In the Summer of 2021, PHU pivoted around Covid and started playing again outside. Without PHU’s typical private indoor gym space, this meant we had to fight for court space in public parks. In this Medium article, PHU Founder, Emma, explains a certain Sunday where PHU was met with resistant men and lots of sexim -- despite even having a city permit. Read this 12 minute read to learn more about how important it is for men to be our allies and for women to take up the space they deserve.

PHU and Intellectual Athlete collaborated to create a visual representation of a typical PHU run, shedding light particularly on the overall experience and community value. The Intellectual Athlete is a lifestyle brand devoted to merging and redefining the boundaries of the intellectual, artist, and athlete by creatively telling stories of unseen spaces.

In 2017, we collaborated with Women’s All Bball, another women’s basketball organization in the Bay Area. While the brands provide slightly different services to the women’s basketball community, for twelve weeks, we paired up together to reach a greater audience and support one another. Our collaboration successfully averaged 28 women per run, establishing both brands as key destinations for all female hoopers in the Bay Area.

Our collaboration was the cover story of the East Bay Times in Sept 2017. The article was called Bay Area women create their own basketball pickup games.

Emma Leyden, PHU Founder, talked to Justin Wasik of The Vertical Podcast about the creation of Pick Her Up Basketball and her solution to building a space where women feel comfortable playing the game they love. They discuss the many issues permeating through the world of women in sport, from girls sports drop out rates to the lack of female coaches in women’s sports to sports media coverage.

PHU Founder, Emma Leyden, spoke about the need for PHU as a panelist in the Coffee & Conversations event hosted by our friends at the Women’s Sports Film Festival.

As part of the second annual film festival, this event highlighted founders and creators who didn’t wait for permission, rather they built the communities, blogs, podcasts, and media channels they want to see in the world.

PHU Founder, Emma, talks to Colin from the Dynamic Leaders Podcast about the following topics: why her athlete mentality is a way of life and not something she tries to separate, how WNBA players like Maya Moore have been role models to Emma in her life, what her responsibility is to mentor young girls in basketball, what it takes to rebuild a culture that was once great but has fallen on hard times, and why she founded Pick Her Up Basketball so women would have more opportunities to continue playing the sport.