Lindsay Amstutz remembers well the summer that changed her life: when she traded her ballet slippers for basketball shoes. A family friend encouraged the 5-foot-10 dancer to try out for high school hoops. After only one scrimmage, she was hooked. "It was the greatest thing ever," says the Los Angeles native. "I thought it was fantastic and sort of everything they say that Title IX in sports does for women in terms of teamwork and leadership. It just taught me so much."
Those lessons come in handy for Amstutz, in both her job as vice president and chief marketing officer of the WNBA Los Angeles Sparks and her labor of love: a basketball league called Get in the Game, which she launched in 2005 while she was a law student at Georgetown University.
"One day I was in the Georgetown gym, shooting by myself, thinking there have got to be other girls [like me]," Amstutz recalls. Initially a campus club for female law students, Get in the Game grew to include female lawyers and other professional women in Washington, D.C. When Amstutz moved to New York in 2007 to work for the WNBA, she started a chapter there.
Get in the Game is about more than playing basketball. Amstutz knew the organization would encourage networking among women and promote women's basketball, but she also sensed it could offer an opportunity for greater good. "From the beginning, I just saw the charity component as a real big part of it," she says. "A portion of everything we do [goes] back to a charity." Proceeds from league and tournament fees and law-firm sponsorships are given to organizations that work to empower underserved women and girls.
Since joining the Sparks organization in December, Amstutz has been overseeing marketing, public relations, game operations and community relations. Her to-do list includes creating events with the UCLA and USC women's basketball programs and with Stanford hoops fans living in Los Angeles.
Her favorite spare-time activity? "There's nothing I'd rather do," she says, "than go play basketball."
SANDY SIEGEL is freelance writer based in Los Angeles.
