The women’s college volleyball regionals take place this weekend to decide who will advance to the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville for the semifinal and final matches December 19-22, which will be hosted on ESPN and ABC.
When women’s sports have been hosted on the primary channels of ESPN and ABC there have been substantial increases in viewership and continuous records being broken. For example, the WNBA All-Star game was hosted and shown on ABC and set a record with 3.44 million viewers, last year’s Women’s College World Series (WCWS) matchup between the Oklahoma Sooners softball team and Texas drew an average of nearly 1.9 million viewers and peaked at 2.3 million viewers on ESPN, and the 2024 national championship basketball game between the South Carolina Gamecocks and the Iowa Hawkeyes drew an average of 18.9 million viewers and peaked at 24.1 million viewers on ABC, the highest viewed women’s college basketball game in history.
When we look specifically at women’s college volleyball over the past two years, the 2023 season was the most watched volleyball season ever with 466 million total minutes viewed across ESPN’s platforms. Additionally, 2024 was record breaking and shows a continued interest in watching this prominent sport in the US. ESPN Press Room released that the top five match-up between the Nebraska Huskers and Louisville Cardinals on September 22 was the most watched regular season volleyball match ever on ESPN platforms with an average of 684,000 viewers, peaking at 808,000 and 49% of the audience was women. Recently, ESPN reported that the 2024 regular season viewership increased by 21% compared to the 2023 regular season with 635 million minutes watched across 38 matches on their platforms.
This consistent growth and attention is incredible for women’s college volleyball, but did ESPN miss the mark by not making more of the entire tournament available to viewers?
Simply stated, yes.
Similar to 2023 postseason play, this season’s tournament had first and second rounds of the tournament only available via ESPN+ or available via ESPN2 but in a format similar to NFL’s Red Zone where whip around coverage is the format. Regional matches this week were only found on ESPN+ or ESPN2. It is not until the final eight teams are left in the tournament that matches are available on ESPN and ABC.
Women and girls volleyball is the one of the fastest growing team sports in the United States, with numbers hitting an all-time high of 470,488 in 2022-2023. USA Volleyball reported that since 2013-2014, an increase of 40% of junior girls are registered and participating in volleyball through their organization. Furthermore, the US women’s Olympic volleyball team took home the silver medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics and are currently ranked second in Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB)’s power rankings for 2024. Thus, there is a persistent audience available for women’s college volleyball.
As media conglomerates continue to push to stretch their reach to new demographics and markets, again, it seems like a miss to not place the NCAA volleyball tournament on premiere channels (i.e., ESPN and ABC) given the interest from younger and more female driven fans and consumers. The current format and media deal feels like a missed opportunity for ESPN.
As stated above, when women’s sports have been placed on the premiere channels that are more readily available over cable and do not require additional subscriptions, records are smashed.
About Allison Smith
Dr. Allison Smith is a former Division I and II softball student athlete who is now an assistant professor of sport administration who studies and writes about the current state of women in sport. Outside of writing about women in sport, Allison has taught sport management and marketing courses for over ten years at various undergraduate and graduate programs. Follow Allison on Twitter @allisonbsmith15.