Today’s visitor columnist is Haley Rosen, CEO of Just Women’s Sports.
ESPN introduced final month that the community is changing Sunday Night Baseball with “Women’s Sports Sundays.”
The new program will characteristic 12 WNBA or NWSL video games in primetime for 9 Sundays this summer season.
On the floor, extra girls’s sports activities on a serious community is an effective factor. It means extra distribution, extra visibility and extra entry factors for followers.
But ask your self: Could you ever think about there being a “Men’s Sports Sunday”? Of course not. Because everyone knows it’d be ridiculous to shoehorn males’s sports activities right into a single themed day.
Men’s sports activities are assumed to be the default: omnipresent and embedded throughout the whole week, on each platform. They are the foundational pillar, whereas girls’s sports activities stay the versatile stock you fit in when you could have area.
By saying (9) Sundays are for ladies’s sports activities, ESPN can be admitting that Monday via Saturday, and the different 43 Sundays of the 12 months, are for males’s.
Here’s the factor: I don’t blame the executives at ESPN. They’ve constructed their enterprise, their viewers, their expertise and their model round males’s sports activities. It’s straightforward to suppose they might simply lengthen their platform to incorporate girls’s sports activities, however the structural actuality handcuffs them. Their largest rights offers are with males’s leagues, and people contracts will at all times dictate their priorities.
Simply put, they’ve invested an excessive amount of in males’s sports activities for ladies’s sports activities to ever be greater than second fiddle.
And it’s not simply ESPN. It’s been broadly reported that ladies’s sports activities at the Olympics were covered slightly more than men’s. However, the U.S. girls’s gold medal hockey sport exhibits the place the priorities existed in the planning levels. That sport aired reside on Peacock and USA Network at 1:10 p.m. ET on a Thursday, whereas the males performed on NBC on Sunday morning. The girls got the warmup slot, whereas the males had been handled as the grand finale.
Advocates for ladies’s sports activities have spent a long time making an attempt to petition legacy platforms to speculate extra on this area. But whilst girls’s sports activities surge in scores, attendance and relevance, the ceiling on legacy platforms nonetheless hasn’t moved. On these platforms, girls’s sports activities can solely be promoted to the level that they don’t disrupt their core males’s sports activities enterprise. And so as a substitute of foundational change, what you get is an limitless collection of incremental “wins.”
“Women’s Sports Sundays” is one other of these incremental steps. It could also be a PR win for ESPN, however it’s a loss for ladies’s sports activities extra broadly when 12 girls’s video games on linear TV are celebrated as some daring new initiative. So lengthy as we’re content material with celebrating the little steps, we’ll by no means truly make the elementary leap.
For girls’s sports activities to achieve their potential, what’s wanted isn’t one other themed programming block. It’s a structural shift in who owns, prioritizes and invests on this area.
When ESPN designates 9 Sundays for ladies’s sports activities, it clarifies the relaxation of the calendar. We can’t ask these platforms to be the basis of girls’s sports activities. We need to construct a brand new world by investing in properties that put girls’s sports activities entrance and middle.
I based Just Women’s Sports in 2020 on the perception that ladies’s sports activities couldn’t survive on the scraps thrown to them by legacy platforms. They want their very own impartial media ecosystem. Even with all the progress we’ve made these previous six years, that thesis remains true.
At Just Women’s Sports, we don’t deal with the WNBA and NWSL as programming patches or seasonal experiments. We deal with them as highly effective, standalone markets which want greater than a handful of TV video games to develop. These leagues are powered by passionate and quickly rising fan bases that each demand and reward every day protection, actual evaluation and true precedence funding.
The present infrastructure permits us to have moments to have a good time perceived progress. But the future of this area belongs to the retailers that prioritize girls’s sports activities on daily basis, not simply on Sundays, and to the audiences and companions who perceive the distinction between a programming block and an actual dedication.
Haley Rosen is the CEO and founder of Just Women’s Sports, a multimedia platform based in 2020 devoted to masking girls’s sports activities.