Why did I start a pro track team?

10 years ago I graduated from Florida State University and decided to keep training post-collegiately to try and make the Olympic team in 2016. I didn’t know anything about the world of pro running, but one thing I was sure about was that I wanted a team. Being a part of a team has always been so important to me. Those team wins at ACCs were so much more important than any individual title. When I went pro, it made sense to me to choose the coach I wanted to work with and help him build out his growing women’s team. 

The women athletes of the 2015-2021 era of the Bowerman Track club built the brand inside the brand- the Bowerman Babes. But when I left the team, I had to leave all that behind. I might have had a hand in building it, but I didn’t own it.

In 2021 I signed a 4-year, no-reductions deal with a dream brand: lululemon. To this day I still feel so lucky to have one of the coveted track and field partnerships with lululemon despite all the athletically rocky years we’ve endured together since my signing. lululemon sees me as more than a runner, more than an athlete, and we have been telling some great stories and building incredible communities ever since. 

But there was always one thing missing. While lululemon is a great partner for me and they let me choose my coach, they don’t have an organized team. Without a team I have felt truly lonely, floating around on my own as an individual athlete for the first time in my life. I wrote THIS newsletter back in May of 2021 inviting all of my followers who were working hard towards a big goal on their own to be a part of my team so that we could work together. I got SO many positive responses from that post- it was a good reminder that I’m not the only one who thrives in community with others.

This next section is going to explain some of the finances behind how pro teams are mostly set up AND address the gender inequality in coaching at the pro level

Let’s start with a deeper dive into the finances of pro track teams. Imagine you own a shoe company and you want to have a pro track team. You have to pay the coach, an assistant coach, each individual athlete, a certain amount of travel and healthcare expenses for the athletes and coaches, as well as a content/media team to market the team. For a full team operated by one brand, you’re looking at around $2M to do it right. And they’re usually not even providing mental health support, financial wellness support, etc. Are these shoe companies really seeing a big enough return on their investment to justify this? I don’t see it. To be fair, it’s a lot for one brand to take on.

From the athlete perspective, tying a coach to a shoe brand can often completely destroy your negotiating power. If a shoe company knows you want to work with their coach, they can make you a lowball offer and if you believe that’s your best chance of making an Olympic team, chances are you’ll take the deal and they know it. Athletes often have to make hard decisions around sacrificing a paycheck in order to work with a particular coach.

So the first thing I wanted to prioritize in a new team would be the ability for every athlete to choose their shoe sponsor. And with Meridia a shoe sponsor is still the main way that athletes support themselves financially. It’s important to me that the footwear sponsor decision is not tied to the team or the coach so that an athlete can decide who they want to partner with AND who they want to coach them without running into a conflict.

The second thing I wanted to see was a female coach. I worked with a badass female coach in college, and then worked with all male coaches as a pro. It wasn’t until last year when I took a hard look around at the different options for coaches and teams that I realized… where are all the pro female coaches in distance running???? In the fall of 2024 when I was looking, there was only one woman who was the head coach of a team: Joan Hunter had her own team in Colorado, Tinman Elite, which has a partnership with Adidas. and while Tinman had a program where they were offering athletes stipends to be on the team, it certainly wasn’t enough to live off of. So even if I said “I want to work with Joan,” (who is awesome, btw) I would be limited to working with Adidas. There are other female coaches coaching pro athletes as a side hustle in addition to their job coaching in the NCAA or coaching age group athletes, but the coaches who are hired by shoe companies to do their own team are all men.

Now there is one other female coach being paid by a shoe company. It was such a big deal when Nike announced at the beginning of 2025 that Diljeet Taylor would be a Nike-sponsored coach. I can assure you that the lack of female representation in professional distance running coaching is not for lack of talent. This could be a whole other article, so I’ll leave it there for now.

To review:

An an athlete, I want to choose my coach. And I want to choose my brand.

In 2021 I had made those 2 choices, but then I found myself floating, unmoored and lonely. I wanted a team so badly but wasn’t willing to give up my non-negotiables. And I knew I wasn’t the only one.

THAT is why I built Meridia.

Meridia is built by athletes for athletes. We train together and work hard together every day. Beyond that, we are in control of what the team brand looks like, how we tell our stories, and what brands we want to partner with to tell those stories. Athletes are truly at the center and get to make 2 of the most important decisions an athlete can make in this sport: who they want to be their coach, and who they want to be their main sponsor.

My personal coach, Juli Benson, coaches 5 of the 6 athletes on our team right now. One athlete has a different coach who is the right fit for her, which is perfectly fine by us. We collaborate on workouts as much as possible, and go to lengths to support each other as much as we can. We all know how hard this sport is even with proper support. Nobody wants to do it alone. 

My dream for Meridia long-term is to provide a holistic support system for athletes. Not just training partners and brand-building, but a whole ecosystem. Even when athletes do get contracts, they don’t know who to turn to for advice on how to set up an LLC, how to set up retirement accounts, etc. Mental healthcare is another BIG one. Athletes are at the forefront of the mental health conversation to help normalize these topics, yet we largely still don’t have access to the resources we need to handle things like injury, the transition from college to pro, the depression that often follows an Olympic games. There are so many ways we as a team can fill these gaps for athletes. And since Meridia is made by athletes, we know exactly where those gaps are.

We don’t know exactly where Meridia will take us. This has truly never been done quite this way before. The athletes are making the rules. How do we decide on new team members if there is no coach making that decision? Can someone get kicked off the team? Does every athlete have to promote every brand Meridia partners with? What does the revenue share look like? 

My answer to the athletes: What do you think? How do you want it to work? We make the rules, we get to decide how it “should” work, not some old white guy working in an office in Beaverton, OR who we only speak to a few times a year.

I’m so excited to finally be able to share this team with the world and invite people to join us in the movement. We hope you want to be on our team and be along for the ride. If you do, we’d love to have you.

We are Meridia.

We were never meant to wait for a lane.
We make our own.

How can you get involved with Meridia?

Run with us! The Meridia Mile is a virtual mile event we our hosting as our way to invite you to join us and run a mile from wherever you are in the world on Aug, 9th. Once you sign up, you will be entered in all the weekly brand giveaways hosted between now and Aug 9th. The giveaway winners will be picked randomly from the entries and announced over IG live every Sunday (you’ll also be notified over email if you miss the live) and we have prizes from tons of our favorite brands like lululemon, AG1, Runna, ROKA, WHOOP, Strava, Hyperice, Momentous, Cheribundi, Bose, and more!

Once you sign up, you will also receive regular emails from the athletes of Meridia guiding you through your training for the Meridia Mile. We will give you sample workouts you could try as well as recovery tips and tricks so that you can crush it on race day.

Entry is only $20, and you can add on a shirt as well as 1:1 coaching with my coach, Juli Benson, or another member of the Meridia team if you want extra support! We are here for you!

FAQs about Meridia

Q: Where did the name come from?

The naming process was actually way harder than I expected! I naively thought that while we talked to athletes, ideated on what the team would look like, nailed down our values, and talked about our team culture, the name would just sort of come to us… not the case. So we hired a creative company to help. They came up with a whole list of names… we hated each and every one of them. Womp. So I hired someone else who came recommended. He came up with a bunch more names. Some were okay, but nothing struck us as “that’s it!” So we went through at least 3 more rounds of ideas before the word “Meridia” came up.

Meridia is a made up word. It comes from the word “meridian” which has a definition of a “high point, peak, or apex”. It also can mean “a channel in the body through which energy flows”, which I really love too. We dropped the “n” off the end to form Meridia so that it sounds more feminine since we are a female-founded team. Meridia also sounds like it could be the plural form of meridian, signifying how an athlete has multiple high points throughout her career.

After we picked Meridia, I hired a creative agency called Eat to help us develop our brand identity. That process took about a month and was SO fun! The brand we came up with doesn’t look like any other running team or sports team really. It’s a blend of athlete and artist and gives us exactly the kind of “different” we were looking for.

Q: Where is the team based?

Most of our athletes live and train in the Boulder/Denver area. However, we won’t limit ourselves to one location. Again, this team is built by athletes and we make the rules. If an athlete is a great fit for our team but needs to be based elsewhere, we can accommodate for that and expect the athlete to join us for high altitude training camps in Colorado when they can. I’ll still be based in LA, for example, but will spend a lot of time in Boulder going forward. We will also host a team retreat in the offseason to spend quality time together as a team.

Q: How will the team make money?

For my business-minded folks, Meridia has 3 ways we will make money to fund the team’s operating expenses and pay the athletes. 1. Events like our first virtual event, the Meridia Mile. For $20 you can sign up to join our community and run a virtual mile with us on Aug 9th. We have a ton of brand giveaways for those who enter, so make sure you sign up right away as the drawings will happen every week! 2. Sponsorships with non-endemic brands. There are so many brands who have never even gotten the chance to invest in a pro running team because of the way most teams are owned by shoe companies. If we do a good job of telling our athletes’ stories and building community around the team, we can market ourselves to brands in categories like travel, wellness, tech, finance, beauty… the options are endless! 3. Merchandise sales. I cannot wait to get our merch store live! We will be selling premium merch on our website later this summer. Drop us a note to let us know what kind of merch you would be most excited to see/use to rep Meridia!

We want to hear from you! Drop us a note using the link below…