How Break Sports Is Innovating Recreational Athletics And Merging Sports With Culture

In 2019, Trisha Goyal found herself experiencing a pain point that many casual adult athletes face: she wanted to get back into playing tennis but wasn’t sure how.

(Disclosure: Caroline Fitzgerald served as a consultant for Break The Love in 2022.)

“After a 9-to-9 day, I was kind of tired of having to hit the gym by myself. I was looking to get back into the sport that I grew up playing, which was tennis,” said Goyal. “I realized that it was really hard. I either had to join a single location brick-and-mortar club, or I had to go online and find a stranger to connect with.”

Goyal quickly learned that the pain point she was experiencing wasn’t just her own – it was something shared by many of her friends and colleagues.

“A lot of my friends would actually ask me ‘how can I get into tennis?’ or ‘where do I go to learn?’ So that is when I started Googling and realized there was an education & empowerment gap – because it wasn’t easy to learn these sports online, and back in 2019 you would have to pick up the phone to schedule and book a lesson,” said Goyal.

From this collective frustration a business idea was born: Goyal saw the opportunity to create a company that would make it easier for people to play sports. In 2019, Goyal went to work to create Break Sports, and since officially launching in 2020 the platform has become one of the largest online social sports booking platforms for casual players in the U.S.

“You can think of us as ‘Meetup.com’ meets a ‘Mindbody’ for sports,” said Goyal.

Best known for their Break The Love platform for those who play racquet sports, Break Sports offers social sport experiences across 35 states where casual athletes can book, show up, play, and meet new people. To date, Break Sports has served over 360K users in the U.S., primarily in racquet sports (tennis and pickleball) and golf.

Merging Sports With Culture

For Goyal, Break Sports is about more than just simply playing sports – since adult recreational sport leagues and platforms have certainly existed before Break Sports entered the market. Her vision for the company is around having sport seamlessly become a part of popular culture.

“Bringing pop culture into our messaging is really at the core of our DNA – from who we hire, to who we partner and work with, to everything we put out there in the world,” said Goyal. “I knew that in order to get a new audience of people to even discover who we were, I would have to speak their language and so we always would mix in content and collaborations that leveraged not just sport but also pop culture; from fashion trends to people in pop culture who actually weren’t athletes and more to get in front of the non-athlete.”

Break Sports has found success leaning into experiential partnerships at events like Art Basel, and collaborating with brands like Liquid I.V., Bumble, Blank Street, Alo, Lillet, and Walmart to show up in unique ways where active adults already work and play.

A Female Founder In A Male Dominated Space

The data shows that being a female founder is not an easy task. By the numbers, only 2% of all venture capital funding goes to female founders, despite data that shows that female-run start-ups drive better business outcomes per dollar of funding than male-run start-ups.

“Female run start-ups earn $0.78 for every dollar of funding, which is more than double of what male run start-ups earn,” said Goyal. “I think that female founders are really scrappy and are able to do a lot more with less.”

Goyal and her team have certainly driven some incredible business results despite the systemic challenges of being a female-led company in sports. Break Sports has reported double year-over-year revenue, and is currently tracking towards eight figures in all-time revenue. Break Sports’ lead investors include Dassler Family, Antler Ventures, Lake Nona Fund, Behind Genius Ventures. Goyal was also named as the first Tory Burch Foundation Sports Fellow in partnership with Billie Jean King.

On The Horizon

With the global interest in women’s sports on the rise, Break Sports is continuing to see growth specifically among their female-identifying users.

“54% of our users identify as female, which is pretty exciting. It’s usually flipped with other kinds of booking platforms in the sports space,” said Goyal. “We are excited to grow participation amongst women across all sports categories as we continue to expand and as we are now seeing a rise in interest in women’s sports across the board,” said Goyal.

Break Sports has started expansion beyond their core offering of racquet sports, to testing golf in golf with Break The Birdie. In 2025, the Goyal and the team are setting out to innovate across more team sports, specifically soccer & basketball, driving by interest they’re seeing from casual women athletes.