by Makenna Damhorst
Sports embody grit, effective collaboration, and strategic action toward a shared vision—all traits required in the fight to address climate change. The world of athletics provides an opportune angle for mobilizing large-scale climate action. In climate advocacy, athletes are uniquely positioned to be able to reach wide audiences with their influence: 88% of Americans report watching live sports, with global engagement for high-profile events reportedly reaching around 5 billion people, roughly 63% of the global population. At the university level, this opportunity persists—including Penn Men’s Basketball’s appearance in March Madness (with the first round of the tournament reaching millions of viewers), the platforms of Penn’s Olympians, and the increasing opportunities for name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals for student-athletes at Penn. The audience surrounding sports, combined with the persuasive nature of athletic figures, poses a powerful opportunity to mobilize climate action through the athletics community.
Photo credit: University Communications
The Role of Athletes in the Climate Fight
Penn recently sparked a collaboration with the non-profit EcoAthletes, which focuses on empowering athletes from the collegiate to professional to Olympic levels to leverage their platforms for climate communication and action.
When sports entrepreneur and EcoAthletes founder Lewis Blaustein spoke at Penn in January, he discussed his vision for the role of athletes in what he calls “the climate comeback.” Blaustein cited that athletes have historically led on all types of social issues, from the 1960s social justice and civil rights efforts of champion heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali to the LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality advocacy of professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe.
So far, the “greening” of sports has focused on elements of the in-person experience, such as EV chargers and solar arrays on LEED-Certified stadiums, but Blaustein envisions the next, and potentially much more impactful step: engaging millions of sports fans worldwide.
Now is the time for athletes to speak up on climate.
EcoAthletes is focused on building this type of widespread community engagement in climate action, and works hard to make it accessible, fun, and impactful.
The Collegiate Cup, Powered by Protect Where We Play: An Opportunity for Penn
Since 2023, the EcoAthletes has run the Collegiate Cup—a competition among 49 universities in the U.S. and Canada—to promote inclusive, gamified climate action. Anyone can join any university team, no affiliation is required, and log exercise via smartphone to fund environmental efforts.
For the second consecutive year, EcoAthletes is partnering with the Ocean Conservancy’s Protect Where We Play initiative. Any logged exercise will fund volunteer cleanups of coasts and waterways through the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) initiative, which has already collected more than 400 million pounds of trash thanks to efforts from 19 million volunteers since the program originated.
All exercise counts—walking, running, rowing, swimming, biking, and more—and is tracked in the Climategames app, either manually or via synced devices. As participants log their workouts, the platform ranks universities and reports plastic cleanup metrics.
2026 marks Penn’s first year in the Collegiate Cup—join the team today to start contributing to ocean plastic removal by tracking your exercise!
Penn’s Connection to EcoAthletes
In August 2025, I was researching carbon management and decarbonization under Dr. Jennifer Wilcox and Dr. Hélène Pilorgé with the Clean Energy Conversions Lab, with a dual presence researching climate misinformation and disinformation under Dr. Irina Marinov in the Oceans and Climate Dynamics lab. I was living in Philadelphia over the summer to train for gymnastics, and I wanted to use my platform as a collegiate athlete to share what I was learning and advocate for climate action. That’s when I learned about EcoAthletes, and became Penn’s initial EcoAthletes Champion and captain of our Collegiate Cup team. I was soon joined as an EcoAthletes Champion by David Rolands (‘27), an offensive lineman on Penn’s football team, who works for the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM) under Dr. Michael Mann, and also serves as a board member of EcoAthletes. Rolands manages the PCSSM website, social media feeds, and other outreach on news and events. Rolands is pursuing a B.A. in Communication and Media Studies in the Annenberg School of Communication, and is well-positioned to lead on climate communication within athletics and beyond.
Together, we are working to engage those in the Penn community and more in this exciting initiative.
Building Community Through Climate Action
Working to cultivate engagement in the Collegiate Cup has instilled in me a tangible understanding that more people at Penn care about this than I initially realized. There are so many incredible people already working on climate at Penn that I’ve spent my time here working to absorb as much information from as many people as possible. But in pushing myself to pitch this initiative to my peers in the athletics community, I’ve realized that people are genuinely excited about getting involved and readily take the moment to download the app and start tracking their exercise. After speaking to a couple of groups with the Penn Athletics Wharton Leadership Academy (PAWLA) and briefly sharing a slide with the QR code for Climategames, I opened the app weeks later, at the start of the Collegiate Cup, and was struck to see student-athletes already tracking their training for plastic removal.
It has also been inspiring to collaborate with students across other universities. Emily Pape is a senior basketball player for Cornell and a fellow EcoAthletes Champion who led Cornell to win last year’s Collegiate Cup. Although it’s a competition between universities, she readily made herself available for advice and support in helping to maximize Penn’s reach in the initiative. Beyond the Collegiate Cup, there is strong potential here for a cross-campus Ivy League sustainability initiative within athletics.
Pape is joined by so many other highly collaborative individuals working at the nexus of climate and athletics. A community which is now more readily connected through EcoAthletes.
During the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, EcoAthletes Champion Jacquie Pierri – New Jersey native, US-Italy dual citizen and ice hockey player for Italy – was highlighted by NBC commentators for her energy engineering master’s thesis on alternative refrigerants for ice rinks and her commitment to embodying her dedication to sustainability in her daily commute as she rides her bike 45 minutes to and from intense hockey practices. That clip reached an estimated audience of over 3 million viewers.
In reflecting on the role of athletes in this space, Pierri told me, “Often in climate advocacy we are kind of preaching to the choir… It’s such a wide-reaching problem that I think it’s really important that we reach people who maybe don’t buy into the identity politics of being a climate activist.”
That’s exactly what the Collegiate Cup aims to achieve. I am thrilled about Penn’s first year in the competition, and look forward to continuing to build this passionate community to represent the Red and Blue.
How To Get Involved
Download the Climategames App, sign up for Penn’s team under the Collegiate Cup, and track your exercise (even walking or biking to class!) before Earth Day, April 22, to help contribute to healthier ecosystems through cleaner bodies of water. New team members can join and begin logging their exercise at any point during the competition. Exercise, build community, cultivate hope, and remove plastic from the ocean!
Makenna Damhorst is a third-year undergraduate Penn student, studying Earth and Environmental Science in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Energy and Sustainability Engineering through an accelerated master’s in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is also an Ambassador for Penn Athletics in the SNF Paideia Program, and a member of the Women’s Gymnastics team.