{"id":541172,"date":"2026-03-17T00:01:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T00:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/541172\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T00:01:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T00:01:07","slug":"usa-sports-eyes-wnba-negotiations-with-patience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/541172\/","title":{"rendered":"USA Sports eyes WNBA negotiations with patience"},"content":{"rendered":"

The WNBA and its players union have yet to strike a new collective bargaining agreement<\/a>, meaning the start to USA Sports\u2019 recently signed 11-year contract<\/a> with the league could be delayed.<\/p>\n

But Matt Hong, the president of Versant\u2019s USA Sports division, is more concerned about the quality of a prospective deal for both sides than timing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have an 11-year deal with them, so that\u2019s a long time, and we\u2019re taking a long-term approach to it and want there to be a win-win deal that works for the league and for the owners and for the players,\u201d Hong tells my SBJ colleague Josh Carpenter. \u201cWe\u2019re hopeful that everything starts on time, but at the same time, I think they need to get it right and everyone needs to be comfortable when we\u2019ve got 11 years to work with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s sports have been a key pillar for Hong<\/a> in the early days since the company\u2019s spinoff from NBCU. USA Sports networks have more than 1,000 hours of women\u2019s sports coverage over the next year with the WNBA, LPGA and LOVB volleyball.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we look to grow, and as we\u2019re being opportunistic and we\u2019re looking to align with partners that we can hockey stick [growth] with, many of those mid-growth or properties that have high growth in the future happen to be women\u2019s sports,\u201d Hong said.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the golf side, Hong said he\u2019s spent \u201ca lot of time\u201d with PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp and Chief Commercial Officer Dhruv Prasad, but little of that time has been spent discussing media rights. Instead, it\u2019s been around what comes next in the tour\u2019s reimagined competitive structure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really been around their vision for how to evolve the sport from a competition standpoint, from a schedule standpoint, and then really how we as current media partners partner with them on that,\u201d Hong said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s been a lot of talk about the future, but not much of it has been in the context of, maybe none of it\u2019s been in the context of the next media rights deal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The WNBA and its players union have yet to strike a new collective bargaining agreement, meaning the start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-541172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}