‘This is the time for women’s sports’: investor Deb Henretta backs US rugby

The term “angel investor” comes from 1950s Broadway, where eager producers sought wealthy individuals to get their plays off the ground. In the 1990s, such angels became synonymous with internet start-up culture. Now, Deb Henretta, a former Proctor & Gamble executive and habitué of Fortune magazine’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business, is playing such a role for a US sporting start-up: Women’s Elite Rugby.

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“I am a little bit of an angel investor,” Henretta says from her home in Cincinnati, via Zoom, “because we’re just getting started, and I happen to be someone who has an absolute love and passion for rugby.”

Henretta knew the game at college, St Bonaventure in New York, though not as a player. “When you went to the rugby games, there was a keg on the sidelines. And it really was a drinking event. I’m not sure I actually watched the game…”

She really picked the sport up through her children, who played in Singapore, at the American School.

“I love the development and the sense of community it gave them. I think they have incredibly strong values, good work ethic, a good sense of community, a good sense of helping others. I’d like to think my husband and I helped a little bit, but I think it was driven by the rugby culture. I think rugby is a little less of a hot-dog individual sport, because it takes the team to make the win, by and large, and I love that.

“I had an incredibly successful 30-year career with Proctor & Gamble and I know a lot about business. I know a lot about investing. I’ve been working the last 10 years both as an independent board director and also as an operating advisor for tier-one private equity so what I’d like to do with WER is not just be an investor but bring some of my business acumen, some of my investment acumen, so we can help drive this forward.”

WER, a women’s 15-a-side league, announced itself last spring. It is set to kick-off next year, semi-pro to start and with teams in Boston, New York, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Denver and the Bay Area, four coached by women, all arising from the structure of the amateur Women’s Premier League. In September, the Legacy Cup, a WER taster event for WPL teams, saw Colorado Gray Wolves beat Berkeley All Blues in an epic final in North Carolina.

For WER, funding began with a pre-seed round, raising $500,000 from Henretta and Chasing Rainbows, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that invests in companies with LGBTQ+ founders. Such efforts continue.

This year, the profile of US women’s rugby received a huge boost when the national sevens team took Olympic bronze in Paris. That success attracted an announced $4m investment from Michele Kang, owner of women’s soccer teams including the Washington Spirit. The Olympics also propelled the star player Ilona Maher to a Sports Illustrated shoot, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars and perhaps next The Bachelorette. Maher has also said she wants to play at the 15-a-side World Cup in England next year. After that, the World Cup will be in Australia in 2029 and then the show will come to the US in 2033, two years after the men’s event lands on American soil.

Asked how long it might take to establish WER, Henratta says: “This thing will take some years to develop. I don’t think anybody who’s going to come into this, from a management, a board, an investor position, is going to be able to look for a quick two- or three- or maybe even five-year exit from the investment. So I think it’s a bit of a longer-term build.

“But it’s exciting for me to see what the WNBA has done, what women’s soccer has done. It takes time, but I think we’re going to have to find our way to the investors like myself who are willing to make a longer-term bet, to try to build something extraordinary.

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“I think this is the time for women’s sports. Women’s sports are finally starting to take off in a big way. I mean, look at the WNBA. Look at what Caitlin Clark has been able to do for Indiana Fever. And when you look at women’s sports at the college level, to offset, from a Title IX standpoint, the large football teams, you need other women’s sports. And so rugby is starting to take hold.”

Henretta speaks proudly of her alma mater, the Bonnies, national small college champions last year. Members of that team and others like it will hope to challenge for WER contracts, maybe US Eagles caps too.

Angel investors do not seek large profits fast. Henretta knows, first hand, that establishing rugby in the US will never be close to easy. She previously joined up with the World Rugby Football League, which aimed to host, but cancelled, a million-dollar sevens event in New Jersey.

She was “looking for a sports investment. And I kept getting minor-league baseball teams and, you know, we’re not baseball fans. It just doesn’t hold my interest. So I ended up connecting through a private equity firm with [WRFL founder] Bill Tatham and we made a run.”

WRFL stumbled but Henretta found WER: “Some people play golf and they spend a lot of money on country clubs and golf clubs. And that’s not our thing. We love rugby. I’d love to give rugby a jump start here in the US.

“I did not want to go forward with the men’s rugby. And I’ll tell you why: because there are so many groups of people trying to make a go of men’s rugby, and they will not play in the sandbox together. And I tried my hardest to get some of these entities into a room, like, let’s figure out what we can do instead of spending money to compete against each other. Why don’t we pool our resources and see if we can’t get the sport established … you can’t compete with each other when you’re trying to get a league started in a sport that has lower awareness and lower loyalty … I just couldn’t seem to swing that.”

Related: The Breakdown | Women’s World Cup has the hallmarks of game-changer for rugby union

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For Henretta, what made WER different “is it’s a single-entity structure where you’re going to establish something, you’re going to work together with USA Rugby, you’re going to work together with global rugby as a unit dedicated to building the sport. Then when you’ve got the sport built, when you’ve got some loyalty to teams and some success with players, then you can either come up with a sort of NFL, NBA kind of structure, where you compete that way, or if you really feel you need to spin off and do an alternative league, go for it, but do it once the sport has awareness and it’s established.”

WER will be tested in the short term, as it attempts to establish itself and survive, and in the longer term, as that home World Cup approaches.

Henretta says she is “a passionate rugby person with the financial ability to to make some investments in the sport. I’d love to see nothing more than women’s and men’s rugby making a bigger impact.

“In the run up to the 2028 Olympics in LA, and also prior to the 2033 World Cup, it’s an exciting time. If rugby is going to make an impact and get something going, I think it’s going to be in this window. If we’re not successful, shame on us.”