President and CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee, Zaileen Janmohamed
Photo Credit: BAHC
President and CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee, Zaileen Janmohamed, is bridging the gap between sports and community impact in the San Francisco Bay Area.
With three major sporting events–NBA All-Star in 2025, and Super Bowl LX and FIFA World Cup in 2026–all scheduled to take place over the span of 18 months, Janmohamed is placing the Bay back on center stage.
Shifting the future for women through the business of sports
As the daughter of immigrants, Janmohamed has always been inspired to explore success outside of traditional lines. After taking a liking to hockey, she saw the many ways it influenced fortitude and resilience within her, and challenged expectations of what femininity looked like within the realm of sports. This passion eventually led to her studying Kinesiology and Sports Management, placing her at the intersection of science and sports.
With a broader view of the industry, she began to develop an intimate understanding of the business of sports, as she grew increasingly more inspired by the women she encountered along the way. However, as with most spaces, the gender inequalities she encountered reserved women to executional roles and placed them on the other side of C-suite doors, and away from tables where policy and impact were taking place. Janmohamed expresses, “…within my own career ambitions, I knew that if I wanted to be in a position where I could actually influence change, I needed to have a different type of skill set.” Recognizing that the skills she needed to break these barriers weren’t readily available to her, Janmohamed set out to create these opportunities in the hopes of providing increased instances for growth and learning for women following in footsteps they had yet to discover existed.
In collaboration with University of Massachusetts, Janmohamed founded the Women in Sport Business Program that seeks to provide young women with the skills needed to shatter gender and resource-based hindrances to access pivotal roles within the business of sports. By providing skill development within strategy, along with business and financial acumen, it offers women integral access to the support, resources, and visibility that Janmohamed wished had been available to her at the onset of her career. She understood that, in doing so, she would be inspiring young women to reimagine career possibilities, just as she’d done the first moment she stepped onto that hockey rink as a young girl. In providing indelible resources and support to about 30 young women each year since its inception in January 2021, she offers a space to unleash their untapped potential by exposing them to scenarios that aim to give invaluable world and industry knowledge, through direct access to leading female leaders across the sporting industry.
Janmohamed’s commitment to increasing representation in the industry also led her to serve as a board member for Women in Sports Tech (WIST)–an accelerator program that helped to connect over 7,500 candidates with sports and technology roles through its employer network. Within any role she undertakes, her goal, she states, “[is] to get women into positions where I believe the industry is going so that they could be more impactful, and be placed in leadership positions in the future. When you fast forward that to today, now I’m in a position where I can actually hire those women and put them in C-suite positions. It’s almost a full circle moment; you offer education at the beginning, the skill development at the beginning, then you evolve those skills based on where the industry is going, which is in technology. And then, you hire those women when you have the ability to do so.” And that is exactly what she did when she became the president and CEO of the Bay Area Host Committee.
The impact of sports goes beyond the field
The expertise Janmohamed acquired within each of these spaces, paired with her much sought-after insights on and off the field, has continued to make her a valued collaborator and resource with a holistic perspective that spans the full spectrum of sports, from mental health to brand positioning and impact. She understands the unique lens through which she’s able to be a key asset for community leaders, business executives, and those with the power to impact policy and change. “Beyond the science of sport, I also work on the business side. So, when I walk into a room and I’m talking to a team or a brand and they have a focus on a certain thing within sport, I can usually find a way to relate. I understand the movement of sport, as well as its impact because I’ve studied it and I’ve worked in it for a number of years.”
It is why it came as no surprise when she was asked to take the helm of the Bay Area Host Committee and lead the region through the most highly visible sporting events in the world.
This unprecedented occurrence finds the Bay Area being the first city to host the Super Bowl and the World Cup within the same year, and is most likely a feat that may never occur again. While these events are expected to collectively bring in $1.4 billion into the region, beyond this, Janmohamed knows that this is an opportunity for the Bay Area to shine through after years of economic strife. While these events will showcase the Bay to millions of viewers and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors, Janmohamed is more focused on the community impact. From the moment the first tourist arrives to the moment the last tourist has returned home, she aims to, “explore initiatives or programs that our organization can implement to ensure that local communities are actively involved and that these benefits are widely distributed and really felt across different demographic groups.”
To do so, Janmohamed and her team are focusing on events and initiatives that include, “BIPOC and marginalized populations, and the ways to contribute to community and economic impact in order to attract other events to come to the Bay after.” The diversity that exists within the Bay Area is one that cannot be denied. With a total of nine counties, Janmohamed is creating festivities for tourists, and locals alike, to experience the magic of the Bay Area together. “A fan in San Jose is going to engage in the sport of soccer differently than a fan in Oakland, or a fan in Marin, and we should allow for that to happen. It’s that diversity that we should actually be focusing on and allowing to flourish organically versus forcing everybody into one spot.” Through each county, Janmohamed hopes that “…fans will celebrate the events in a way that’s more authentic to them through food, culture and music. And as the host committee, it is our job to ensure events like this have a lasting impact in the Bay.”
From play to policy, equitable outcomes for the future of sports require women at the helm
With the Bay Area Host Committee–a not for profit organization with the primary goal of uniting the Bay Area through sport–acting as an effective collaborator for communities, brands, investors, and industry leaders, Janmohamed humbly leverages the knowledge and support of her team and board members to blaze new and inventive trails toward the future. With a shared vision, she leads by example, while also creating greater opportunities for continued growth for those around her. With a small team that she hopes to scale in the future, the key to success, she believes, “[is] to be completely transparent with my team and vice versa. If there is a problem that they’re facing, and they don’t know how to solve it, we need to support each other through it.” She is also a huge advocate for optimizing the skills of those around her, explaining, [I have] to trust the people in the positions [I’m] putting them in. They are experts, and I have to rely on them and trust them to do a really great job to the best of their ability, versus trying to micromanage and stifle [their] growth.”
It is this unwavering confidence in her leadership that allows her to build trusted relationships with those within local, state, and federal government entities to ensure she can lend her voice to the issues that matter.
The possibility model for women and young girls is directly impacted by their ability to see themselves within spaces that have traditionally been reserved for men and boys. However, through her determination to shatter stereotypes, ceilings, and limitations for women and girls, Janmohamed is leading the way to create more executive roles for women, while redefining what it means to be a woman in sports, and she’s hoping to make the Bay Area proud along the way.
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