Lauren Gilbert Is Building the Next Play for Women in Sports

Interview by Holly Arend | Nov 10 2026

Gilbert lost her last game at Northwestern on a goal with 1:03 left, kept playing when there was no clear path forward and named her company after the lesson she is still learning.

Growing up in Lake Oswego, Oregon, just outside Portland, Lauren Gilbert had a clear picture of what she wanted. She watched Mia Hamm and the 1999 U.S. women’s national team, the first female athletes she remembers actually seeing in the media. When the team played in Portland, she wore her Hamm jersey and red, white and blue face paint. She was all in.

She saw herself in Hamm. “She started out as scrawny and fast, less technical like me, and eventually blossomed into a world-class soccer player, which gave me hope that I could do the same,” Gilbert said.

Her parents, who met at Dartmouth, where her mother played field hockey and her father played football, encouraged her to try different sports and find what she loved. For most of her childhood, that was soccer. In eighth grade, she wrote a letter to herself, to be opened at the end of high school. “By now you will have fulfilled your dream of becoming a Stanford soccer player,” it said.

Lacrosse was the fun sport. That changed her freshman year of high school, when she started for her team, scored two goals in the state championship game and played for a coach who had played at Dartmouth, one of the few in Oregon who had competed at that level.

“I got so hooked on that feeling of doing something hard with a group of people that I felt really passionate towards,” she said.

Growing up on the West Coast meant she did not have the same exposure to the major East Coast programs as many of her peers. When her parents signed her up for a Northwestern camp the summer after her freshman year, she was a 15-year-old still developing her skills. She knew almost nothing about the program. She remembers an 80-degree day, a field right on Lake Michigan and a team of women playing at a level she wanted to reach.

“I was really just an athlete and a competitor,” Gilbert said.

She was not the most polished player at camp, but she was willing to work for the opportunity. Afterward, she reached out to the coaches, expressed her interest and sent film. When the staff wanted one more look at her at the Presidents Cup in Florida that November, no Oregon team was going. So Gilbert joined a Seattle club, and she and a teammate drove 3½ hours to Seattle for practices.

Northwestern recruited her after that tournament. She committed in December of her sophomore year, having just turned 16, standing in her high school gym with her dad when the call came.

Not everyone around her had believed it would happen. People in the Oregon lacrosse community had nudged her toward schools that seemed more within reach. Nobody put it that bluntly, she said, but she got the message. Proving people wrong became part of her identity as an athlete, and it still is.

“It’s a blast to shock people, to hear their criticisms … but then to lock in and not stop until they eat their words,” she said.

By the time she opened that eighth-grade letter, she was headed to Northwestern to play lacrosse. Her sister ended up at Stanford, playing lacrosse, too.

The Northwestern she arrived at was not quite the one that had recruited her. The Wildcats had won seven national championships, but while Gilbert was in high school they stopped reaching the Final Four, and the coaches wanted it back badly.

Gilbert’s freshman year was difficult. Playing midfield, shuttled in and out in fast shifts, she could not find a rhythm, and her playing time shrank. After one game, she said, her coach told her she was not good enough to be playing, and that she would not play “until I could show up as the player she knew me to be.”

For someone who calls herself a perfectionist, it was the first time she questioned whether she belonged. It also taught her that more work was not automatically the answer.

“You can go and take 100 more shot reps every single day, and if you don’t fix your mindset, it’s not going to fix the problem,” she said.

She called home. Her parents told her she could have the mindset of “I don’t know if I can do this,” or the mindset of “Why not me?”

She spent the following summer in Oregon training with her father every day. That fall, her coaches moved her to attack. After scoring three goals as a freshman, she started all 21 games as a sophomore and scored 52. Northwestern returned to the Final Four and upset top-ranked Maryland for its first Big Ten championship. That season, she said, was the springboard to becoming a captain.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the 2020 season. Players did not know whether they would receive an additional year of eligibility, and Gilbert worried she might not have enough time to leave the mark she had hoped to leave at Northwestern.

She eventually received that extra year.

By 2022, Northwestern was an underdog again. One of its best players was injured, and the Wildcats had lost badly to North Carolina earlier in the season. Gilbert is proud of one detail: Northwestern was the only team in the Final Four without a single transfer, while UNC had added several transfers from top programs.

In the quarterfinals, at home against Syracuse, she scored four goals, added an assist and reached 100 points for the season. She finished the year with 79 goals and 106 points and was named a first-team All-American.

“I felt like I was playing the best lacrosse of my life,” she said. “I felt like I had dreamed of this moment of winning a national championship and getting us back there for so many years.”

Her final college game came against North Carolina in the NCAA semifinals on May 27, 2022, at Homewood Field in Baltimore. The Wildcats came out strong, building a 6-0 lead in the first quarter. Then lightning stopped the game for 1 hour, 36 minutes, interrupting the momentum Northwestern had built.

When play resumed, Northwestern kept its pace. The Wildcats led by eight in the third quarter and carried a 13-6 lead into the fourth. Gilbert scored five goals, and for a team that had spent the season being underestimated, the championship game was right there.

Then North Carolina scored nine goals in the fourth quarter. Sam Geiersbach’s goal with 1:03 remaining gave the Tar Heels a 15-14 win.

For Gilbert, the loss was not just the end of a season. It was the end of her college career, in a game where she felt she had played her best, on the biggest stage she had reached.

She had gone, as she put it, from “this nobody from Oregon into the leader of this national powerhouse program.”

“If my dreams were a cloud in the sky, I felt like I was literally touching it, and it was all within grasp,” she said. “And so it was really gut-wrenching.”

For a while, she could not be around the sport. “It actually was really hard for me to kind of be around lacrosse initially after this because I just was truly heartbroken,” she said.

Then came graduation, and with it the loss of a community and a routine that had shaped nearly every part of her life. As a student-athlete, she had a nutritionist down the hall, academic advisers, coaches and trainers. Her team was a built-in social circle. There was a schedule, a role and a clear sense of where she belonged.

Almost all of it disappeared at once.

“I think it’s unacceptable that it goes from 100 to zero with nothing in between, honestly,” Gilbert said. She’s quick to add that it isn’t just a Northwestern problem. She thinks every athletic department should be doing more.

“You just feel like you’re a part of something incredible, and then suddenly you’re discarded,” she said. She described going from insider to outsider, “as if you’re banging on the window and no one can hear you.”

That did not mean walking away. About a month after her last college game, Gilbert was playing for Athletes Unlimited, a summer league where players drafted their own teams each week. It kept her on the field, but it did not feel like the meritocracy she had grown up in, and it put off the hard part. She grieved Northwestern first. When that first season ended, it finally hit her that she wasn’t just an athlete anymore.

There also wasn’t much of a pro career to step into. “I’m 22, 23, and literally at the top of my game. I haven’t even hit my athletic prime yet,” she said.

Her working life started more predictably. She knew she wanted sport to stay part of it. “I knew I wanted to at least marry my career with sport and with what I cared about in some way,” she said. An immersion project with Under Armour’s consumer research team during her master’s program gave her that, and it turned into a full-time job.

She started coaching on the side, which was harder than she expected. “I want to be the one being coached still,” she said. “I want to be the one playing.”

Northwestern won the national championship in 2023, the season after she left. Watching from the sidelines was difficult, even as she celebrated the program’s achievement. Over time, she came to see part of that title as hers, too. She had helped lift the program back toward the top, even if she wasn’t on the field when it got there.

Over the next few years, she kept finding ways to play. She played in Japan, helped organize an Athletes Unlimited exhibition at Sandstorm, the West Coast tournament she grew up playing in, and sat on the league’s Player Executive Committee, which gave her a closer look at the business side of women’s sports.

She later moved to Athleta, where she worked in athlete partnerships. She was also still figuring out who she was beyond performance. “I put so much of my self-worth into who I was on the field,” she said.

At Northwestern, a bad game could feel like her whole world was crumbling. It took distance, and a life in San Francisco outside the sport, to find a healthier balance. She thinks it has made her a more resilient athlete.

In fall 2025, a little more than a year into the Athleta job, she was affected by a layoff. The company was working through a tough business climate and leadership changes, she said, and the cuts hit the marketing organization hardest.

For a long time, she did not talk about it. “I have definitely hesitated to talk about this because I felt a lot of shame around it,” she said. As a perfectionist, she first read it as her own failure. She worried it would undermine her credibility if she then started a business.

“Like, who am I to go off and start a company?” she said. “And it’s like, who am I to not?”

Part of the problem, she thinks, is how people present their careers online. Nobody, she pointed out, posts on LinkedIn: “Happy to announce that I was just laid off.”

Her first instinct was to replace the structure as fast as possible. She went full throttle into interviews and got a job offer in women’s sports that she believes would have been great. She turned it down. An idea had been building since her time on the brand side, where she watched companies with enormous resources miss with female athletes and consumers in ways that seemed obvious to her. She started Next Play Creative instead.

In a way, she had been here before. She describes her years of playing after college, when the professional game was still taking shape and she often didn’t know when or where her next game would be, as “kind of my first taste of doing something that I felt very passionately about without a super clear roadmap forward.”

What scared her most was the loss of structure. In a traditional job, she said, there is a boss, a performance review and a clear sense of how you are doing.

“It’s just a lot more black and white,” Gilbert said. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re living in the gray.”

“I’m going to sit down at my computer, going to apply for this LLC, I’m going to build a website from scratch,” she said of starting out. She did not yet know any of the people who are now on her team.

At first, Next Play was a solo effort. Then creative partner Jessica Cox reached out because the mission resonated with her. Gilbert thought Cox would help refine the logo and branding. The work went well enough that it turned into a much bigger role.

“I think that was the first moment where, even though it was just two of us, I felt like I had a team,” she said.

The core team is now four women, including former Nebraska track and field athlete Cami Merickel and photographer Maxine Parkin. Gilbert said bringing in women that talented and thoughtful has been the most gratifying part of building the company so far, and a sign she’s on the right track with the gap she set out to fill.

“Entrepreneurship is a team sport,” Gilbert said.

She often returns to Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” passage, which she and her team have adapted to the woman in the arena. To her, the critics are easy to picture: people “watching your highlight reel from their couch with their popcorn, who have never played a sport in their life, and are telling you why you did the wrong dodge.”

She isn’t shy about how big she wants it to get. She grew up near Wieden+Kennedy, the Portland agency behind so much of Nike’s advertising, and calls it the gold standard.

“I still want to win,” she said. “I’m a competitor, and I want to build a successful business. I don’t think there should be any shame in that.”

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Four years after her last college game, she is still playing, now in the Women’s Lacrosse League. Like the other players in the league, she said, she works another job. Hers is Next Play. She trains on her own.

She drives to random fields around San Francisco to get her work in, hopping a fence if she needs to. “I don’t have a coach. I don’t have a trainer,” she said.

The professional game is still young, and players don’t always know what the next season will look like. Gilbert sees the upside in that, too: the chance that “this could become something really exciting.”

Lacrosse returns to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, and at almost 28, Gilbert is pursuing a spot. She didn’t expect to still be playing this long.

The name Next Play comes from the athlete’s mindset: miss, let it go, attack the next one. It has never come naturally to her.

“If you’re trying to be a lethal goal scorer and you can’t get the first shot where the goalie stuffed you out of your head for the entire first half, you’re not exactly on your way to becoming that,” she said.

Coaches call it having the memory of a goldfish. Gilbert takes it a step further.

“It’s also liberating yourself to attack what’s ahead,” she said.