Amanda Gunville is using football as a vehicle for confidence, connection, and inclusion, building an educational platform designed to help women better understand the game and feel more comfortable participating in football-related conversations and experiences.
Over the course of her more than two-decade career, Amanda Gunville has established brands and businesses across multiple industries. At the root of it all, regardless of what sector she is in, the overwhelming majority of her work has remained connected to the same initial source of inspiration: the world of professional sports and football.
In fact, Gunville got some very real, very palpable insight into how to allow her passion for sports to color her work elsewhere by working alongside legendary sports agent Leigh Steinberg. Steinberg was the real-life inspiration for the Tom Cruise-starring movie Jerry Maguire, and afforded Gunville unique behind-the-scenes exposure to elite football culture and the business of sports. Steinberg’s firm has represented some of the biggest names in NFL history, including Steve Young and Patrick Mahomes. After all, who doesn’t want to work with Jerry Maguire, a man who famously wants to “show you the money?”
Through her work with Steinberg over the course of many years, Gunville gained firsthand experience as well as an in-the-field education that can simply not be replicated. Here, she learned about strategy, relationships, pressure, and the larger culture surrounding the game at its highest level. She was already incredibly successful and poised to take things to a whole new level when the unthinkable happened. She was diagnosed with cancer, and the ensuing two-and-a-half-year battle with the illness pulled her away from her work altogether. Fortunately, after persevering through it all, Gunville returned to work with brand new eyes and ambition to spare. She refused to let cancer define her, and that decision would ultimately reshape her life’s work.
Returning to the Game
Following her battle with cancer, when Gunville finally had the opportunity to sit down and actually watch football again after years away, she found herself perplexed. Football is an American institution, something that has remained a viable part of the culture for decades. And yet, after only a handful of years away from it, Gunville found the sport to have changed substantially, in ways she had not anticipated. She felt disconnected from this game that she had once known so intimately; the rules seemed different, the pace felt faster, and the language had evolved.
However, instead of wallowing in this feeling, she elected to use it as inspiration. She quickly realized that if she, a woman whose literal job it had been for decades to work in and around football, was having difficulty following the modern version of the game, then there must be thousands, if not millions, of other women around the world who were struggling even more. After all, the vast majority of women did not have a job that helped to teach them how to follow the game in the first place. Gunville quickly realized that there was an entire section of the market, an unserved demographic, that her new work could cater to. This became the foundation for Champera and its flagship program, Football Fluency Method, a modern, confidence-driven approach to football education designed specifically for women.
Recognizing an Underserved Audience in Plain Sight
Football games are some of the highest-viewed televised events on an annual basis. The Super Bowl is regularly the single most-watched thing on television every single year. In fact, over 180 million Americans watch football regularly, and close to fifty percent of that figure consists of women. And yet, despite representing such a significant portion of this audience, many women were never actually taught the strategy, language, or psychology behind the game in a way that feels welcoming or easy to understand.
Gunville realized that there was this gargantuan gap in the market, right under her nose. As she began to initially explore the possibilities of doing something to bridge this undiagnosed divide, she realized that even within her personal circle, this affected many women. Some of the smartest, most accomplished women she knew still confided in her that even if they understood some of the rote mechanics of the game, they ultimately still felt largely disconnected from football. Like many women, it wasn’t that they were incapable of understanding it, but rather that no one had ever taught them in a way that felt approachable, intelligent, or welcoming.
The Gender Differences
This illustrates a stark divide between the genders. The vast majority of men who are huge football fans likely learned a great wealth of their knowledge about the sport from a common source: their fathers. It is common practice, almost outright American tradition at this point, for fathers and sons to sit around the television and watch the sport together, from a young age. This experience has shaped many men’s perceptions of the game and gives them an unexpectedly emotional entrance to the sport. These emotive ties help the young men to not only remember the various rules and regulations surrounding the sport, but also to internalize a sense of accomplishment in keeping up with and recognizing them.
But as Gunville quickly found, the same was not true for women. In fact, most women’s introductions to the rules of the game were in public settings, such as bars, or in the middle of important games that they were taken to by others, often after they were already adults. This not only means that women generally receive a far less comprehensive education in the sport, but also are not afforded the same kind of reward-based system to help them internalize all of the lessons learned.
Use Cases: Women in Power, Still Struggling to Understand
One of Gunville’s graduate school friends, an accomplished entrepreneur who actually helped to grow an athletic apparel company into a multimillion-dollar business, admitted to her that she still does not understand football at all. As Gunville recalls, “She told me, ‘It just looks like a bunch of guys running around. And that was a huge moment for me. Because she is incredibly smart and successful. It made me realize this has nothing to do with intelligence. Women simply have not been taught the game in the right way.”
Elsewhere, an immigrant mother told Gunville that she attended every single one of her son’s high school football games, and yet, never actually could understand what was happening on the field. She simply stood when everyone else stood, cheered when everyone else cheered, and tried her best to be there to support her son. As Gunville says, “That story really stuck with me. Because underneath it was something much deeper than football. It was the feeling of wanting to connect, wanting to participate, and quietly feeling left out.”
Building a Different Kind of Football Education
From her own personal experiences and these broader conversations, Gunville realized that there needed to be a more practical way for women to understand the sport and connect with it in a way that opened up the game on an emotional level for them. She wasn’t necessarily looking to create a course to help women become analysts or sports experts; she just wanted to imbue these female viewers with confidence, connection, and belonging. After all, what if this massive silent portion of the football viewing audience were suddenly equipped with greater knowledge of the game and how it functioned? That could potentially change the entire landscape of sports entertainment, allowing women to participate more fully in conversations and experiences surrounding the sport.
Fortunately, Gunville was uniquely positioned to tackle this issue head-on. After all, she had decades of professional experience working in and around the sport. This gave her something most traditional sports educators do not have: the ability to understand both the insider and outsider perspectives at the same time. She understands how football people think, communicate, and process strategy at a high level. But she also understands how overwhelming and intimidating the sport can feel when the language and culture were never properly explained.
That combination became the foundation for the Football Fluency Method. As she details, “This is not about memorizing penalties or trying to sound impressive. It is about understanding momentum, pressure, strategy, psychology, and why decisions happen when they happen. Once you understand that, the entire game changes.”
How the Football Fluency Method Works
The program breaks down football through five core modules: Follow the Game, See Players Not Just Jerseys, Read the Strategy, Think the Way the Coach Thinks, and Become Fluent.
Rather than overwhelming women with information, the system is intentionally designed to create confidence step by step. Each module builds on the previous one, creating a progressive learning experience that feels approachable rather than intimidating. Gunville also made the decision to offer the first module free through the Champera app, launching this August, a choice driven by her desire to make football fluency accessible to as many women as possible. “I want millions of women to have access to this education,” she says. “So many women have spent years feeling left out of conversations and experiences simply because no one ever taught them the game in a way that made sense.”
Gunville’s teaching style also reflects the way she has approached communication throughout her career and in her writing. Much like her book, Finding Hope & Joy in Cancer, Football Fluency Method combines education with humor, relatable analogies, and real-life stories from inside the world of football.
Instead of making women feel intimidated by the game, she focuses on making complex ideas feel approachable, memorable, and genuinely fun to learn.
That emotionally intelligent approach has become one of Champera’s biggest differentiators, especially among high-achieving women who often feel embarrassed asking what they perceive as “basic” football questions.
“No one likes feeling lost in a conversation,” Gunville says. “Especially smart women who are highly competent in every other area of their lives.”
Gunville is not teaching women to memorize rules or become sports analysts. Instead, she is helping them develop genuine understanding and cultural fluency that allows them to participate confidently in football conversations and environments.
Transforming Sports Culture Through Inclusion
Ultimately, Gunville sees Champera as something much bigger than a football education company. She is building partnerships with NFL teams, athletic directors, fan engagement leaders, and aligned organizations to distribute the free module to large groups of highly targeted audiences. By making football education accessible at scale, she is working to shift sports culture itself toward greater inclusion and belonging.
The transformation that she witnesses in women goes deeper than football knowledge. Women report feeling more confident in professional settings where sports conversations happen, stronger connections with family members who love football, and a new sense of belonging in spaces where they previously felt excluded.
One woman told her that, for the first time, she actually understood what was happening during her son’s high school football games instead of simply reacting to the crowd around her. That small shift created a profound connection. “What actually changes for women when they understand the game is confidence, belonging, and connection,” Gunville says. “Football becomes the vehicle, but confidence is the transformation.”
Building the Future of Sports Education
As Amanda Gunville prepares for the August launch of Football Fluency Method, she is thinking about the impact that extends across the next decade.
She sees a community of dynamic women coming together in an environment that promotes personal growth, authentic relationships, and a desire for a meaningful and fun life. Football may bring them together, but the culture will keep them there. Across Champera’s content, partnerships, and education, Gunville is ensuring that every piece of messaging reinforces the core mission, helping women feel confident, included, and connected through football fluency.
With nearly 90 million women watching football, and many of them never having received proper education about the game, Gunville is addressing a need that has been hiding in plain sight. But more than market size, she is focused on cultural impact. Every woman who gains confidence through the Football Fluency Method represents a shift toward a more inclusive sports culture, one where expertise is not assumed based on gender and where asking questions is welcomed rather than mocked.
“My excitement around launching Champera and Football Fluency Method is about impacting millions of women and creating meaningful relationships,” Gunville says. “Does the NFL want to partner with me to host events? That would be incredible. But at the center of all of this, I want to make a difference in as many lives as possible.”
Gunville spent years learning football from the inside. She spent two and a half years away from the sport entirely. Now she is using both experiences to build something women have been waiting for: a way to finally understand the game that does not require pretending, enduring condescension, or figuring it out alone. For millions of women who want to feel confident in football conversations, Gunville is opening a door that has been closed for far too long.
