The Betty Squad: Kona’s Triathlon Sorority

The Betty Squad routinely has members travel to races to support their teammates — including in Kona. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

If you have been in Kona this week, there’s a good chance you’ve seen large groups of women roaming around town in hot-pink swimsuits and cycling gear, a skull-and-butterfly logo emblazoned on their chests. Whether you saw them at the Ho’ala Training Swim last Sunday, the Underpants Run on Thursday or anywhere else in and around Kona, they were likely laughing and visibly having a fun time.

Those are the women of the Betty Squad — an athlete ambassador team for the women’s triathlon apparel brand Betty Designs. This team has been around for 11 years — four fewer than Betty Designs’ 15 years of existence— and it is routinely one of the most highly reviewed ambassador groups in the sport. To understand why that’s the case, you’ll have to hear from Kristin Mayer, the founder of Betty Designs and the Betty Squad, and some of her fellow “Bettys” — the term of endearment athletes receive when they join the team.

Founding Betty

One of the first questions to pop into your head when you heard about Betty Designs may have been, Who’s Betty? Mayer’s not named Betty, so what’s the deal?

“Betty’s Australian slang for hot surfer chick,” Mayer says with a laugh. “I never really took myself too seriously when it came to business stuff […] and I wanted a name that was just kind of low-key. I didn’t want to have a stodgy, I don’t know, incorporated name.”

Mayer’s journey to founding Betty Designs started long before the company was even an idea. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a fine arts degree, but she says she had no idea what to do for a job. She had done photography, sculpting, painting and more in school, but she had no expectations of “making it” as an artist.

Mayer joined the rest of the Betty Squad on the Big Island this week. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

“My dad was like, ‘Please don’t go live on Venice Beach and sell your things on the sidewalk, you need to get a real job,'” she says, laughing at the memory.

That was when she took her experience in art and applied it to graphic design. She began freelancing for various companies — a “real job” that satisfied her dad and she actually liked. It was around this time that she discovered, and fell in love with, triathlon, and she soon combined her work with her newfound passion.

“I freelanced for some of the small tri brands, like coaching companies, some magazines,” she says. “And that sort of just kept growing.”

Eventually, Mayer started designing individualized racing kits for pro women like Heather Fuhr and Lori Bowden, and a friend of hers (a friend she ended up marrying) suggested that she start her own brand.

“I thought if I sold one thing a day, it would just like be a side hustle,” she says. That was 15 years ago, and today Betty Designs is far more than just a side gig for Mayer. A few years after launching the company, she decided she wanted to expand, so she started the Betty Squad.

Mayer didn’t have huge plans for the team, she just wanted to create a fun group for women triathletes. Like her “side hustle” of Betty Designs, however, the Betty Squad became much more than she could have hoped it would be.

“What’s so cool about it is we take people from all over the world,” she says, “and obviously, you know, every brand exudes its sort of personality and people gravitate, or don’t gravitate, toward your brand. Everyone doesn’t love my brand and that’s fine, but the girls we attract, it’s unbelievable. They get together and they’re like the same person.”

Mayer likens it to her college days when she was looking into different sororities.

“You kind of find your house and your people and you’re all really similar,” she says. “It’s amazing to me that that’s what we’ve created. It’s just been a natural sort of thing.”

Bettys Supporting Bettys

The Betty Squad sisterhood is perhaps best on display in Kona this week. There are around 30 women from the team on the Big Island, but only half of them are racing. The rest are in town to hang out, play sherpa to their teammates, volunteer and cheer the rest of the Bettys on.

The Betty Squad arrived in Kona with plenty of time to do group training sessions. Photo: Sailfish

“That’s what’s fun about this event,” Mayer says. “We get just as many who come out and just have a blast all week supporting the others.”

Jen Temperley has raced Kona before — twice — but this year she is one of the non-racing Bettys on the island. A health and performance coach by trade, Temperley has been racing triathlon for most of her life (she did her first when she was just eight years old), but before she found the Betty Squad, she had never been a part of a true triathlon club or team.

“I kind of grabbed local people,” she says. “I’d go to a bike shop and find people to ride with. Go to the pool and join a masters team. I had, like, the local run club.”

Despite never having sought out a triathlon-specific group before, Temperley was drawn to the Betty Squad when she first learned about it, which happened to be in Kona in 2013, just before the team’s inaugural season.

“I just absolutely loved the style of the kit, loved the vibe, everything about it,” she says. She applied to be on the team and hasn’t looked back since.

“It’s been really encouraging to have a team around you throughout years of training and racing,” she says, adding that going to races has become even more fun than it already was now that she can look forward to hanging out with her fellow Bettys.

“That’s a thousand percent why I’m still racing,” she says. “Because it’s not as fun solo, even though it is a solo sport.”

Thirteen Betty Squad Members are racing in Kona on Saturday. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

From Cancer to Kona

One of the Bettys in Hawaii is Joanna Schaefer-Nami, a triathlon coach and 23-time IRONMAN finisher from Houston, Texas. She has raced the IRONMAN world champs twice before — first in St. George in 2022 and then in Kona a year later. This year’s world championship is different than the others, though, as Schaefer-Nami is coming off of a recent battle with breast cancer.

It was only a year and a half ago that she received her diagnosis, and since then, she has undergone treatment and multiple surgeries. All the while, she did what she could physically.

“Even during surgeries, I kept going back to some base training,” Schaefer-Nami says. “It would be, like, on a recumbent bike or anything I could do just to maintain some fitness.”

Throughout all of this, she maintained the goal of returning to full-distance racing.

“In the back of my mind, I wasn’t saying it out loud, but my husband knew,” she says. “He was like, ‘She wants to go back to Kona. She’s got to do it to show herself that she came back from it all, you know?'”

Schaefer-Nami’s husband was on board for whatever she wanted. She raced IRONMAN Texas this past April, but fell short of qualifying. Even so, she recorded a final time of 13:10:48.

Joanna Schaefer-Nami is in Kona for the first time since battling breast cancer. Photo: Eric Wynn

“After that, I decided to look at the IRONMAN schedule, and I was like, ‘Honey, I think I want to go to Frankfurt,” she says. It was a big commitment, but they went for it, and just over a year since her diagnosis, Schaefer-Nami reached her goal of qualifying for Kona once again.

A big part of her drive to get back to racing was fuelled by the Betty Squad.

“When I got into the cancer journey, those people stepped up,” she says of her teammates. “They were my biggest believers and supporters.”

Schaefer-Nami says Betty Designs and the Betty Squad give her “so much joy,” whether its from the launch of a new product to group events or even something as simply as Zoom Zwift rides (an activity they started during the pandemic).

“It was that little bit of light I was hanging on to all the time,” she says. “I knew I wanted to come back, you know, and be a bigger part on the squad, and so Kristin was the first person I sent the picture from Frankfurt with the [qualifying] coin. She wanted it for me as much as I wanted it.”

The Betty Squad is entering its 13th year, and any and all women can apply to join. The applications for the 2026 team close on October 15.

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