Trisha Goyal is the CEO and Founder of Break Sports.
In 2019, Trisha Goyal found herself faced with a problem that many casual adult athletes face: she wanted to get back into playing tennis but didn’t know how.
(Disclosure: Caroline Fitzgerald served as a consultant for Break The Love in 2022.)
“After a 9-to-9 day, I was a little tired of having to go to the gym alone. I was looking to get back to the sport I grew up playing, which was tennis,” Goyal said. “I realized it was really difficult. Either I had to join a physical club in one location, or I had to go online and find a stranger to connect with.
Goyal quickly realized that the problem she was experiencing wasn’t just hers: it was a problem shared by many of her friends and colleagues.
“A lot of my friends were actually asking me ‘how do I get into tennis?’ or “where should I go to learn?” That’s when I started Googling and realized there was a gap in education and empowerment – because it wasn’t easy to find. “learn these sports online, and in 2019 you had to pick up the phone to schedule and book a class,” Goyal said.
From this collective frustration a business idea was born: Goyal saw the opportunity to create a business that would make it easier for people to practice sport. In 2019, Goyal got to work creating Sports breakand since its official launch in 2020, the platform has become one of the largest social online sports booking platforms for casual gamers in the United States.
“You can think of us as ‘Meetup.com’ meets ‘Mindbody’ for sports,” Goyal said.
Best known for their Break love A platform for those who play racquet sports, Break Sports offers social sports experiences in 35 states where casual athletes can book, show up, play and meet new people. To date, Break Sports has served more than 360,000 users in the United States, primarily in racquet sports (tennis and pickleball) and golf.
Merging sport and culture
For Goyal, Break Sports is about more than just playing sports – as adult recreational sports leagues and platforms certainly existed before Break Sports entered the market. His vision for the company is to make sports an integral part of popular culture.
“Bringing pop culture into our messaging is truly at the heart of our DNA: from the people we hire, to the people we collaborate and work with, to everything we put out into the world,” Goyal said. “I knew that for a new audience to discover who we were, I would have to speak their language and so we would always mix content and collaborations that leveraged not only sports but also pop culture; from fashion trends to people in pop culture who weren’t actually athletes and much more to get in front of non-athletes.
Break Sports has found success by leveraging experiential partnerships at events like Art Basel and collaborating with brands like Liquid IV, Bumble, Blank Street, Alo, Lillet and Walmart to showcase at unique ways where active adults are already working and playing.
A female founder in a male-dominated space
Data shows that being a female founder is no easy task. In numbers only 2% of all venture capital funding goes to female founders, despite data showing that female-led start-ups generate better business results per dollar of funding than male-led start-ups.
“Women-led startups earn $0.78 for every dollar of funding, more than double what male-led startups earn,” Goyal said. “I think female founders are really scrappy and are able to do a lot more with less.”
Goyal and her team have certainly generated incredible business results despite the systemic challenges of being a women-led sports business. Break Sports has seen revenues double year-over-year and is currently heading toward all-time eight-figure revenues. Break Sports’ lead investors include the Dassler Family, Antler Ventures, Lake Nona Fund, Behind Genius Ventures. Goyal was also named the first Sports scholarship from the Tory Burch Foundation in partnership with Billie Jean King.
On the horizon
With interest in women’s sports growing globally, Break Sports continues to see growth, particularly among its female-identifying users.
“54% of our users identify as female, which is pretty exciting. This is generally reversed with other types of booking platforms in sports,” Goyal said. “We are excited to increase female participation across all sporting categories as we continue to grow and now see growing interest in women’s sports at all levels,” Goyal said.
Break Sports has begun its expansion beyond its core racquet sports offering, to test golf within golf with Breaking the birdie. In 2025, Goyal and the team plan to innovate in more team sports, particularly football and basketball, building on the interest they generate among casual female athletes.