Content & Media
Career Development
Women in Sports
5 min read
•
Published Aug 13, 2026
Progression over Perfection: how posting 10 sports jobs every Friday turned into a career resource for sports professionals
Joidon Jennings
Director, Digital Media
•
CSI Sports
01
The Project
Joidon Jennings broke into sports the way a lot of women do: through sheer belief that it was possible, without much proof that it was, and without anyone who looked like her showing her the way.
She grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, played college basketball at Miles College, and figured out through a graduate assistantship at Alabama State that she wanted to pursue a career in digital media. She was strategic from there: interned with the Baltimore Ravens, spent three seasons as the digital UX/UI coordinator at the Green Bay Packers, moved to the Houston Texans as digital media manager during their rebrand, then spent a year at Roc Nation leading digital marketing and strategy for athlete personal brands, working on the creator economy with athletes like Skylar Diggins and Rickea Jackson. She is now the Director of Digital Media at CSI Sports, a combat sports agency.
In 2026, with layoffs heavy across the industry and LinkedIn feeling like a loop of bad news and empty encouragement, Joidon decided to do something different. She launched the In It to Win It series: a weekly LinkedIn series featuring 10 curated job opportunities in sports, paired with a piece of her own testimony. Real jobs, real honesty about what breaking into this industry actually takes, and a consistent presence for anyone who needed to see someone still in it and still going.
Hear Joidon on why she started In It to Win It and who she was thinking about when she did
CORE TEAM
Joidon as sole creator and curator, with a freelance graphic designer
BIGGEST CONSTRAINT
Whether consistency was actually possible while working a full-time job, and whether anyone would find value in something this specific when LinkedIn is already flooded with content.
DELIVERABLES
10 curated job listings per week plus one piece of original content, inspiration, testimony, or tactical strategy, totaling 180+ job posts and 21 original content pieces
TIMELINE
25 consecutive weeks as of interview date, posting every Friday since launch in early 2026
02
Strategy & Execution
The series started with a problem Joidon could not ignore. LinkedIn in 2026 felt heavy. Job losses, performative positivity, and very little that was actually useful to someone trying to break in. She wanted to create something that was the opposite: specific, honest, and consistent. Something that gave people a concrete action to take, not just a feeling.
The format she landed on was simple. Ten jobs every Friday, chosen based on what her audience was actually clicking, plus one piece of content designed to make someone feel something real. Inspiration, testimony, a specific strategy she used. Not a motivational quote. Something that acknowledged the difficulty of the process while refusing to let it be the end of the story.
T
Tori
Consistency is one of the hardest parts of running a recurring series, especially while working full-time. How do you hold yourself to it week after week?
J
Joidon
I told myself this year, if you're going to start something, you have to keep it going. And I think it's hard because you come home from work and you have to find that motivation to still do it. So I was intentional about what day and what conditions would make it easiest. Fridays work because my workload is lighter. I look for jobs in 30-minute windows throughout the week so by Friday I'm not starting from zero. The post is drafted before the day even starts. And then I just have to hit post. Once you're in the routine, you realize what works and what doesn't, and then you hold yourself accountable because you know what you're capable of now. The hardest part is the beginning, building the habit. After that you're doing it because you've already proven to yourself that you can.
T
Tori
In your own words, describe the "why" behind In It to Win It.
J
Joidon
It's making a conscious decision. I am going to build a strategy and a plan to get a job in sports and entertainment. And my strategy behind it is posting 10 jobs a week, plus content that keeps people encouraged when nothing's happening. Because every week is not going to be good. You might not hear back. You might get a rejection. You might not get an interview. But as long as you keep that faith, that determination, that resiliency, you stay in it to win it. Working in sports is a process. It's going to take months. Interviews take time, relocations take time. I just want to be realistic with people about what it comes with, and then let them know it's possible if they really want it.
The operational system behind the series took a few weeks to figure out. Jennings started by trying to find all 10 jobs on Fridays, which nearly burned her out before the series had any momentum. She redesigned the process: 30 minutes of job searching spread across the week so that by Friday, the content is already drafted and ready. All she has to do is post.
She switched from free short links to a paid tracking service called Linkly to actually understand what was resonating. The data made things clearer. Entry-level and coordinator roles drove the most clicks. NFL internships, especially timed around playoff season when teams start posting, were consistently high-performers. Agency roles with hybrid or remote options drew strong engagement, even though she is honest with her audience that fully remote roles in sports are rare and in-person relationships still matter most.
The graphic design piece solved itself unexpectedly. A freelance designer found the series on LinkedIn, mocked up designs he thought would work, and sent them to Joidon without being asked. She started working with him and he has been designing the series ever since.
"A student came up to me after a talk and said she never thought sports was possible for someone who looked like her. That hit me. I think about myself at that age, coming from Alabama with nothing but a delusional belief that I could make it work. Now I see students getting discouraged and I think the only way I can change what I see in these rooms is by showing up, being active, and being a resource to the people coming up behind me."
Joidon Jennings
Three decisions shaped how the series works:
1
Friday as a non-negotiable posting day
Joidon chose Friday deliberately. Her workload at her full-time job is lighter, which means she can post without the day becoming a source of stress. Building the series around a day that worked for her schedule rather than an ideal posting time kept the commitment sustainable.
2
Track clicks, not likes
Likes and shares are not how Joidon measures whether the series is working. Linkly data showing which job listings get hundreds of clicks tells her what her audience actually needs. That feedback loop is how she refined the content toward NFL internships, coordinator roles, and agency positions with flexibility.
3
Draft first, post second
Every post is drafted in advance. That one habit removes the anxiety of starting from zero on a busy day. Jennings gives herself until 5 PM to post but the content is always done before the day starts. Execution becomes a single button, not a creative sprint under pressure.
1
Social and digital, led by Donny
Countdown content, game-day graphics, real-time social assets, and the full digital suite. Donny owned this end and managed the external agency producing assets the internal team couldn't get to.
2
Parade and championship assets, led by two designers and the creative director
Win-scenario content including parade look and feel, championship graphics, and print.
This workstream ran at the same time as digital. They couldn't afford to wait and see if
they'd need it.
3
Project management, a first day on the job
The Seahawks had hired a project manager two weeks before the Super Bowl. Her first
assignment was tracking roughly 100 deliverables across five people. It worked.
T
Tori
Consistency is one of the hardest parts of running a recurring series, especially while working full-time. How do you hold yourself to it week after week?
J
Joidon
I told myself this year, if you're going to start something, you have to keep it going. And I think it's hard because you come home from work and you have to find that motivation to still do it. So I was intentional about what day and what conditions would make it easiest. Fridays work because my workload is lighter. I look for jobs in 30-minute windows throughout the week so by Friday I'm not starting from zero. The post is drafted before the day even starts. And then I just have to hit post. Once you're in the routine, you realize what works and what doesn't, and then you hold yourself accountable because you know what you're capable of now. The hardest part is the beginning, building the habit. After that you're doing it because you've already proven to yourself that you can.
T
Tori
Consistency is one of the hardest parts of running a recurring series, especially while working full-time. How do you hold yourself to it week after week?
J
Joidon
I told myself this year, if you're going to start something, you have to keep it going. And I think it's hard because you come home from work and you have to find that motivation to still do it. So I was intentional about what day and what conditions would make it easiest. Fridays work because my workload is lighter. I look for jobs in 30-minute windows throughout the week so by Friday I'm not starting from zero. The post is drafted before the day even starts. And then I just have to hit post. Once you're in the routine, you realize what works and what doesn't, and then you hold yourself accountable because you know what you're capable of now. The hardest part is the beginning, building the habit. After that you're doing it because you've already proven to yourself that you can.
03
The Outcome
Twenty-five weeks in, In It to Win It has grown every metric Jennings tracks. But she is clear that follower counts and engagement rates are not what success looks like to her. The messages from people who applied for a job because of a post, the student at the Harlem YMCA who said she never thought sports was possible for someone who looked like her, the speaking invitations that keep coming in because of the visibility the series has created — those are the outcomes that tell her the work is landing.
+538
Followers gained organically since launch
80+
Reposts, extending the series beyond Joidon's direct audience
1,200+
Total reactions across 18 weeks of posts
T
Tori
Consistency is one of the hardest parts of running a recurring series, especially while working full-time. How do you hold yourself to it week after week?
J
Joidon
I told myself this year, if you're going to start something, you have to keep it going. And I think it's hard because you come home from work and you have to find that motivation to still do it. So I was intentional about what day and what conditions would make it easiest. Fridays work because my workload is lighter. I look for jobs in 30-minute windows throughout the week so by Friday I'm not starting from zero. The post is drafted before the day even starts. And then I just have to hit post. Once you're in the routine, you realize what works and what doesn't, and then you hold yourself accountable because you know what you're capable of now. The hardest part is the beginning, building the habit. After that you're doing it because you've already proven to yourself that you can.
T
Tori
How are you thinking about evolving the series from where it is now?
J
Joidon
I think In It to Win It is just the beginning. The newsletter is the next step because I want to actually hear from people. LinkedIn is noisy and people are not comfortable commenting publicly. A newsletter gives me that one-on-one feedback that I can't get right now. And then beyond that, I've been thinking about a six-week boot camp. Something intimate. Resume revamping, interview confidence, actual mentorship. Because the thing I really want to prevent is the next generation wasting time on trial and error the way I did. Nobody told me what to do and what not to do. I figured it out the hard way. I don't want that for the people coming up behind me.
Three things to carry forward
01
Start before you have the system. Build the system as you go.
Joidon did not launch In It to Win It with a content calendar, a graphic designer, or a link tracking strategy. She launched it with a belief that it was needed and figured out the rest in real time. The Linkly upgrade, the Friday workflow, and the freelance designer, none of that existed at the beginning. All of it emerged because she started. The people who wait until everything is figured out before they begin are usually waiting forever.
02
Track the thing that tells you the truth.
Likes are easy to collect and hard to interpret. Click data on specific job listings told Jennings exactly what her audience needed and when. That signal, not engagement metrics or follower counts, is what shaped the content into something actually useful. Whatever you are building, find the metric that tells you whether it is working, not the one that feels good.
03
Raising your hand is still the move.
Joidon got her first sports experience by walking up to a sports information director at Miles College and asking if she could volunteer. A designer in Nigeria found her series, made unsolicited graphics, and became her long-term collaborator. Every door that has opened in her career has opened because someone extended themselves without a guarantee of return. The worst answer is no. Most of the time, the answer is not even that.
01
Process is the method to the madness, and it's a blind spot in sports.
Donny came up through an agency before she ever worked in the NFL. That experience gave her the habit of building strategy before touching a design file: kickoffs with data teams, alignment on voice and narrative before anything visual exists. That's what lets you build a campaign that holds up seasons later, not just one that looks good this week.
02
Build the relationships before you need them.
Donny describes herself as a seed planter. She builds relationships with teammates, freelancers, and collaborators all year, not just when a deadline appears. That's what made it possible to assemble a Super Bowl caliber production team in a matter of days. You cannot manufacture that kind of trust in the middle of a crisis.
03
You have to advocate for the vision. No one is going to hand it to you.
The Seahawks gave Donny a sandbox. But she had to decide what to build in it. That meant going to her VP and asking directly for more budget so she could push the work further. The organization's openness to creative is real, but it only activates for the people who show up with conviction and a track record to back it up.
Connect with
Joidon Jennings
Joidon Jennings is the Director of Digital Media at CSI Sports, a combat sports agency. Her career spans the NFL and music industry, with stops at the Baltimore Ravens, Green Bay Packers, Houston Texans, and Roc Nation, where she led digital marketing and strategy for athlete personal brands. She launched the In It to Win It series in 2026 to give the next generation of sports professionals the resource she never had.
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