For years, Chiney Ogwumike has been making the case that women’s basketball deserves its own dedicated platform, something daily, something built around the sport rather than carved out of it.
“Having a show like that would show that we’ve arrived,” she told Front Office Sports last year.
Starting today, she has one.
ESPN and Omaha Productions announced the launch of Chiney Today, a twice-weekly digital show hosted by Ogwumike that covers the NBA, WNBA, and college basketball. Episodes will be available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get podcasts. The partnership with Omaha — Peyton Manning’s production company, which has become an increasingly significant content partner for ESPN in recent years — gives Ogwumike a show of her own to go alongside her existing roles on NBA Today, NBA Countdown, WNBA Countdown, First Take, and SportsCenter.
“Basketball has always been so much bigger than final buzzers and box scores — it’s culture, community, and global connection,” Ogwumike said in a statement. “Chiney Today is about bringing all of that together, covering the entire basketball landscape in one place.”
That includes covering the WNBA’s ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations, and Ogwumike — whose sister, Nneka, is one of the players at the center of those talks — acknowledged to People that covering them has been a complicated position to be in. “I’m not going to lie, it’s been difficult to balance because I have personal feelings, but at the same time, I have a job to do,” she said, adding that Chiney Today will absolutely dive into the CBA negotiations from her perspective.
As for the portfolio she’s building around it, Ogwumike re-signed with ESPN on a four-year deal last October and has since expanded well beyond her on-air roles. She became the first Black woman and WNBA player to host a national radio show for ESPN, co-founded Victorious with agent Allison Galer — which already has a scripted WNBA comedy series (“The W”) in development at Peacock with the GLOW creators as showrunners — and now has her own show through Omaha Productions.
“I’ve been fighting for this opportunity for a long time,” she said of Chiney Today. “I don’t take this for granted because I know I’m doing this for the players and for the locker rooms that I was in and for the moment that we’re in.”
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.