Almost every professional women’s sport saw significant increases in ratings and popularity this year. And this growth shows no signs of stopping in the years to come: Caitlin Clark is now one of the most well-known athletes in the country, both the WNBA and NWSL are adding expansion teams, and a new 3v3 professional women’s basketball league, Unrivaled, is slated to debut in early 2025 with a national television deal already in hand.
For these reasons and many more, 2024 will be remembered as a game-changing year for women athletes — but also for those who cover them.
Sarah Spain, an ESPN personality who this summer partnered with iHeartMedia to launch her own daily podcast focused exclusively on women’s sports, has been at the forefront of this change. That the opportunity to create such a show even presented itself is reflective of a media ecosystem that is dedicating more resources to covering women’s sports than ever before, Spain told Awful Announcing earlier this year.
“I think the biggest difference [between 2024 and previous years] is how many more outlets are offering spaces for people to engage with women’s sports,” Spain said. “For so long, it felt like women’s sports coverage was predominantly handled by espnW and a few niche social media accounts. Today, the content universe is much larger.”
ESPN, CBS, and ION collectively aired more than 80 WNBA games this year. While these networks have hosted the WNBA for some time, the unique success of their 2024 broadcasts — a record-setting 22 regular-season WNBA games averaged at least 1 million viewers — had other media organizations wanting in on the action, too. In October, Warner Bros. Discovery signed an exclusive rights deal with the upstart Unrivaled league ahead of its first season in 2025.
Elsewhere in the women’s sports media world, CBS’s primetime broadcast of the 2024 NWSL Championship Game easily outdrew the MLS Cup title game by comparison. NBC and its Peacock streaming service found huge audiences during the 2024 Olympics cycle by spotlighting female stars like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Ilona Maher (and by enlisting female talent, including popular podcaster Alex Cooper, to host made-for-social shows). Netflix even scored the rights to the 2027 and 2031 Women’s FIFA World Cups, marking the steamer’s first long-term sports deal.
Interest in women’s sports has been ticking upward for decades, but this wave of media investment affords the category a more permanent place in the mainstream zeitgeist. And though the expanded reach is welcomed, some seasoned women’s sports reporters, including ESPN’s Monica McNutt, have found themselves having to tweak their journalistic approach to best meet the needs of first-time fans.
“A wrinkle in my work this year has been being mindful about the newness of most of my audience,” McNutt told Awful Announcing. “I’ve had to figure out how to invite them in and celebrate their presence, while also dropping in a lot of education about names or events or history that may be commonplace [for a more tenured women’s sports fan].”
However, the increased attention didn’t come without negative consequences — especially in the case of the WNBA.
With a star-studded rookie class, the league became a topic of conversation on daily sports shows where it had rarely been discussed before. And this went to some strange places.
Caitlin Clark was welcomed to Indianapolis by columnist Gregg Doyel in such a bizarre way that he was banned from covering the team for the season. The Chicago Tribune likened a foul on Clark by Chennedy Carter of the Chicago Sky to an assault. WNBA players regularly faced an onslaught of racism and threats on social media.
“If you want to be a big-time sport, you invite all the big-time stuff that comes with it, which sometimes includes nonsense,” McNutt said. “But it was still jarring to those of us that have been in this space for a while and are used to it being more steeped in community. Plus, it’s hard to downplay how harmful some of that stuff can be when we’re talking about women — particularly Black and LGBTQ+ women.”
“I think what we saw in the WNBA this year kind of helped elucidate some of the problem of parachuting in and presuming that you can operate in exactly the same way you might in a men’s league for a number of reasons,” Spain said. “The main one being that the isms that sort of organically interact with women’s sports aren’t just reflected in coverage and not seeming tone deaf, but also in practice, like, you know, talking to some of the WNBA players about their policies around locker rooms, that’s for a reason.”
Lyndsey D’Arcangelo, another longtime WNBA journalist, decided to step away from sportswriting earlier this year when the toxicity that came with the growing spotlight for the league became impossible to ignore.
The day-to-day conversation around the WNBA didn’t focus on Clark’s outstanding rookie performance, the brilliance of A’ja Wilson, or the New York Liberty’s road to a championship. Instead, it devolved almost exclusively into hot takes about off-court drama.
“There was definitely a huge shift this year in WNBA discourse toward off-court topics. And while this certainly drove attention, I don’t think it was a good thing for anybody — for writers, for players, for teams, for the league,” D’Arcangelo said. “I got really burnt out from it.”
There was perhaps no incident that summarized these tensions better than the feud between longtime women’s sports journalist Christine Brennan and WNBA players during the 2024 postseason. The WNBA Players Association accused Brennan of trying to manufacture a negative story after Dijoinai Carrington of the Connecticut Sun accidentally poked Clark in the eye during a first-round playoff game. While Brennan maintained that her probing questions of Carrington were warranted because she is writing a book about Clark, it became a flashpoint for a league — and more broadly, a sports movement — that saw itself having to interact with scrutiny that hadn’t existed before.
As we head into 2025, there will undoubtedly be more growing pains for the WNBA and other professional leagues. Fortunately, most of the women’s sports reporting world is taking the off-season to better understand how to navigate these challenging moments.
“Our role in women’s sports as both journalists and fans is ever evolving,” McNutt reflected. “There has to be a willingness to learn. As we go, we might not always knock it out of the park. Can we be accountable? Can we adjust? And even when it’s time to discuss topics that are challenging or to call athletes out, whatever it is, can we do that with respect?”