Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe mix business and pleasure

• Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe have launched a new production company.
• Bird recently retired from the WNBA after a 21-year career.
• The engaged couple explained why they’re so excited to work together.

Sue Bird, a four-time WNBA champion, and Megan Rapinoe, a soccer star, have launched a new production company. The engaged couple explained to news source why they’re so excited to work together.

Some couples Netflix and chill, while others brainstorm ways to completely rewrite the rulebook on how things have always been done.

We’ll give you three guesses as to where Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe fall. “I think back on the conversations that Megan and I have had just chilling on the couch, talking about our lives,” Bird, who recently retired from the WNBA after a 21-year career that included four championships, told in an exclusive interview.

“And a lot of it ends up being topics about challenging the status quo. And so now we’re actively going to be able to do that in a very public way through all of this content.”

In other words, our favourite athletic power couple has recently entered the world of content creation. The pair are shooting their shot with their new production company, A Touch More, in collaboration with TOGETHXR, the media platform Bird founded with fellow sports super stars Alex Morgan, Simone Manuel, and Chloe Kim.

The plan is to highlight stories from underrepresented communities such as LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and women, but mostly “what’s not being covered—the stories that aren’t being told,” according to Bird.

Their slate begins with “a sort of quintessential women’s sports story,” according to Rapinoe: the four-part audio documentary 30 for30: Pink Card, which follows the lives of Iranian women fighting for the right to simply watch soccer.

“Oftentimes, you only see the shining moment or championship or World Cup, but you don’t really understand all that it took to get there,” the two-time FIFA World Cup winner explained. “Female athletes, I think women in general to be honest, don’t really get to just do what they do. You’ve got to do 20 other things to just get yourself in a position.”

Noting that the world of women’s sports has a tendency to highlight a select few athletes (including, they admit, themselves), Rapinoe explained that their goal is “not to use the success that we’ve had to continue to gain success for ourselves or continue to tell our own story,” but “rather to do something much different and put eyes on things that we feel are really important or things that we know about, but not necessarily our personal stories.”

In other words, don’t get your hopes up for a Bird-Rapinoe reality show. (Because, yes, we suggested that they film their future nuptials.)

“A hard pass,” Rapinoe joked. “Whatever the hardest pass is, that one,” Bird agreed.

They had no reservations about working together professionally.

Since 2015, when she decided to stop playing overseas (“As a women’s basketball player, you play for the WNBA, then you go over to Europe—rinse, repeat for years and years and years,” Bird explained), the five-time Olympic gold medalist has been experimenting with different options for her life after basketball.

“I was really starting to try new things out, whether it was commentating, I worked in an NBA front office—just really trying to see what I liked, what I didn’t like, and go from there,” she explained.

In the past seven years, her perspective has shifted “and I think having the conversations that Megan and I have when we’re just chilling on the couch, you start to get to know yourself better, you start to see what interests you and this became a natural direction.”

It was an easy yes to do it with her favourite teammate. “I feel like we’ve both gained so much from the other person’s perspective, learning from it, and being challenged,” Bird said.

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Furthermore, they’ve already had plenty of practise. “I think all these conversations we had were like little mini business meetings,” Rapinoe said.

It’s just a bonus that their jobs will put them in the same zip code more often. After years of being at the mercy of “the schedule gods,” Bird joked, hoping that her home games with the Seattle Storm would coincide with Rapinoe’s games with the city’s OL Reign, “it will be good to have time together where we can kind of get more focused on things like this.”

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