Women's Health October 8, 2025 0 Comments

How These Trailblazing Women Quietly Transformed Las Vegas Into The Ultimate Sports Powerhouse

They say men drove the cars at the Las Vegas Grand Prix—but who really put the wheels in motion? It turns out, a formidable squad of women were the real engines behind bringing Formula 1 to the glittering Strip. Picture this: in the thick of a pandemic, while the world was hitting pause, Emily Prazer and her team dared to dream big—crafting a vision to anchor racing right in the heart of Vegas. It wasn’t just ambition; it was a calculated, bold move fueled by creativity and unstoppable grit. And here’s a kicker—over half the workforce making the Grand Prix happen were women, shattering the typical “boys’ club” image of sports. From law to marketing, these women juiced the energy, connecting power players and navigating uncharted legal tracks. So, what does this tell us about Vegas? It’s not just the neon lights and endless entertainment anymore; it’s a city reinventing itself as a sports powerhouse—where women aren’t just participants, but leaders reshaping the game. Ready to meet the women who changed the face of Vegas sports? Dive in, because the race to dominance has only just begun. LEARN MORE

9 min read

Men drove the cars, yes, but it was a handful of women who made the Las Vegas Grand Prix happen in the first place.

In September of 2021, Emily Prazer was working at Formula 1 when the team was scrambling to get races back up and running in the world of COVID. “It gave us an opportunity to really think about the future of the sport, where we wanted to go racing, and what was strategically important,” she says.

She and her boss, Chloe Targett-Adams, started building out a plan to bring the race to Las Vegas—a place they believed held people as ambitious and creatively-minded as they were.

Prazer got in touch with a former colleague, Lauralyn McCarthy Sandoval, who was well-connected in Vegas and married to the previous governor of Nevada. Another woman, Renee Wilm, was looped in to help with legal conversations. “It was very much driven by women at the beginning,” says Prazer. At the time, 54% of the workforce for the Las Vegas Grand Prix was women, she says.

In March 2022, it was announced that the Grand Prix would happen in Vegas the following year. “I remember standing at the launch looking over the strip and thinking, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to have racing cars down there,’” Prazer says. She became chief commercial officer for Formula 1 in May 2022, and president of the Las Vegas Grand Prix in February 2025.

Kate Wik, chief marketing officer of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, recalls the moment that Prazer made her big pitch: “I was sitting in a conference room and she’s at the other end of the table pitching this crazy idea with Stefano [Domenicali, president and CEO of Formula 1],” Wik says. “The woman is phenomenal in terms of all the balls that she juggles and the creative vision that comes out of her is just unparalleled.”

Courtesy of Subject

Kate Wik (far left) attends the Las Vegas Grand Prix preview in March 2025.

Prazer is one of many women who have been fitting the pieces of the Vegas sports scene together for the past few years. “If you think about it, the majority of sports in Las Vegas are run by women,” Prazer says, citing Sandra Douglass Morgan, president of NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, and Nikki Fargas, president of WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, as examples. “They are super supportive of not just women in business, but women in sports.”

Here’s how Vegas became officially known as a “sports city,” and more of the women who worked to make that happen…

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The Rise of Sports in the Desert

Wik moved to Vegas 15 years ago for a job with MGM Grand—but she didn’t plan on staying long. “Vegas is one of those places you don’t expect to ever move to,” she says. “I told my husband and my family, let’s go for a year, let’s give it a try and see what it’s all about, it’ll be great for my resume.” But now, she’s not planning on going anywhere any time soon. It’s been “an amazing ride,” she emphasizes.

She’s witnessed Vegas evolve over the past 15 years, yet “it’s really been within the past decade that we’ve exploded onto the sports scene,” she says. Although sports—including NASCAR, the NBA Summer League, and boxing—have been in Vegas’s DNA for much longer, Wik cites infrastructure developments like the opening of the T-Mobile Arena (home of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights) in 2016 as part of the full-on sports evolution push.

“The idea of hockey in the desert was sort of frowned upon,” Wik says. “People didn’t think it would work, but the success of that proved that we could punch above our weight in terms of being a small town, but able to host a professional sports team.”

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Courtesy of Katy Boettinger and the Vegas Golden Knights

Katy Boettinger (bottom right, front) with the Vegas Golden Knights after the Stanley Cup finals win in 2023.

When Katy Boettinger, director of hockey administration for the Vegas Golden Knights, arrived in 2016 to help the players relocate and get the team’s scouts set up, she says she noticed an inherent passion for sports woven into the fabric of Vegas culture. That was also, in part, due to the fact that it’s a haven for tourists who want to keep tabs on their home teams. “It was my first experience living somewhere where I didn’t have to ask for the TV to be turned on to a hockey game,” says Boettinger.

Then, in 2017, the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars became the Las Vegas Aces. “They’re now our back-to-back world champions,” Wik says. Becky Hammon, head coach of the Las Vegas Aces, played on the team when it was still based in San Antonio. She moved on to become the first woman to be a full-time assistant coach in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs, and remembers feeling “shocked” to hear the news that her former team was moving to Las Vegas.

“When they sold ’em to Vegas, I felt, I wouldn’t say salty about it, but I loved having that women’s team that the community and the young girls in south Texas could look up to,” she says. “I had no idea it was going to loop me back in a few years later.” In 2022, she came back as head coach for the team, and yep, moved to Vegas. Now, she says, “Vegas turned itself into the sports capital of the world. It’s not just the strip anymore. It’s the strip and sports.”

“Vegas turned itself into the sports capital of the world. It’s not just the strip anymore. It’s the strip and sports.”

Next, Allegiant Stadium opened in 2020, which opened the door for the Raiders to come to town. While she wasn’t with the team at the time, Sandra Douglass Morgan, now president of the Las Vegas Raiders, remembers what it was like when the idea of the Raiders coming from Oakland to Vegas was first floated. Douglass Morgan, who has lived in Vegas since she was two years old, was working as a lawyer in telecommunications and was in the building when the special session vote happened for public support for the stadium. “I remember being there, very late at night, and it was a very, very exciting time,” she says.

Since then, Vegas hosted the Grand Prix in 2023 (and will do so again this November), as well as the Super Bowl LVIII (in 2024) and the Stanley Cup finals (in 2023), and multiple WNBA All-Star games.

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A Woman In A Boys Club

Some might think that the sports world—especially the Vegas sports world—would be particularly male-dominated. But that’s simply not true, and the community as a whole is welcome and supportive of all. “There’s a lot of movers and shakers in this town from a female leadership perspective, and I’m proud to help support every one of them in their missions,” Wik says.

Douglass Morgan, for example, is one of two female presidents in the NFL. (The other president is Kristi Coleman of the Carolina Panthers.) But about half the Las Vegas Raiders leadership team are women, she says, and the team has a female strength and conditioning coach and a female scout, in addition to many more in other areas of the business.

Courtesy of the Las Vegas Raiders

Sandra Douglass Morgan, president of the Las Vegas Raiders.

More broadly, Douglass Morgan says the NFL has some good programs in place to support women in football, including the NFL Women’s Forum to expose more women to the business operations side—and those women don’t just check a box: “They’re also delivering results, and I want to make sure that that is not lost on the readers,” she says. “You have people that have different points of view, maybe different backgrounds and upbringings, but if their passion is for the team, and in this case, it’s for the Las Vegas Raiders, then whoever’s going to help us win, that’s who I want on my team.”

Kim Frank, chief community officer, foundation president, and player programming manager of the Vegas Golden Knights, is another example of a rockstar female in sports leadership. “As a result of all of her work, the Knights from day one have been so firmly entrenched in the community,” Boettinger says, which was super important since the team is “Vegas born.” (The many kids growing up in Vegas today will grow up as fans of their hometown sports teams, unlike the adults who inherited them, Boettinger points out.) Hammon adds the late Elaine Wynn to the list, who helped lay the groundwork well before the team moved to Vegas: “She was a huge supporter of women’s sports and was a season ticket holder for the Aces,” Hammon says.

Boettinger says she doesn’t feel out of a place as a woman in a hockey environment: “I think that that is so culture-driven,” she says, adding that the culture that George McPhee, president of hockey operations for the Vegas Golden Knights, created for both the Knights and formerly the Washington Capitals where they also worked together, is inclusive.

“There’s no trying to fight your way in the door or anything like that,” she says. In fact, if anything, it’s been the opposite: “They’ve always been very good about finding ways that my skill set or the lens that I have can contribute to whatever it is that makes up that total picture,” she says. “I do realize in some aspects that’s an experience that I’ve been fortunate to have, where that’s the norm.”

Courtesy of Subject

Las Vegas Aces president Nikki Fargas (center) at an Aces game with in-game host Joe Brown (left) and Aces mascot BUCKET$ (right).

What The Future Will Look Like

For starters, the F1 Academy, a women-only racing series, will come to Vegas this November, in part thanks to Prazer’s advocacy in addition to that of managing director Susie Wolff. “Having the opportunity to bring it to a destination that sparkles and gives the girls the opportunity to race in a place like Vegas is just something that I don’t think anyone could turn down, so I wanted to make sure that they were here,” Prazer says.

A Major League Baseball stadium is currently under construction on Las Vegas Boulevard where the Las Vegas A’s will play in 2028. “There’s a lot of rumors about potentially an NBA team and that would be phenomenal to see,” Wik adds. “You never know what’s going to show up in Vegas, and I think that’s kind of what makes this destination so special.”

Douglass Morgan says she believes the fact that Vegas is a place of reinvention and reimagination explains why so many people move here. “Who would have thought that there would be an oasis of gaming in the middle of the desert in the 60s and 70s?” Then in the 90s and 2000s, integrated resorts brought shows, shopping, and celebrity chefs. “Every few decades, Vegas is kind of able to reinvent itself, and it has more recently with sports coming here,” she says.

Yes, it’s true: Vegas is in its Sports era—and plans to stay in it for a long long time.

The Best Places To Watch Sports in Vegas

“You don’t even have to have a ticket to the game to be a part of the action, and that is so unique in this town,” Wik says. Here, a few of the women of Vegas share their favorite spots to catch a game or event.

McMullin’s Irish Pub: “It’s a big hockey bar, it’s family owned, and they have all sports, including Premier League,” Boettinger says. “So if I want a full day of sports, that’s where I’ll usually go to watch ’em.”
Stadium Swim at Circa Las Vegas: This rooftop pool in downtown Las Vegas has massive screens. “So you’re having a pool party watching the game,” Wik says. “You pinch yourself, you think, is this real?”
Grand Prix Plaza: Prazer admits she’s biased, but she says that “watching sports at our venue is the best.” Built on 39 acres, the plaza includes an immersive Formula 1 experience, a restaurant, a bar, a store, simulators, and many TVs to catch live or past races.

Vegas: Where Sports Compete With—And Meet—Entertainment

Going to a sports game in Vegas means a leveled-up entertainment experience too. Boettinger says that the main competition for sports teams is actually the “glitz and glamour” of Vegas. “Here in Vegas you have a top act performing across the street for a sold out show, so you have to come up with something that brings the fans in,” she says. Elsewhere, “it’s almost unheard of for people to all be in their seats before the team even hits the ice. But here, they want to see the Knight dueling with the enemy and they want to see the dragon and they want to see the lights.” (The Knights consider their pre-game show a “theatrical production.”)

Raiders fans, too, get in on the excitement. The recent “Welcome To Fabulous” campaign debuted at a game in September and involved an “experiential runway that merges pro football pageantry with the vibrant spirit of the campaign” instead of the typical tunnel walk at other stadiums, where players enter and run onto the field. “Honestly, it doesn’t matter who your team is and what game you’re at, the entertainment experience, a part of every sporting event here, raises the bar on what these professional games are supposed to be,” Wik says.

Caitlin is a health and fitness journalist based in New York City. In addition to Women’s Health, she writes for publications including The Wall Street Journal and Runner’s World. She’s completed 12 marathons, including the six World Marathon Majors, is semi-fluent in French, and volunteers as a greeter on The High Line. Follow her on Instagram or LinkedIn.