Steph Yang Hopes to Bring Honor to Us All
“If you don't take the chance, then you're just a coward"
A club hiring a communication director is not normally something that garners excitement from fans — or intrigue in general — but Steph Yang isn’t your typical hire.
Yang is a staple of the women’s soccer space. Her storytelling ability took her to the pinnacle of journalism, being paid to write about women’s soccer full-time for The Athletic.
But for Yang it all started covering the Boston Breakers a decade ago for some random site on SB Nation called The Bent Musket (RIP). The founder of the site reached out to Yang as he noticed her impressive work on social media.
“I got to shout out Steve Stoehr, who was like, ‘Hey, we see you around socials. We need someone else to cover games. I can't lie. I can't pay you,’ like they gave me like 50 bucks a month at some point, which is not even enough for like an MBTA pass but I was like, that's cool, no one's ever paid me to write about soccer.”
From there on Yang got fully ingrained in the beat. She didn’t have to pay for tickets to see the club she loved and she got to be in the press box (albeit a shipping container press box). While it is easy to romanticize the grind and the come-up, Yang jokes that she doesn't miss it.
“I have a lot of fondness for that time in the same way that you have a lot of fondness for when you were younger and you could do all-nighters and eat like crap and be functional the next day,” she said. “That was great, and I'm so glad that I'm not in that anymore.”
Her position with The Athletic propelled her to the national stage but also allowed her to focus on women’s soccer coverage. Yang noted just how rare it was for a writer to earn a full-time salary just to cover the women’s game.
“It was incredibly freeing in some ways, in another way when you write for, quote, unquote, the man, you have to abide by their standards, which I understand,” she said. “As a freelancer or even managing All for XI on SB Nation, I determined everything and there are pluses and minuses to that, right, where you have a lot of editorial freedom [and] at the same time, you have no support. So you're exchanging one for the other.”
Now Yang has made the jump from journalism to public relations. Leaving a company such as The Athletic doesn’t come without its risks. Yang would be pivoting her passion for storytelling and investigating into working with journalists and media outlets to get the message of BOS Nation FC out to the masses.
“Yeah, I think it was just the rarity of an opportunity like this,” she said when asked about taking the job. “When does a professional women's soccer team start in your hometown, and then the ability to kind of get in almost on the ground floor and hopefully be able to point them in a better direction than the predecessor whose failure you covered in excruciating detail. I've been at this a while, and I've been writing about soccer for about 10 years, and it was super scary to think about leaving a job that has treated me very well.”
But Yang also wanted to challenge herself. As someone who worked with communications crews constantly, a part of herself thought that she could do a better job.
“If you don't take the chance, then you're just a coward,” Yang said.
The communications director will be facing arguably the greatest challenge that someone in her position could have to deal with. Yang will be tasked with helping BOS Nation FC rebuild its reputation after a failed brand launch.
The team name was widely viewed as poor while the accompanying ad campaign centered around “Too Many Balls” gained national attention for all the wrong reasons.
“I am not oblivious to the situation that I went into when I got hired,” she said. “It was impossible not to see the reactions. I myself wrote about the transphobia of the campaign. You know that saying, ‘It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and 10 seconds to lose one.’ They didn't even have time to build a reputation.”
The team has since said that it will be reconsidering the name and soon after the launch apologized for the “Too Many Balls” campaign.
Yang noted that a lot of the work she hopes to do revolves around building trust with fans and the overarching community after the failed brand launch.
“If people have no reason to trust you through your own actions, you just have to practice radical acceptance about it and keep working and earning trust. The way you earn trust is you say you'll do something and then you do it and then you repeat that, like 100 times. Unfortunately, that just has to come with time. I don't want to put out this idea that, like, if we just say the right thing, then all of a sudden everybody's going to be on board. I invite people to be skeptical of us, until action matches what we say that we're going to do. We're talking about the community benefits of the stadium and investing in women's sports. Okay, keep watching. We understand, or at least I understand that if people are skeptical, they have their reasons so all we can do is keep grinding and then over time, hopefully as our actions match what we say we're going to do, then that's how you build trust. There's really no other way to do it.”
To their credit, BOS Nation FC is putting in the work. Along with considering a name change and apologizing for the campaign, the club is working with fans about the potential for a new name and working on a grassroots level to learn more about where the community stands after the drama regarding the brand launch and the headlines that the renovations at White Stadium can draw.
“It's hard to ask for patience from people after the way that the name launch went down but that is all that we can ask for right now,” Yang said. “Trust takes time, and so it has to happen over time, while also accepting the way you feel is the way that you feel, acknowledging that it's not coming from some weird, unbounded place. When you hurt people, or when people are hurt, what you have to do is just acknowledge it and say sorry and then try to do better next time. Sometimes you have to accept that you were the bad guy of somebody else's story and all you can do is improve for tomorrow.”
With a failed brand launch, soccer fans expressed relief that Yang was hired. Considering how the club started, fans believed that she would get the club back on track.
Yang doesn’t take the admiration lightly. She even admits that she feels the pressure to succeed but that pressure isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“I think you should feel pressure from fans to, like, do a good job and if you don't do a good job, you should feel bad,” Yang said. “It's incredibly flattering. I was joking with my wife, like, I should probably make one of those word maps where you have the intensity of the word, like a little validation wall for days I feel like, crap. It's very validating. It's a lot of pressure, and it's pressure that absolutely should be there, and I hope that I can live up to the pressure. Probably won't be able to all the time, just by the nature of the job and human failings but hopefully we'll, I'm sorry, it's like the Mulan thing, like, I hope I'll bring honor to us all.”
While it is harsh to pin the future of an entire organization on a single person, Yang possesses unique knowledge of what went wrong with the Boston Breakers. Ultimately, ownership will take the blame if BOS Nation FC suffers a similar fate to the Boston Breakers but Yang got a sense of where things went wrong for the Breakers and will take that knowledge with her as she works with the new NWSL club.
“I would say, to the extent that I can, helping people in my organization understand the history of where we came from,” she said. “Where people were like, ‘Oh, I do it because my daughter loves soccer’ and then they couldn't keep up with the level of investment but also not veering too far into ‘well, this is strictly a business’. I would hope that the people who are in sports do it because they love sports. I think sports are a really unique industry in that way and our controlling owner, Jennifer Epstein has talked about her father's involvement with the Celtics, so she developed her own love of the game through that. Obviously a little different from the rest of us, because there's an ownership component but trying to navigate that line between loving the thing that you're doing and also understanding that this is a real business.”