ESPN sets viewership records for NCAA women’s volleyball semifinals

The ESPN coverage of the NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championship is pulling in big numbers for them. Thursday’s coverage of the national semifinals (Pittsburgh Panthers-Nebraska Cornhuskers and Texas Longhorns-Wisconsin Badgers), both games that aired on the main ESPN network, drew big year-over-year boosts for them. They came in as ESPN’s most-watched semifinals ever and as two of the top four matches ever on ESPN networks:

As noted in the graphic attached to that tweet, both of those matches posted averages of 1.1 million viewers. Those were year-over-year jumps of 49 percent and 55 percent from last year (which, as Jon Lewis writes at Sports Media Watch, saw 736,000 for Texas-San Diego State and 692,000 for Louisville-Pittsburgh). Both of those games were on ESPN as well.

However, last year’s final was on ESPN2. This year’s will be on ABC (3 p.m. ET on Sunday, Texas vs. Nebraska). And as ESPN coordinating producer Ericka Galbraith told Power Plays’ Lindsay Gibbs this week, that fits with how the company has boosted the sport to higher-profile windows this year given the viewership growth:

“Throughout the course of the season, I think there were 20 matches that were upgraded to higher-profile windows. And as we were putting different broadcasts in these higher-profile windows, what we’re seeing is there’s just an increase of audience. The audience viewing is is there!”

“…So I think from a programming perspective, that team worked really hard to say, ‘Hey, if the audience is there, then it’s a safe bet and a very good one to put this on ABC.’ So again, we couldn’t be more excited. I think it’s tremendous for the sport. And we’re ready to go.”

That growth has come not just for ESPN. Fox aired Big Ten volleyball in a couple of NFL-adjacent windows this year and saw ratings rewards, while BTN saw great viewership for some of their broadcasts (including those involving No. 1 Nebraska, which outdrew the school’s football team on BTN at one point and also saw strong numbers there for their August match at the school’s football stadium that set an in-person attendance record). So NCAA women’s volleyball on the whole is on the rise (notable considering this was a sport targeted for potential announcerless broadcasts in early rounds of the NCAA championship only two years ago), and that’s something that can be said for many women’s sports right now.

It is notable that ESPN’s coverage of this tournament still hasn’t been perfect. Indeed, they took a lot of criticism for their handling of the Elite Eight last week, which saw unrealistic two-hour windows, matches on ESPNU that got bumped to ESPNEWS/ESPN+, and more. But the semifinals here went very well for them from a viewership perspective, and they’re now set for Sunday’s final on ABC. We’ll see how that does in the ratings, but all indications so far are that viewership there should be strong.

[ESPN PR on Twitter]