Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Marina Paul. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Marina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.
I had a call the other day with an AAU Basketball coach, Clarence, who was one of the first coaches interested in SPRHRA.
A few months prior, we held a pizza party in a conference room at a recreation center in Princeton, NJ.
Clarence’s team, the Princeton Lady Bengals, all came to this small-ish room. We watched the end of the WNBA NY Liberty game, then I gave each of them my book, “Becoming a Superhero.”
I told them my female athlete story, as vulnerably as appropriate, then we dove into the book. I wrote this book to heal my trauma from eating disorders, depression, and the body image dilemma I experienced.
I told them what it was like to feel like you never fit in, yet seemingly fit in perfectly.
And like any women’s sports team—though they were freshman and sophomores—they looked at me in a re-assuring way, that made me know I could trust them and they were there for me.
I finished my schpeel and went into why I created a female athlete sports apparel brand, and specifically a girls’ basketball uniform. I told them how we tailored the uniforms just for female basketball players and designed them to enhance their basketball performance.
They tried on the basketball uniforms and gasped, “Oh my gosh, I’ve never worn a basketball uniform that was this comfortable. It is like literally made for me.”
I smiled so hard.
When Clarence recently called me, he told me they were 100% without a doubt ordering girls’ team uniforms. He then told me how frequently his girls’ basketball team talks about our pizza party.
We met up again to perform a sizing session with Clarence’s team, in preparation for their upcoming Spring 2024 AAU Basketball season. The girls remarked at how they had, again, never worn something that made them feel so good about playing the sport they loved. They helped us design how their logo(s) and numbers would look on the uniforms. Yes we’re in a team group chat, haha. It is so fun.
I didn’t realize how big of an impact quality time with these youth and teen basketball players meant. But that’s how we do it differently at SPRHRA.
We don’t just offer the best basketball uniforms for girls and women. We offer a custom team experience so that every athlete can feel appreciated and loved. And we show up at their games to let show them we care.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
ABOUT MARINA Marina is the author of Becoming a Superhero: Awaken Your Superpowers and Elevate the Lives of Others (April 2021), and founder of Women’s Sports Apparel company, SPRHRA (April 2022).
Marina’s story is about learning how to find connection with herself, in the face of darkness. As a College Freshman on the Top 20-ranked Georgetown University’s Women’s Division 1 Soccer Team, Marina almost lost her scholarship and went to rehab for depression and eating disorders. She then became the team’s first-ever 3-time Team Captain.
Her senior year, she tore her ACL back-to-back in 9 months. She rallied, and not playing in the first 5 games, captained an un-ranked team to the program’s first-ever Division 1 College Cup Final Four, with a final ranking of #3 in the country. She was named an All-American.
Through her experiences, she learned first-hand what Superhera Leadership looked like — elevating yourself and others beyond what you could ever imagine. With full faith in this concept, she set out to study the most successful female leaders she could find, from all different backgrounds. Her findings became her book, “Becoming a Superhero.”
“BECOMING A SUPERHERO” BOOK
From Olympic Gold Medalist to CEO to Lieutenant Colonel, Marina Paul shares the journeys of highly successful women on their intensely raw, emotional paths to leadership.
Through the lens of Marina’s own vulnerable life experiences, both in competitive soccer and personally, readers explore what it means to be deeply human, find ultimate connection with yourself, and use your uniqueness to lift up everyone in a more equitable world.
SPRHRA (SUPERHERA)
Taking the principles from her book, Marina set out to create SPRHRA, an athletic brand for female athletes. Marina is on a mission to eliminate the restriction placed on female athletes, by creating a community, brand, and apparel that gives female athletes the Freedom to Perform.
Throughout her playing career and thereafter, Marina realized a gap in sports apparel for female athletes. There was no sports apparel brand built for how female athletes play, move, and live. Marina wanted to curate female athlete apparel towards an unprecedented quartet: high-performance, precision, swagger, and freedom for female athletes’ bodies.
SPRHRA is sustainably made in Los Angeles, CA and is built by female athletes who play each respective sport — i.e., soccer players inform soccer apparel. (Pronounced Super-hera).
SPORTS BIO
— Bachelor’s degree in Business and Master’s degree in Marketing from Georgetown University
—5-sport athlete from Southern California: Soccer, Volleyball, Softball, Track, and Snowboarding
—Proudly 6’1”, an absolute nerd, hyper, and driven as hell, wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
There’s a thing I deal with big time every day. I don’t believe it yet, but I know I want to, because it’s part of being free in who I am.
That thing is self-worth—believing I’m worthy the moment I wake up, without having to earn anything.
The truth is, I still feel the need to prove myself everyday. I feel the need to prove that I deserve to put my ideas out in the world, that I deserve to create SPRHRA, that I deserve joy and relaxation, and on bad days, that I deserve to exist.
My worth is entirely tied to accomplishments—and thus, how I treat myself is a result of how I scored myself that day.
I’ve known this for years, because healing from my depression and eating disorders is directly tied to my lack of self-worth.
When I first thought about what SPRHRA’s mission should be—our north star for how we create our brand, our sportswear, and our community—I knew there had to be a free-ing element.
Not the woo-woo buzz term of freedom that suggests you never embrace reality and should live in a fantasy. But the freedom that, despite what you did that day or what you couldn’t control, you have peace in knowing that you just get to be yourself. That your enoughness exists without being measured by stats.
Being a female athlete, while I love it, makes believing my self-worth extremely hard.
Since I was little, I’ve been conditioned to measure myself by my sports performance… really any performance. I thought I as person should be punished for not playing well, even though I tried has hard as I could.
I can’t deny that having extremely high standards has helped me accomplish my goals, but how hard I am on myself crushes me just as much.
Lack of self-worth translates into everything, but especially in how we see ourselves. I found that if I didn’t fit my sportswear or didn’t think I looked good, I wasn’t right.
I always put the blame on myself for needing to fit the look.
I never wanted this to be the case with SPRHRA. Sportswear should be designed around the female athlete, not forced upon her.
SPRHRA is supposed to support you in being freely yourself and having freedom in your performance. That means, you as you, showing up and doing your thing, without the weight of not being enough.
If you don’t feel the sportswear fits you in a way that helps you believe you’re worthy, I need you to tell me. We will address it.
When we were testing our basketball uniform with collegiate players, one said, “I love the jersey, but the bottom hem doesn’t fit around my hips. It’s honestly probably just my hips because they’re too wide.”
Another player said, “The basketball shorts are awesome and don’t move, but the waistband is a little tight around my waist. It’s probably just my waist, because I’ve gained some weight, and I feel extra bloated today.”
No.
As female athletes and as women, we self-blame because we are conditioned to believe we need to be grateful for what we have. We are conditioned to believe a short matters more than how we feel. We are conditioned to believe we’re not enough, so we need to change.
I hate this.
After receiving feedback from our basketball players, I went to our production factory in Los Angeles and walked through solutions.
For the Wavy Stretchy Tank Jersey, we added fabric starting from the middle of the jersey, in a way that will maintain flow throughout, and fit over any hip width.
For both the Wavy Stretchy Short and Wavy Stretchy Basketball Short, we added 1 inch of elastic to each of the waistbands, so they will be less tight and stretchier, while also staying where you put them.
I never want myself or this company to come across as if we have it all figured out. Because we don’t and hopefully never will.
I believe that humility and openness with you all, will help us build sportswear that truly makes you—your unique body, personality, etc.—feel worthy, throughout your lifetime.
—Marina
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
What I’m Un-learning & Taking with Me:
I caught up with a friend this week, who has only known me from building SPRHRA. She played college volleyball in the Northeast and covers women’s sports. In this post-organized sports / forever athlete life, I know we’re going to be great teammates.
She asked me,
What is something you learned from your sports career that you want to carry with you?
What is something you want to, or have, unlearned from sports?”
This is tough. A huge part of me still thinks everything I’ve learned from sports is the way.
If you know my story, you know that the way didn’t work out for me.
Here’s what I told her:
Discipline is a triggering word for me. The restrictive Marina wants to live an extremely regimented life and prove to an external something that I can do it, whatever it is.
That restrictive discipline is like eating diet food that tastes terrible, whose chemicals end up hurting your body more over time. I don’t want a diet life; that’s not what freedom means to me.
Maybe discipline is not rooted in restriction and the “lack of”, but is rooted in abundance.
Maybe discipline is really framing it around the things you love, with a combination of responsibilities that help you achieve your loftiest dreams.
So maybe the 4am wake-ups are re-framed to be, “you work best in the morning, and you generally feel less stressed when you are up early.”
This is supplemented with, scheduling in fun throughout the day, and reminding myself if I miss an alarm, I’m not a complete failure.
I still struggle with this, even after writing a book on how to find my worth and connection.
How do I create a life that looks like that? My greatest fear is having everything I wanted and not being happy.
I recently hired a coach, which I acknowledge is an extreme amount of privilege I have. My goals are to become the best athlete I’ve ever been, build the strongest women’s sportswear company I can, develop and maintain deep connections with my people, and goof off… a lot.
My goals haven’t changed, but how I get there will, starting with the un-learning of restrictive discipline.
Earlier this summer, I moved back to DC to hard-launch SPRHRA with the support of Georgetown University and a city that has my heart. My Georgetown experience is where the roots of SPRHRA formed.
I’m immersed again in the female athlete life, hanging out with a lot of current players.
It has reminded me that the great, big goals and dreams matter, but the process—the goofy memories, and the daily grind are what I’m obsessed with.
As another friend recently reminded me, obsession is ok. To deeply love the things I love to a point of obsession, is an epic gift—use it dangerously.
That’s the greatest thing that sports taught me — the saying you’ve heard a million times, “trust & enjoy the process.”
I used to think “the process” was numbing yourself, putting your head down, and getting it done.
I mean, if it’s a fitness test, I’d probably still do that, haha.
In my life now, the process to me means, the daily ups and downs, my growth as an individual, my not-put-togetherness, my big emotions as much as my chill.
…My having no clue what I’m doing and just going for it. My letting people down and my empathy. My being bad at things and my being an absolute weenie. And most of all, trusting myself a little more each rep.
The daily process is feeling, and through tons of reps, transcending into your vision(s).
The forever athlete never leaves us. At SPRHRA, my goal is to build a community and sportswear so you thrive in your forever athlete-ness, you feel ok being a weenie, and you feel like you have a squad at all times.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sprhra.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sprhra_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sprhra/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-paul/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/sprhra
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sprhra4788?app=desktop