How women’s sports are breaking through and scoring big wins with mainstream audiences

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• Amna Nawaz:

  The NCAA announced a new eight-year broadcast deal with ESPN last week for over $900 million, with women's college sports making up the bulk of the deal.

  While women's athletics have traditionally been on the sidelines of sports media, in recent years, they have scored some big wins with mainstream audiences, effectively tripling their coverage in the process.

  Stephanie Sy dives into the rise of women's sports and the fandom propelling them forward.

• Jillian Hiscock, Women's Sports Fan:

  So, yes, like I was at this championship game 2017.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Minnesota resident Jillian Hiscock is a die-hard fan of women's sports.

• Jillian Hiscock:

  I'm a huge WNBA fan and women's basketball fan in general, but I follow everything.

• Stephanie Sy:

  But catching a woman's basketball game at her local sports bar proved complicated.

• Jillian Hiscock:

  So many women's sports fans' experience has been walking into a bar, looking around at the 20-plus TVs and knowing that it is very likely the game you want to watch is not on TV.

• Stephanie Sy:

  That is, until she took a trip to Portland Oregon and walked into The Sports Bra, the world's first women's sports bar.

• Jillian Hiscock:

  It was literally transformative walking in and just knowing that this is a place where my fandom is celebrated.

• Jenny Nguyen, Owner, The Sports Bra:

  It's not a sports bar for women. It's a bar for women's sports.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Owner Jenny Nguyen opened the Bra in 2022. There, she maintains the sports bar aesthetics, but keeps the TVs tuned only to women's sports coverage. But keeping those screens filled with women's sports took a game plan.

• Jenny Nguyen:

  If it was just what was on TV and what was on cable, there would not be enough to open The Sports Bra. So I reached out to some of the bigger women's sports media brands that do their own YouTube channels, that kind of thing.

• Woman:

  Welcome to the "Just Women's Sports Super Show."

• Stephanie Sy:

  While traditional broadcast media has often treated women's sports as a benchwarmer, new media has given it more play.

  Shelley Pisarra, Executive Vice President of Global Insights, Wasserman: Streaming platforms have completely changed the game with respect to women's media coverage.

• Stephanie Sy:

  By including all the ways fans now consume sports, media and marketing researcher Shelley Pisarra says women's sports grew from just 4 percent to 15 percent of all sports coverage in the past four years.

• Shelley Pisarra:

  It is amazing. And, yes, it's triple where we have been before, but it is only 15 percent.

• Christine Brennan, USA Today:

  When we look back, we will look at 2023 as a watershed moment for women's sports.

• Stephanie Sy:

  The rise in coverage comes as no surprise to veteran sports journalist Christine Brennan. It's the fruition of a landmark piece of legislation known as Title IX signed by Richard Nixon in 1972 giving women and girls the right to equal opportunity in sports in publicly funded schools.

• Christine Brennan:

  We are now in the beginning of the next 50 years of Title IX. It makes complete sense that we would be seeing this explosion of women's sports.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Brennan herself was a high school athlete just after Title IX was passed, but she didn't get to enjoy the benefits, as the new rules took years to be enforced.

• Christine Brennan:

  I'm honored to have been kind of at the very beginning, just getting that first glimpse of what would come in the decades that followed.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And what followed are big headline-stealing moments, like the showdown between Iowa's Caitlin Clark and Louisiana State University's Angel Reese in the NCAA basketball final, Katie Ledecky beating Michael Phelps for most individual world swimming titles, and Simone Biles' comeback to become the most decorated gymnast in history.

• Christine Brennan:

  Today is the greatest day to be a woman in sports until tomorrow, but the mainstream sports media has not caught up.

• Stephanie Sy:

  While few women's sports receive prime-time slots, their ratings have continuously exceeded expectations.

  The 2023 WNBA Finals were the most watched in 20 years. The National Women's Soccer League saw a 20 percent increase in TV ratings this season. Women's college volleyball is continuously shattering its own viewership ratings, and that NCAA women's basketball final, it averaged 9.9 million viewers, more than the five-game average for last year's World Series.

• Christine Brennan:

  The rise of social media has been a fabulous turn of events for women's sports and women's sports fans, because, in the old days, it just wouldn't be covered.

• Ellie Carson, Women's Soccer Fan:

  Things that live rent-free in my head include when Angel City beat the thorns 5-1.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Eighteen-year-old Ellie Carson is active on TikTok, where she posts exclusively about her favorite sport, women's soccer.

• Ellie Carson:

  I just posted a video, and then a lot of people were commenting. And I was, like, blown away, because I really didn't have other people in my life who liked women's soccer, and I was like, oh, my God, there's other people?

• Stephanie Sy:

  Carson was first drawn to the sport during the 2019 World Cup.

• Protesters:

  Equal pay! Equal pay!

• Stephanie Sy:

  When the U.S. women's team was campaigning to earn as much as their male counterparts.

• Ellie Carson:

  It definitely draws you to a team when they stand for more than just the sport that they play.

• Jaquinda Jackson, Women's Sports Fan:

  I love all things women's basketball. We can be competitors. Like, we can talk junk.

• Stephanie Sy:

  For South Carolina resident Jaquinda Jackson, watching female ballers is empowering, and, for her sons, enlightening.

• Jaquinda Jackson:

  Showing two little boys that women can and Brent Rowe will compete, it diminishes that whole stereotype of women are like just one way.

• Brent Rowe, Women's Basketball Fan:

  They're playing at such a high level, it makes it really easy and really entertaining to watch.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Brent Rowe has been a sports fan his whole life, but, more recently, he became one of the men who make up roughly half the audience for women's sports. He's now a season ticket holder for his local WNBA team, the Las Vegas Aces and a fan of their championship-winning A'ja Wilson.

• Brent Rowe:

  The Aces were the first professional sports team to bring a championship to the city, and the first ones to have a parade on the Las Vegas Strip. How cool is that?

  I'm rocking an A'ja Wilson Jersey when I'm walking down the street.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Men like Rowe represent a sea change for women's sports and are key to its growth, says Brennan.

• Christine Brennan:

  These are Title IX males who were raised very differently than their fathers or grandfathers, and they will be fighting to make sure there's advertising for women's sports.

• Stephanie Sy:

  While college sporting events are, thanks to Title IX, split evenly between men and women, professional sports are dominated by men's leagues.

  But Jillian Hiscock is banking on that changing.

• Jillian Hiscock:

  In here, we will have all kinds of memorabilia, art on the walls.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Inspired by her visit to The Sports Bra in Portland, she's getting ready to open A Bar of Their Own, the Midwest's first female sports bar in Minneapolis.

• Jillian Hiscock:

  I was that young girl athlete that never really had representation in any kind of professional sports, in sports bars, and the ability to really expose our younger generation to these women athletes is really important to me.

• Stephanie Sy:

  A Bar of Their Own will open its doors this March in what is expected to be another banner year for women's sports.

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Stephanie Sy.

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