A local by-women, for-women sports news outlet began as a typical girls’ night, with a bottle of wine and an order of takeout between friends.

Ellen Hyslop, Jacie deHoop and Roslyn McLarty, then working in the financial services sector, were talking about a recent Toronto Maple Leafs game at McLarty’s house one night in February 2017.

Hyslop was explaining why it was a big deal the playoff-bound Leafs were performing well in what was supposed to be just the beginning of a long-term rebuild.

At that point, it dawned on both McLarty and deHoop that the sports headlines had come up in meetings or at lunch at work. “Both Roslyn and Jacie were like, ‘Hey, this would have been so great to know going into my day this morning,’ ” Hyslop recalled.

The exchange reminded Hyslop, a native of Hamilton, of how other friends came to her for their sports news rather than visiting traditional sports media outlets. It was then she realized there was a gap for sports news specifically catered to women and people who are more casual sports fans.

Another bottle of wine and a Google Doc full of ideas later and the three friends had the beginnings of what would become The Gist.

Launched last December with an initial group of 500 people subscribed to a weekly newsletter, the co-founders say the website and its corresponding social media platforms are “growing rapidly,” though they declined to give subscription numbers.

The aim is to build a community of sports fans, predominately made up of female millennials, by highlighting female athletes and using a female voice. Traditional websites can be intimidating for readers new to sports and make assumptions about fans’ knowledge base. The tone of The Gist, which is more conversational than what is produced by more traditional outlets, was particularly important to the co-founders, who took inspiration from websites like The Skimm, Betches and Girlboss, and brands they believe have “really connected and resonated with other female millennials,” DeHoop said.

“It’s just about how sports can really unite people,” deHoop said. “Just feeling like, ‘Why do so many women not feel that confident in their sports knowledge or not feel like sports is something for them?’ ”

All three women, 26, are graduates of Queen’s University’s commerce program. In the early days of The Gist, they were working in corporate positions in male-dominated settings — Hyslop as an underwriter at Chubb Insurance, deHoop in management consulting at Optimus SBR and McLarty in financial due diligence for mergers and acquisitions with PwC.

Sports was regularly water cooler talk, they say, and all three saw how knowledge about the games could help build relationships with colleagues and clients.

“Just being able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, did you see the game last night?’ Or, ‘Hey, here’s a joke meme of (Blue Jays pitcher) Stroman on the mound’ and being able to have that personal relationship actually really escalated the professional one because there, all of a sudden, ended up being that level of trust,” said Hyslop, who believes her career benefited from her sports fandom.

Today, The Gist includes a section called “Gist U” with guides, glossaries and frequently asked questions about basketball, baseball, hockey, football, golf, soccer, tennis and rugby.

They all now work at The Gist full time after leaving their jobs this past spring when they were selected among five Canadian startups to participate in the Digital News Innovation Challenge, an incubator program put on by a partnership between Ryerson DMZ, the Ryerson School of Journalism and the Facebook Journalism Project to support Canada’s emerging news innovation startups.

Getting selected meant mentorship, office space and funding: $100,000 in cash and $50,000 in Facebook and Instagram ad credits.

The program helped the three friends get “comfortable being uncomfortable” as entrepreneurs, said deHoop. After launching their “minimum viable product” in December 2017, The Gist used the incubator funding to launch a new website, newsletter and Instagram account in July.

It was on Instagram that Khanh Be, the manager of marketing and partnerships at the Ontario Soccer Association, first came across The Gist. She’s a fan of the contextual information she gets in a bite-size format on their social media platforms and the friendly, irreverent and informal tone of the newsletter and website. Be believes the site is less intimidating for someone just getting into sports or who wants to know more to participate in those office conversations.

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“(The Gist is) good at celebrating women’s success stories that are out there but also (giving) commentary about why it’s a good win for women,” Be said.

Sports, Be believes, is a connector. She agrees it can help build relationships and help people advance in the workplace, but adds that sports also intersect with any number of topics — politics, business, fashion and social issues, among others — so being part of the chatter doesn’t necessarily mean knowing who scored the big goal the night before.

“People, especially women, shouldn’t be intimidated about having to be a sports follower because there are so many ways for you to consume the content even peripherally and still enjoy it and be a part of the conversation,” she said.

Sonia Kang, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and HR management at the University of Toronto, said The Gist could be a good tool for women who are interested in cultivating a shared identity based on sports in the workplace. But she cautions against impostor syndrome, no matter an employee’s gender.

In today’s workplace culture, people are looking for the ability to be authentic and reveal their true identity, she said, rather than conform to what those around them are interested in.

“It’s fine for women who are generally interested in it, but for those who are just doing it as a means to build relationships or as a mean to get by because they have literally nothing else to talk about, it’s not going to help them to truly feel like they’re included and valued and really have a shared identity,” Kang said.

The co-founders of The Gist have started to develop a community of women in Toronto who do share that identity outside of the workplace. A recent hockey pool was a particular highlight of the startup’s first full year in business: 40 women — 35 of whom had never participated in a hockey pool before and few who knew each other before that night — gathered with their laptops and binders full of information and left with a fantasy team of their own and a number of new sports friends.

Going forward, Hyslop, deHoop and McLarty plan to expand The Gist into audio and video content, hoping to draw in secondary markets, and are looking to set up shop in two cities in the U.S.

While they believe there is more opportunity for The Gist than they may have thought during the girls’ night that sparked the whole operation, they won’t forget their original objective to offer sports news from a female perspective that makes the reader feel empowered, not inadequate.

“That kind of encapsulates everything that we’re trying to do,” Hyslop said.