During her time at Milton, Jamie Mittelman ’06 was a triple varsity athlete, in soccer, skiing, and track and field. Today, she is making a difference in sports with Flame Bearers, a media company she founded in 2020 that elevates the voices and stories of female athletes.
SAGE (Students Advocating for Gender Equity) invited Mittelman to speak at an assembly for Women’s History Month.
“What’s different is we’re not doing sports reporting,” she said. “We’re not focusing on who’s going to play who. We’re focusing on issues that everyone can relate to, like, pay equity, racial justice, disability bias, and being a mom. The reason is these are not sports stories. These are human interest stories.”
Through three channels—podcasts, videos, and live events—Flame Bearers allows female athletes to control the narrative. All of their content is 100 percent athlete-reported. This is a major departure from the majority of sports media, where athletes have little to no say in how they are represented.
After her studies at Milton, Mittelman went on to attend Middlebury College, majoring in international studies and minoring in gender studies. Then, she went on to earn two master’s degrees, a master’s in business from the Tuck School at Dartmouth and a master’s in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. “My career path has largely been about refining my how,” she said. “I knew that I always wanted to work with women and girls in some way. I didn’t know how I wanted to do it.”
Before founding Flame Bearers, Jamie worked in various marketing and communications roles in the nonprofit and private sectors. “I quickly fell in love with the ability to influence how people think. It’s interesting because today people talk about disinformation, misinformation, and the media as being a weapon and a tool to hurt people. From my perspective, I was thinking about media as a way to do good, a way to broaden how people think and bring people together—as a way to educate, as a way to inform, and make people feel related to each other.”
Now, with her own media company, she has done that with up to 300 different Olympians and Paralympians from 56 countries.
“ For every athlete whose name you recognize, we work with ten athletes you’ve never heard of. So for every Alex [Morgan], for every Becky [Sauerbrunn], for every Caitlin [Clark], hundreds of athletes who are black or brown, who are LGBTQ, who are of a minority religion, are not given the coverage that they deserve. So we try to broaden the aperture of the type of woman whose stories are being told,” said Mittelman.
You can learn more about Jamie and the vital work she is doing here.
