Do you or your brand have a story you want to bring to life?
The data is clear: by age 14, girls drop out of sport at twice the rate of boys. Seven in ten of them say they quit because they didn't feel like they belonged. Molly Hurford has spent her career trying to change that, one book at a time.
As the founder of Strong Girl Publishing and the author of more than a dozen books including the Shred Girls series, Molly brings a rare combination of skills to the table. She's a longtime journalist, a certified coach, a passionate advocate for girls and young women in sport, and an endurance athlete (who came to sport late in life) herself. She doesn't just write about this world, she lives in it. And for brands and organizations that want to create meaningful, lasting resources for young athletes, that depth of experience makes all the difference.
That kind of partnership is exactly why RE.sport, a Canadian organization reimagining, rebuilding, and reclaiming youth sport so every young person has access to safe, welcoming, and meaningful sport experiences, came to Molly. The result is Why Can't They Play?: Reimagining Tryouts So All Kids Have a Chance to Play, a graphic novel illustrated by Crystal Yang, coming in 2026. The book, which Molly helped build from conception to publication and distribution, tackles the real barriers kids face in accessing school sport: Things like gender, race, socioeconomic status, disability, body size, geography. It builds directly on research led by Dr. Catherine Sabiston at the University of Toronto, with contributions from Dr. Sasha Gollish and Vanessa Coulbeck, translating rigorous academic work into something a kid can actually hold in their hands and see themselves in.
Molly's other recent collaborations show the same range. She co-wrote Sprinting Through Setbacks with Micha Powell, a Canadian Olympic sprinter, Commonwealth Games gold medalist, and daughter of two world-class athletes, turning lived experience into a story for young women navigating setbacks in sport and life. She partnered with registered sports dietitian Stevie Lyn Smith on Power Up: A Young Woman's Guide to Winning with Sports Nutrition, a science-backed resource that meets young women athletes where they are. And she worked with Marley Blonsky, co-founder of All Bodies on Bikes, to bring The Ragtag Best Friends Bicycle Club to life as a children's picture book celebrating riding your own way.
What Molly offers organizations is a full-service approach to book creation: concept development, collaborative writing, editorial guidance, and publishing through Strong Girl Publishing, a company purpose-built to produce books that center girls and young women in sport, where a percentage of net profits goes towards supporting nonprofits and charities in the space. Whether your organization wants to reach middle schoolers through fiction, equip teenage athletes with nonfiction tools, translate research into accessible storytelling, or give a young woman athlete a platform to share her story, Molly can help you get there.
Books are among the most powerful tools we have for helping young women and kids see themselves as athletes. If your organization is ready to invest in that kind of visibility, let's talk.
