ESPN’s coverage of the Women’s College World Series set records for viewership on the network for women’s college sports.
What We Know:
- ESPN has been broadcasting the WCWS since 2000. Odicci Alexander, a pitcher from James Madison University, was the overarching hero of the series when she led her unseeded team to victory against championship favorite Oklahoma. According to Social Blade, a social media analytics website, she gained more than 50,000 Instagram followers within a week of the win. She is now signed with United States Speciality Sports Association’s Pride, a professional team.
- The average number of views for the WCWS was 1,203,000, an increase of 10% over 2019. For the championship final between Oklahoma and Florida State, the average number of viewers was a record 1,840,000, a 15% increase. This surge has encouraged ESPN to continue to add women’s coverage across their networks.
- Nick Dawson, ESPN’s Vice President of Programming for college sports, says they are pushing to get more sports programming onto ABC Saturday afternoon slots. The network has already expanded its coverage to softball, basketball, gymnastics, and volleyball. This year the gymnastics final on ABC averaged 808,000 views which was a 510% increase from the 2019 final broadcasted on ESPNU.
- Despite women’s sports being unfairly measured against established men’s leagues without being given the same exposure and financial support, the surge in numbers has proven to networks that they are worth broadcasting. Jane McManus, director of the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College, said, “There has been proof of concept for a decade that people are interested in, and will watch, women’s sports.”
- By having more of a platform, coaches and athletes alike are speaking up about the disparities between men’s and women’s sports. Patty Gasso, Oklahoma’s softball coach, pointed out that issues with the WCWS format, adding off days, eliminating doubleheaders, and ensuring games end at reasonable times needed to be addressed by the NCAA.
- It now falls upon the networks to include these sports in their conversations. The hope is that media coverage creates a conversation that is not just about athletic performance but incorporates other facets of athlete’s lives much like discussions around men’s sports. The more women’s sports get aired on major networks at primetime slots, the closer this goal gets.
Stories like Odicci Alexander’s seldom get the limelight, but the numbers prove a national interest in seeing more women’s sports highlighted on television. Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, stated, “There’s a vast untapped market of people desperately interested in women’s sports. Whether sports media will continue to do that, so we end up with a normal critical mass of coverage as opposed to being treated as a one-off or a surprise, that remains to be seen.”
