What 20 Years Around Pro Football Taught Amanda Gunville About the Audience Nobody Was Serving

The Perspective Most Fans Never See

For over twenty years, Amanda Gunville worked in and around professional football, including alongside legendary sports agent Leigh Steinberg, the real life inspiration behind Jerry Maguire. During that time, she collaborated with some of the biggest names in NFL history, including Steve Young, Warren Moon, Ben Roethlisberger, and Patrick Mahomes.

Football was not just part of Amanda’s career. It was part of her identity.

But after stepping away from the game during a two and a half year battle with cancer, Amanda returned with a completely different perspective, one that would ultimately reshape her entire mission.

When she finally sat down to watch football again, she realized how quickly the game can start to feel intimidating when you step away from it for long enough. The pace felt faster. The terminology had evolved. And suddenly she saw the sport through a lens she never had before.

If someone with decades of experience around professional football could feel disconnected from the rhythm and language of the game after time away, how must millions of women feel who were never taught the game in the first place?

That question became the foundation for everything Amanda would build next. 

The Real Education Behind Professional Football

Working alongside Leigh Steinberg gave Amanda an insider’s perspective most fans never see. She watched elite athletes navigate pressure, studied how coaches think strategically, and learned the psychology behind decision making at the highest levels of sports.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson came from observing how relationships drive the sports world. The game was never just about talent. It was about communication, trust, leadership, momentum, and understanding how people think under pressure.

During those years, Amanda accumulated what she calls her “story bank,” experiences from twenty years around professional football that revealed the human side of the game. These were not just entertaining anecdotes. They were windows into how strategy unfolds in real time and why certain decisions get made in critical moments.

She learned to see football not as a collection of rules to memorize, but as a constantly evolving combination of momentum, psychology, and strategic thinking.

Yet despite her deep immersion in football culture, Amanda never forgot where she started, as a girl from Montana with no roadmap and no obvious path into professional sports. When she was in college, she simply asked a camera operator at a college basketball game who hired him, and that one question helped launch her entire career in sports.

That willingness to ask questions without embarrassment would later become central to her teaching philosophy.

What Cancer Taught Her About Inclusion

When cancer pulled Amanda away from football, the sport that had defined so much of her life disappeared almost overnight.

During treatment, survival became the only game that mattered.

But when she eventually returned to football, she noticed something she had never fully appreciated before, how inaccessible the sport can feel to people who were never taught the strategy and language behind it.

“I realized how overwhelming and inaccessible football can feel, even for someone who spent decades around it,” Amanda said. 

Through conversations with friends, Amanda discovered how widespread the issue really was.

A college friend who built a multi million dollar company, athletic, accomplished, and watching football every Sunday with her family, admitted she had no idea what was happening on the field. Another woman, who attended every one of her son’s high school football games, confessed she simply stood when everyone else stood.

These were not casual observers. They were engaged, intelligent women who wanted to understand the game, but had never found a way in that felt welcoming.

Amanda realized the issue was never that women did not care about football. It was that nobody had ever taught them the strategy, psychology, and language of the game in a way that felt approachable and easy to understand.

Football had become one of the biggest cultural forces in America, yet millions of women were expected to simply figure it out on their own.

Building Football Fluency for a New Audience

That insight became the foundation for Champera and its flagship program, Football Fluency.

The approach differs fundamentally from traditional sports media or rulebooks. Instead of overwhelming learners with every penalty and technical detail upfront, Amanda teaches strategy and momentum first. She wants women to understand why certain plays matter, how coaches think about risk and reward, and what actually creates the drama and excitement in football.

The rules become context, not the starting point.

Amanda designed the program around one core goal, helping women feel confident, included, and connected through sports culture.

“This is not just about football,” Amanda explains. “It’s about confidence. Belonging. Connection. And helping women feel like they belong in rooms they once felt excluded from.” 

Amanda made the first module completely free because she wanted women everywhere to realize something important: they were not behind. They were simply never taught this way before.

That distinction matters. Many women carry embarrassment about not understanding football, even when they are professionally successful in every other area of life. They feel like they should already know this information, so they avoid asking basic questions.

Football Fluency creates an emotionally safe learning environment where those questions are not only welcomed, but expected. Amanda draws on her insider knowledge to provide relatable explanations that connect the game to concepts women already understand. She uses stories from her twenty years around professional football to illustrate strategic principles, making abstract ideas concrete and memorable.

The goal is not to turn women into sports analysts. It is to help them feel confident, connected, and able to fully enjoy an experience that has too often felt intimidating or exclusive.

A Teaching Style Built Around Joy, Not Intimidation

During her cancer journey, Amanda also wrote Finding Hope & Joy in Cancer, a book focused on helping patients find humor, perspective, and moments of light during some of life’s hardest experiences. Through her nonprofit initiative, copies of the book have been donated to cancer patients across the country.

That same philosophy now shapes the way she teaches football.

Amanda believes people learn best when they feel safe, welcomed, and encouraged, not intimidated. Her teaching style blends strategy with humor, relatability, and real life examples, creating an environment where women feel comfortable asking questions and confident enough to finally enjoy the game instead of feeling overwhelmed by it.

Football becomes the vehicle, but confidence is the actual transformation. 

Amanda’s approach feels less like a lecture and more like having your smartest, funniest friend sitting next to you on the couch explaining the game in real time. Strategic, relatable, and never condescending, she creates an environment where women feel comfortable enough to ask questions, laugh, learn, and finally enjoy football without feeling intimidated by it.

The Audience Nobody Was Serving

Over 180 million Americans watch football, and nearly half are women. Yet for decades, sports media largely focused on either die hard fans or advanced analysis, leaving a massive audience in the middle underserved.

Amanda believes that audience has been overlooked for far too long.

The women enrolling in Football Fluency are not just buying football education. They are investing in confidence, connection, and cultural fluency. Many want to connect more deeply with their partners or children. Others want to feel more included in workplace conversations or social settings where football dominates the conversation.

Amanda is not building a traditional sports analysis platform. She is building a category defining brand focused on sports fluency, inclusion, and confidence.

Her vision for Champera extends far beyond the current course. She is exploring partnerships with NFL teams, athletic directors, and organizations that want to create more welcoming and engaging experiences for female fans. She is also building a media platform centered around conversations with leaders across sports, fan engagement, and culture, all focused on helping more women feel confident and included in the game.

At its core, Amanda’s mission is simple. She wants women to stop feeling like outsiders in one of America’s biggest cultural conversations.

And after twenty years around professional football, she realized the biggest opportunity was not serving the people who already understood the game.

It was finally teaching the people nobody else was serving.