Five things that stuck with us after two days with the people running content for some of the biggest teams in sports

Gondola is where the people actually making content at sports organizations get together, not execs giving keynotes about "digital transformation," but the social managers, producers, and creative leads who are shipping posts every day. This year, a few themes kept coming up in sessions, breakouts, and the conversations that carried on well past the last talk of the day.

Here's what stood out to our team.

Approval workflows aren't just process—they're how fast teams move

The sharpest question of the whole conference came out of the NFL breakout: "How many people touch your piece of content before it gets sent out?"

It sounds like something that would slow you down. But the teams with the most structured approval processes were actually the ones moving fastest — because nobody's second-guessing whether something was signed off. One organization shared that they now require every piece of content to be uploaded with its caption and approved by three people before it goes live. That sounds heavy until you realize it means no last-minute "wait, did legal see this?" scrambles.

For any social team posting at volume, this was a real gut-check moment: if your approval process is still Slack DMs and vibes, you're probably leaving speed on the table.

YouTube strategy went way deeper than "post more videos"

YouTube came up constantly, but the conversations weren't surface-level. Thumbnail design for click-through rate optimization was a recurring topic — most teams know thumbnails matter but haven't put real process behind getting them right.

The bigger takeaway: sports teams are starting to treat YouTube like a channel that deserves its own strategy, not just a place to dump long-form. And the gap between the teams approaching it that way and the ones that aren't is getting harder to ignore.

The best conversations weren't on the schedule

The official program was good. But the sessions people kept bringing up afterward were the hallway ones — the unplanned 20-minute deep dives that happen when two social leads realize they're solving the same problem.

That's the sign of a conference that's working. The people in the room are generating more value than the agenda on its own. Gondola's gotten to a point where the community is the reason to show up.

The vibe was genuinely optimistic

Beyond the sessions and workshops, the thing that stuck with us was how excited sports content teams are about where things are headed. People came ready to share their playbooks, not protect them. The teams doing interesting work were eager to talk about it.

If you work in sports content and you weren't there this year, put it on the calendar. See you in Denver in 2027.