Black women NFL agents struggle working at agencies — so they create their own

About a decade ago, Tamika Hrobowski wanted to pivot from being an attorney to a sports agent. After spending years as a prosecutor or legal counsel, she wanted to get into the sports world, something she’d considered since attending law school at the University of Illinois.

A friend at the time encouraged Hrobowski to get certified as an agent and subsequently connected Hrobowski with an agent friend of theirs. After about a year of vetting each other, Hrobowski joined the agent’s firm as a partner and vice president.

Hrobowski expected to bring her legal expertise as a former deputy prosecuting attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, and regional counsel for the Social Security Administration to the firm, and, in return, be groomed for the sports representation industry.

But that didn’t happen.

At gatherings and events, Hrobowski wasn’t introduced as a partner of the firm, but rather as “so-and-so from my Atlanta office.” Information about the agency and its clients wasn’t always shared with her, and Hrobowski felt pushed back and put in a corner as just the lawyer, which she said lessened her credibility as a sports agent.

That experience alone taught Hrobowski a valuable lesson about how Black women are viewed in the sports representation industry. It also foreshadowed her path to creating her own sports agency, CREED Sports & Entertainment, in 2021 with two other Black women, rather than working for someone who didn’t value her.

“It was untenable,” Hrobowski said of her previous experience as an agent.

While there are recent examples of women — and more specifically Black women — representing NFL players, their numbers pale in comparison to those of men. Just under 9% of the almost 1,000 certified NFL agents are women, with even fewer being Black women (2.3%). For those Black women who work at established agencies, they can sometimes face sexism and boys’ club cultures that limit their ability to do their jobs.

For these reasons, and many more, some Black women agents have created their own firms rather than work within agencies that diminish them. At least seven of the 26 Black women agents certified by the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) run their own agencies, according to Diverse Representation, a publication that advocates for more diversity in sports representation.

According to a 2025 study conducted by Diverse Representation and super agency Wassermen, more than 85% of Black women agents across all major sports run their own shop.

“I could only control what I could control. I couldn’t control him,” Hrobowski said of her former partner. “But I can control the surroundings and the environment I choose to put myself into, and with that we created this environment that is like-minded people with the same basic foundation in terms of what our goals are in representation.”

The answer to the question, “Why are there so few Black women sports agency owners?” is no different from the lack of Black women entrepreneurs in other industries.

Startup costs can be astronomical. Office space in large markets like New York City can run more than $10,000 a month. The NFLPA’s annual certification renewal fees range from $1,500 to $2,000 per person. Agents normally shoulder the costs for draft clients, including training, housing, transportation, and meals. Those costs can range from $5,000 per player on the low end to the hundreds of thousands, and aren’t always returned beyond the 3% commission agents earn under negotiated contracts. Agents can sink upwards of $250,000 into their business with no guarantees of a return.

“A lot of people don’t have that just laying around,” said Rasheeda Liberty, founder of Lady Lib Sports and Entertainment. “And I’ll be honest, that first year I didn’t either.”

Liberty is a former marketing executive for Fortune 100 companies Mars and Amazon. She decided to become an agent after participating in an agent bootcamp hosted by Chris Cabott, who represents Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Liberty said she was recruited by other agencies, but she decided she didn’t want to just be used for her marketing background; she wanted to be seen as an actual agent. Liberty instead launched Lady Lib in 2018 and currently represents 27 professional and college football players.

“I [didn’t] want to be bought and sold,” she said.

There’s also a lack of mentorship and community for Black women in the industry. There’s no formal organization for Black women sports agents, and they often feel excluded from networking opportunities. Hrobowski said she wasn’t introduced to anyone in the industry during her time at her previous firm, and it has been difficult for her to adjust.

“This whole business is relationships,” Hrobowski said.

The Diverse Representation-Wasserman study asked Black women agents the main obstacles they believe prevent Black women from becoming agents. The responses ranged from a lack of pipelines to agent fees, tokenization, and the fear of failure.

“The lack of representation can make success feel out of reach,” one respondent wrote in the study’s survey.

Jaia Thomas, a former sports and entertainment attorney and the founder of Diverse Representation, said it can be a lonely experience for Black women at majority white, male agencies, making it challenging for them to assimilate and build community. Those challenges are difficult to overcome these days, she said, because of the anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movement sweeping corporate America, leading some agencies to abandon diversity.

“I just don’t know right now in this political climate if that’s going to happen,” Thomas said.

Black women agents say that veterans in the industry can be reluctant to take Black women under their wings and show them the ropes — even other Black women.

“A lot of agents are not very forthright in giving you information because they view you as their future competition, ” Liberty said.

But that’s far from everyone’s experience. Tabetha Plummer, the CREED co-founder, has been a National Basketball Players Association-certified agent since 2019. A male colleague encouraged her to get certified as an NFL agent. When Plummer needed information on a basketball player for insurance purposes, she reached out to Tracey Carney for help contacting the right people.

Soon after, Plummer, Carney and Hrobowski met and later formed CREED, which represents eight football players, including free agent safety Gabriel Taylor, the son of the late NFL player Sean Taylor.

“What we realized in talking to each other was that despite the fact that our backgrounds may be different, we were mature, we had the same mindset in terms of the goals for the players,” Plummer said.

There’s no point in sugarcoating it: There’s a lot of anti-Black misogyny rooted in the industry. It’s a hypermasculine space that isn’t accustomed to women being around. Kelli Masters, the first woman to represent an NFL draft pick, signed defensive lineman Gerald McCoy in 2010.

There’s an understanding among Black women agents that people underestimate their knowledge and business acumen simply because they’re Black women. Parents and athletes will sometimes say they don’t want to sign with a woman agent simply because of her gender.

Black women working in White male-owned agencies can lead to them being used for both their race and gender to help close a deal. They are used to better relate to the Black families that agencies must sit in front of to pitch to their Black sons. Say an agency knows a prospective client lost their mother, they’ll then assume the client needs what Liberty calls the “woman’s touch” or “Black touch.”

“I didn’t want to be a part of that, fooling the system or being utilized in that way,” she said. “I wanted to build it all.”

After receiving her degree from the University of Illinois College of Law, Hrobowski said — like many Black women at the time — she was steered toward employment law because firms wanted Black women at the table for racial discrimination cases. The firm’s argument would be how can their client be racist if they have a Black woman on their team?

“Even though I am not doing anything but probably pulling boxes in,” Hrobowski said.

Black women agents have no choice but to acknowledge the racism and sexism, but sometimes have to play by those rules to make it. For instance, it’s sexist to assume women working in sports want to sleep with the athletes. But you still have to be overly mindful that it’s not assumed about you.

“Being a female in a male-dominated industry, you really had to decide what standard you’re going to take,” said Jametta White, who founded Journey Sports Management in 2013. “You never left any room for anybody to question how you got somewhere, what you were doing while you were there, always remaining above board, and never putting yourself in a situation where you can’t find yourself out of.”

In fact, Black women often must go above and beyond their job titles to get the same respect as men. Liberty said she’s praised by front offices for what she calls “making deposits in the bank,” including calling on executives’ birthdays or remembering their children’s and wives’ names. For her clients, Liberty helps manage their various appointments, organize their homes, and even cook for them on occasion.

Hrobowski said a client recently signed with CREED, in part, because the co-founders helped him better understand the player-agent process than any other male agent he spoke with.

Plummer said she became an agent because her attorney clients kept asking her to explain their contracts.

“Inherently, women will see and hear something that others might miss because we are inherently attuned in a very different way,” said White, who retired from sports representation in September. “It allows you to anticipate a need that others may not naturally think of.”

Mothers of clients feel more included in the process because Black women agents go out of their way to seek their input. There are things a Black woman can say and do that most men wouldn’t feel comfortable saying, getting to the heart of how they’re feeling, because they’ll feel comfortable talking to her.

“We traditionally carried the weight of the world on us, so there’s so many things that we understand and so many things that we get,” Plummer said.

What can feel like a burden can also be a blessing. Last year, Plummer went to Austin, Texas, to have dinner with former Longhorns basketball player Christian Bishop and his family. She told Bishop’s parents that she is a wife and a mom, too, which means she understands the anxiety surrounding their child’s future. Plummer assured them that if they entrusted her with that responsibility, she would not disappoint them.

Bishop, whose team won the Czech Republic League championship in 2025 and, according to Plummer, is making more money than he ever anticipated after five college seasons at Creighton and Texas.

“Being a Black female,” Plummer said, “is my superpower.”

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