"That's my claim to fame," she says. "I'm a season ticket holder. Every time I'm sitting there, I just look around and think, yeah. That was me."

 

For 26 years, the Seattle Mariners had been a Pepsi account. Twenty-six years. Then Gina came along, built the relationship, made the case, and closed the deal. It is, she'll tell you with obvious delight, one of the proudest moments of her career.

 

Though right now, she's got some competition for that title.

 

With the FIFA World Cup just days away from arriving in Seattle, Gina Lambert is in the middle of something she still has to pinch herself about. As Vice President of Commercial Operations and Partnerships for Seattle FWC26, the local organizing committee for the 2026 World Cup, she has spent the last year helping shape what this tournament looks and feels like for the city she has called home her entire life.

 

"I can't believe how fast it's gone," she says. "When I started there were 500 and something days left. Now we're almost here. It's wild."

 

Gina grew up in Auburn and went to Green River College right out of high school, working full time and going to class in the mornings, the way a lot of South King County kids made it work. She earned her associate degree, and then she got busy. Over the next three decades she climbed steadily through grocery, retail, and food and beverage, managing teams, driving results across Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, and developing a reputation for not just doing a job well but finding ways to do it better. At Target she oversaw Food and Beverage across 59 stores in three states, hit number one in company-wide sales growth in 2018, and rewrote the Grocery Operating Model in a way the entire chain eventually adopted.

 

But it was Coca-Cola that changed everything.

 

When she joined Coca-Cola, she moved to the food service and on-premises side of the business, the part that works with sports teams, restaurants, hotels, ski resorts, and casinos and anywhere else you would drink a beverage. She had found her world.

 

"I love sports," she says. "Always have. Getting to work in that space just clicked for me immediately."

 

She built her team, grew her territory, and eventually ran the largest food service and on-premises operation in the Swire Coca-Cola network across Washington and Oregon, nearly 80 people, over $112 million in annual revenue. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she walked into the Mariners and closed a deal that had been off the table for a generation.

 

"Twenty-six years they'd been with Pepsi," she says. "And now every time I'm at a game, I'm just quietly looking around at all those Coke cups. I don't say it out loud. but I think it."

 

She had also, quietly, been getting closer to the World Cup for years before she ever officially joined the team. As a commissioner with the Seattle Sports Commission, she was part of the group making Seattle's case to FIFA. She served as Coca-Cola's FIFA lead for the city. She knew the people, knew the vision, and believed in what Seattle could pull off. So, when the chance came to go work for FWC26 directly, the fact that it was a fixed-term role with no guarantees beyond the work itself didn't give her much pause.

 

"How do you say no to something like this?" she says. "You don't."

 

Her job was to find and develop partnerships that would fund what the committee wanted to build, not just for the tournament but for Seattle long after the closing ceremony. When she started, two partners were signed on. She worked directly with the SEAFWC26 CEO to find and sign the rest. Microsoft, Amazon, Alaska Airlines, Boeing, and a dozen more, each one a conversation, a relationship, a deal that took the whole of her career to be ready to close.

 

But ask her what she's most proud of and she doesn't talk about the names on the partnership list. She talks about what those partnerships made possible.

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