This year, we’re celebrating Brooke Faw as a member of our class of Women Who Lead Sports. Brooke’s journey to the sports industry didn’t start in an arena or a front office. It started in a kindergarten classroom in Indiana. Today, she’s senior vice president at Publicis Sports, a sports marketing agency, and nearly 20 years into her career she’s focused on making the industry easier to navigate for the women coming in behind her.
For the Love of the Team
Brooke has always been an athlete, but it wasn’t the game itself that drew her to a career in sports. “More than the love of the game, it was really the love of the team,” she says. Growing up in team sports taught her to rely on other people and showed her what it meant to have a group at her back. When she started thinking about work, who she would be doing it with mattered more to her than what she would be doing. The sports industry, which takes so many different groups of people to pull off, was a natural fit.
From Kindergarten Teacher to Sports Partnerships
Brooke began her career as a kindergarten teacher and high school basketball coach in Indiana, where basketball is a way of life. She still jokes that if she can get a room full of five-year-olds to listen to her, she can handle professional athletes.
When she moved to Charlotte, she knew nothing about NASCAR. But many of the parents in her classroom worked in the sport, and through them she began volunteering for several drivers and their foundations. One of those drivers knew that a Charlotte hospital system was looking for someone to run its sports partnerships, and he pointed her toward the role.
Her timing was good. Brooke arrived as Charlotte’s NBA team was transitioning from the Bobcats to the Hornets, a full overhaul of the name, the colors, and the arena. Her organization became one of the first brands to put its logo courtside. The team was owned at the time by Michael Jordan, and she remembers the Michael Jordan family clinics, which offer free care in the areas of greatest need, as a highlight of that work.
From there she moved to the agency side, joining a startup that was acquired 12 years later by what she describes as the largest global media agency in the world. “It’s just been such a wild ride to be that kindergarten teacher from Indiana to where I am now,” she says.
Partnerships with Purpose
At Publicis Sports, Brooke helps brands decide where they should be in sports and why, then how they should show up, through activation and hospitality. She also builds partnerships that give the agency’s clients a first look at unique opportunities.
What she finds most rewarding is putting the reach of athletes and teams behind something important. Athletes are widely recognized and widely listened to, and she has seen what happens when that attention is pointed at a good cause. She recently worked on a cancer screening campaign with athlete ambassadors. Afterward, people wrote back on social media to say they had gotten screened because of it, and some said they had caught something early.
“Sports actually has a huge ability to impact humans, and that’s what I love,” she says.
Midwestern Roots
Brooke credits her parents for her ambition and work ethic. Her mother was a school principal and her father worked at General Motors. The family always had enough, she says, but they worked for everything they had. Her parents taught her never to forget where she came from, which she knows is easy to do in a world of athletes and polished social media content. They also taught her to be kind. She can be direct when she needs to be, but Brooke intentionally leads with kindness, and she has found that people respect it and want to work with her because of it.
Becoming the Mentor She Couldn’t Find
Seventeen years ago, the first time Brooke walked into the NASCAR garage, she was asked whose girlfriend she was. When she said she was there to work, she was asked whose PR rep she was. While she respects both roles, it was frustrating that they were the only two options for a woman in the garage.
She worked with two men who became huge influences on her career. Still, there were things they could sympathize with and not fully understand, so she asked them to help her find a female mentor. She gave them five criteria. The mentor had to be a woman, married, a mother, attractive, and kind. Each one reflected something Brooke was navigating herself, from the strain travel puts on a marriage to new motherhood to leading with kindness in a tough environment. They searched and found women who met three or four of the five. They never found one who met them all.
Years later, Brooke was telling that story in an interview while driving her son to soccer practice. He spoke up from the back seat: “But mama, that’s you.”
It changed how she saw her own career. “While I may not have been able to find her, my whole goal in life is for no one to be able to say that they can’t find her behind me,” she says. She is a mother who leaves at three to make her son’s soccer game and does not apologize for it. She leads with kindness. She has seen real change in nearly 20 years, and although there is a long way to go, she is proud of the women who stuck it out so that those coming in behind them have an easier path.
What Ambition Really Means
Brooke thinks ambition has been a tricky word for women, and that it shouldn’t be. “Ambition just at its core means that you have drive,” she says. It means knowing what it takes to get from A to B and getting there as directly as you can. She hopes women’s ambition can be seen for what it is: wanting to make the world better in whatever industry they work in.
Because so much of family and home life tends to fall on women, she thinks of it as something larger than professional ambition. For her it’s about making life as good as it can be, and then having the time to enjoy it.
Advice Worth Passing On
Brooke shares some words of wisdom. Early on, she tried to do everything herself and wore being busy as a badge of honor, until she ended up in the hospital. That was when she learned to delegate and rely on her team, and to lean on her strength as a teacher. Today she calls that team her pride and joy. “Doing it all is not the flex that you think it is,” she says.
The second piece of advice is the simplest: treat people the way you want to be treated. You never know what someone else is carrying, she says, and a little benefit of the doubt goes a long way. It is how she has built real friendships across the industry. “People are not transactional. They are people, and they need to be treated as such.”
Just People in Sports
Asked how she hopes to inspire the next generation of women in sports, Brooke looks further ahead. “I hope there comes a day where it’s not women in sports and it’s just people in sports,” she says.
She sees reasons for optimism in the WNBA, the NWSL, and the new women’s leagues that keep launching. Until that day comes, this Women Who Lead Sports 2026 honoree plans to keep being the person she once went looking for.