Blue Cottage of CannonDesign wins top Esri award for women’s and girls’ sports narrative map
July 17, 2026
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Play Anyway, a narrative map on the state of women's and girls' sports in America, took home first place in the Map with a Message category of this year's Esri Storytelling with Maps competition at the Esri User Conference. It's the second consecutive year the team has taken the top award in the category.
Created by a collaborative Blue Cottage of CannonDesign team, the map opens with the momentum that's impossible to miss right now. Professional women's leagues are drawing record valuations, audiences and investment, and the visibility of women's sports has never been higher.
Play Anyway maps that rise, then examines a harder question. Who actually gets to play, and where? Using geographic and demographic data, the map traces how access to youth and school sports varies by income, geography and community investment, and shows that the barriers girls face, such as cost, safety, transportation, weak facilities and a shortage of women coaches, are structural rather than incidental.
From there, the map makes the case for why closing these gaps matters well beyond athletics. It connects access to sports with outcomes like education, economic mobility, mental health and community safety, and frames athletic fields and facilities as civic infrastructure on par with parks and libraries.
Using Esri technology, the map also traces the spatial patterns of women’s sports access and resource availability as girls and women climb the sports ladder across the U.S.
This is Blue Cottage's second year participating in the Esri Storytelling with Maps competition. Last year's first-place winning map visualized the fragmentation and inefficiency of the healthcare system in treating individuals with co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorder diagnoses.
