and her husband, Paralympic medalist sprinter Hunter Woodhall, represent peak athletics.
- Coach Rac of the Savannah Bananas represents the sports-entertainment crossover.
- Emily Harrigan, a former soccer player turned content creator, represents the athlete-to-creator transition. The captains are not figureheads. They are the program’s thesis in human form.
The All-Star Roster
You could tell what kind of program this was just by looking at who was on the trip.
There were professional dancers from Dancing With the Stars in the room. There were micro-account creators just starting to find their voices. There was a four-person golf creator collective sitting at the same dinner table as a viral running creator known for democratizing the sport for slower paces. There were creators in their teens and creators in their forties. There was a mix of sports, lifestyle, fitness, fashion, and faith. There was no obvious hierarchy.
If you wanted to know what Dick’s actually thinks about creator marketing in 2026, the cast list told you. Reach was not the point. Range was.
Three different marketing leaders from three different brands made that argument in their own words across the trip.
- Nicole Marcus at Dick’s: “Influence in sport isn’t just about scale, but rather about connection and credibility within your community.”
- Sandra Blum, Marketing Manager at adidas: “Influence today is multi-dimensional. Reach matters, but so does trust, niche relevance, and cultural connection.”
- Tyler Rutstein, SVP of Brand and Americas Marketing at Under Armour, put it plainly: “A lot of people can have reach, but that doesn’t guarantee impact.”
Three brands. Three different framings. Same point. It was the unofficial thesis of the trip, and the room itself was the proof.
Brand Integration Masterclass
Most brand events involve a swag bag and a step-and-repeat. This one involved working partnerships.
The North Face anchored breakfast every morning of the three-day trip, a quietly persistent presence that was easy to take for granted until you realized that almost every conversation that mattered started over their coffee. Stanley owned the midday “Fun in the Sun” pool moment on day one, which functioned as the icebreaker for a room of strangers. Red Bull picked up the cocktail hour. Under Armour took over the evening with dinner at the Dick’s House of Sport and a panel led by Tyler Rutstein, joined by Coach Rac and rising star Kyle “KJ” Jackson, on the subject of authentic brand partnerships.
The Under Armour panel turned out to be the place the trip’s underlying philosophy got spoken out loud, on a stage, by a brand.
“Pairing Coach Rac and KJ Jackson together was intentional,” Rutstein told the room. “They are a prime example of how Under Armour thinks about partnerships today. We value multifaceted athletes and creators who can inspire the next generation in different ways. Their stories show the power of the sports-entertainment crossover and reinforce that there isn’t one path to impact.”
Day two belonged to adidas. The activation, called “Seas the Day,” took the team onto a yacht for what Sandra Blum described as “a fully immersive brand experience” months in the making. Adidas outfitted everyone head to toe. Creators customized adidas Sambas with personal charms, turning a generic shoe into a one-of-one keepsake. And in a detail that landed hardest in retrospect, every guest could personalize a U.S. ’94 World Cup jersey on board.
The U.S. ’94 jersey is not a random pick. 1994 is the last time the United States hosted a World Cup. The 2026 World Cup, which adidas officially sponsors, kicks off in North America in about a month. Many of the creators on the boat were not even born in 1994.
“That adidas does it best,” Blum said when asked what she wanted the team to remember six months from now.
Day two closed at the hotel with a dedicated evening hosted by CALIA, VRST, and DSG, Dick’s three in-house apparel brands. Worth noting, because elevating your own labels in front of a creator room of this scale is a deliberate move.
Day three was the Fitness Fest, co-hosted by On and FP Movement (Free People’s activewear line) and built around movement, performance, and recovery. It was the trip’s high-energy peak. The closing dinner that night was framed by Dick’s as a “Tunnel Walk Fit.” Tunnel walks are the NBA and NFL pregame fashion moment that has become its own cultural genre, and Dick’s borrowing that frame for the final night dinner made every member of the team the athlete arriving at the arena. The trip opened with a “First Day of School” dress code on Monday’s media day and closed with the tunnel walk. The arc was on purpose.
Dick’s Sporting Goods as the Lifecycle Brand
The clearest line of the entire trip came from Emily Harrigan, one of the captains.
“Dick’s has been woven into my story as an athlete, a coach, and a creator,” she said. “It’s a brand that has supported my love for sports at every stage.”
That is the thesis. Stripped of marketing language, the thing Dick’s Sporting Goods seems to actually believe about itself is that it shows up at every stage of a sporting life. The first tee ball cleats. The middle school basketball uniform. The high school running shoes. The college lacrosse stick. The adult half marathon. The masters race when you’re sixty and still trying to beat your forty-year-old self. The kid’s first glove, for the same parent who just bought the masters running shoes.
That is the brand strategy. The Varsity Team is one of the ways Dick’s is staffing that strategy with people who can tell that story authentically across an enormous range of ages, sports, and audiences. The reason the trip felt like summer camp is because it actually was structured like one: paid, equipped, and taught. The chemistry was downstream of the fact that everyone there was being treated as a peer worth investing in.
By Wednesday night, dressed in tunnel walk fits, hugging people we’d met a few days earlier, we were all leaving Tampa with about fifty new contacts in our phones who we’d already started calling friends.
Why the Industry is Watching the Varsity Team
Year three of the Dick’s Varsity Team put a fully realized creator program on stage for the rest of the industry to see. Dick’s brought 60+ people to Tampa, and seven brand partners (adidas, Under Armour, On, Stanley, Free People, The North Face, and Red Bull) built dedicated, integrated activations rather than slapping logos on the welcome bag.
The Varsity Team will keep growing. The program structure of pay, gear, and mentorship is going to get copied. But the harder thing to copy is the cast list, the captains, the chemistry, and the lifecycle of sport that Dick’s sits in the middle of. That part is not a slide. That part is a long-standing relationship with American families that nobody else in retail has earned.
Source: First-hand attendance at the 2026 Dick’s Sporting Goods Varsity Team Tampa Orientation, April 27-29, 2026. Direct interview quotes from Nicole Marcus (Manager of Influencer Strategy, Dick’s Sporting Goods), Sandra Blum (Marketing Manager, adidas), and Tyler Rutstein (SVP of Brand and Americas Marketing, Under Armour). Captain quotes from 2026 Dick’s Varsity Team program materials.
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