{"id":707875,"date":"2026-06-16T17:47:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T17:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/707875\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T17:47:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T17:47:06","slug":"inside-espns-boost-to-womens-sports-on-sundays-dominated-by-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/707875\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside ESPN’s Boost to Women’s Sports on Sundays Dominated by Baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPlenty of media companies are filling their schedules with all kinds of women\u2019s sports<\/a>, ranging from WNBA<\/a> games to League One Volleyball match-ups. ESPN<\/a> wants to do them one better.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the Disney-backed sports-media giant launches \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d this weekend<\/a>, it will mark a quiet revolution of sorts. ESPN\u2019s nine weeks of WNBA or NWSL games will replace what had been an end-of-week mainstay, \u201cSunday Night Baseball,\u201d which aired for 35 seasons. The symbolism is not lost on anyone.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe actually don\u2019t even use language like \u2018initiative,\u201d says Susie Piotrkowski<\/a>, vice president of women\u2019s sports programming at ESPN, during a recent interview. \u201cWe build franchises, and that\u2019s what we think we\u2019re doing here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tESPN is giving women\u2019s sports a primetime perch on a night that has long been dominated by sports-media stand-outs like \u201cSunday Night Football.\u201d In doing so, the company hopes it can develop another signature property, even if the majority of sports continues to be dominated by games played by men. In a bid to make sure the games get seen, \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d will appear across ESPN, ESPN2, the ESPN App, Disney+ and ESPN Deportes. Retailer TJMaxx will serve as a presenting sponsor, and work with ESPN to call attention to athletes, teams and leagues.<\/p>\n

\n\tHaving a Sunday-night program dedicated to women\u2019s sports is a landmark move, says Rebecca Lobo, who played for the New York Liberty during the WNBA\u2019s inaugural season in 1997. \u201cPeople will know on Sunday night, if I want to watch the WNBA, I know where to turn to,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty significant.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tLobo will be on hand Sunday as an analyst, calling a game that comes with some history \u2014 her own. \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d on June 21 will feature the New York Liberty taking on the Los Angeles Sparks , exactly 30 years after the WNBA\u2019s first game was played on June 21, 1997. It\u2019s a game Lobo remembers well, because she played in it. That inaugural match was heavily promoted by the network that aired it, NBC, then in the middle of its \u201cNBA on NBC\u201d heyday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere were a ton of resources put into that first game,\u201d recalls Hannah Storm, who will anchor a telecast of \u201cWNBA Countdown\u201d before the first \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d debuts. Storm has direct knowledge of the earlier Sunday event, because she did the play-by-play for it \u2014 all under an intense spotlight. NBC put a lot of work into its WNBA debut, driven in part by David Stern, the league\u2019s former commissioner, who believed there was new business to be found in a women\u2019s basketball league.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was the LA Forum. It was sold out, filled with stars, and it was everything you would want a WNBA basketball game to feel like,\u201d says Storm. The debut broadcast featured a female lead producers, and an all-female announcing team.\u201d She recalls feeling \u201cfairly terrified. I had just had my first baby. There were a lot of resources in place to make it succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne might argue that Stern is finally getting what he wanted. All it took was a massive recalibration of the media industry and the rise of a group of fans that didn\u2019t need to rely on traditional channels to call attention to their favorite teams and players.<\/p>\n

\n\tSports have become, perhaps, the only programming format upon which major U.S. media conglomerates can rely. In an era when more consumers are able to create their own programming schedules by streaming their favorites on demand, sports still command the broad, simultaneous crowds that big-spending advertisers like Procter & Gamble and McDonald\u2019s still need if they are to spend their marketing dollars efficiently. That has spurred not only a new deluge of new sports properties across streaming and linear outlets, but also a move by advertisers who in the past might not have spent so much on football and basketball games \u2014 and now need to do so because of the audiences they draw.<\/p>\n

\n\tSports are of paramount importance to all media companies this year<\/a>, because TV-advertising budgets are down noticeably, according to five executives familiar with current \u201cupfront\u201d negotiations, when networks and streamers try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming, Games from leagues like the NFL and the NBA are one of the few things in which marketers see growing value.<\/p>\n

\n\tMedia companies may not have the intense demand for dramas and comedies they once enjoyed, but they know sports gives them license to seek top dollar. Disney went to market this year initially\u00a0seeking $10 million for a 30-second ad in its coming 2027 broadcast of Super Bowl LXI<\/a>, a significant jump up from the price NBC initially sought last year for its broadcast of\u00a0Super Bowl<\/a>\u00a0LX.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEven sports, however, are open to scrutiny. Assigning \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d to a slot reserved for decades for Major League Baseball shows ESPN taking a very pragmatic approach to its schedule, no matter the long ties it may have to various leagues. ESPN and MLB were in the midst\u00a0of a seven-year deal that started in 2022<\/a>. But the two sides allowed for an \u201copt-out\u201d clause in 2025,<\/a> with either side able to break the pact under certain conditions \u2014 a necessary condition, perhaps, in an era when more leagues are seeking exponential raises for the rights fees they charge. ESPN reworked its MLB relationship, opting instead to take a different package of national games while distributing MLB.TV via digital platforms. The move gave ESPN a piece of thousands of games made available to fans outside a specific home team\u2019s market \u2014 widely seen as some of the most passionate and enthusiastic among followers of the national pastime. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2026, there is more than just hope for the WNBA and other womens\u2019 sports leagues. There is active interest. WPP Media, the media-investment consortium, in 2024\u00a0vowed to double the amount of money its clients spend on women\u2019s sports<\/a>\u00a0and said it would seek to create a dedicated marketplace for the programming genre.\u00a0Publicis Media last year launched Women\u2019s Sports Connect<\/a>, a new offering that uses agreements to buy certain types of ad inventory as well as the funding of original content to help advertisers get positions in sports and programming centered around female athletes.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlly, the financial-services company, believes consumers will grow more attached to women\u2019s sports<\/a> as the networks give them more prominent placement on their schedules. The company has reallocated tis ad spending, moving ad dollars away from traditional cable networks so it can invest them in women\u2019s sports. \u201cI think fans have a different relationship with female athletes than they do with male athletes, and they have a rabid interest in knowing as much about them as they possibly can,\u201d says Andrea Brimmer, the company\u2019s chief marketing and public relations officer. \u201cI\u2019d like to see that continue to grow,\u201d she adds, citing leagues devoted to women\u2019s hockey and football. Already, sponsors have come out to support Unrivaled,<\/a> an early-stage three-on-three women\u2019s basketball league that plays on Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s TNT. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe momentum behind women\u2019s sports has created new opportunities for brands to engage with fans in meaningful and authentic ways,\u201d says Danielle Brown. senior vice president of sports and streaming brand solutions for Disney Advertising.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sports sector simply seems more open to women, says Odessa \u201cOJ\u201d Jenkins, founder and CEO of the Women\u2019s National Football Conference, a league in its early stages that recently expanded its rights deal with ESPN.<\/a> \u201cMore people are open today. Now, if you asked me seven years ago, frankly, it wasn\u2019t as easy. I think this boom that\u2019s happening in women\u2019s sports is kind of revolutionizing how people see what women are capable of, which has completely, I think, changed the attitude of fans towards, well, of course, women can play football, right? she says. \u201cI think today we have much less resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe WNBA has helped by staying the course. \u201cYou are getting ready-made stars coming into the WNBA:\u201d from college, says Storm, and many observers agree that the arrival of Caitlin Clark in 2024 has turbo-charged interest in the league. \u201cShe took it to a completely different stratosphere,\u201d says Ryan Ruocoo, who will also be on hand to call the first \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d action. Support for the league was swelling, he says, \u201cand then she turned it into a full-blown inferno.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe assignment at \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d may be more challenging than expected. There will be die-hards who know every detail of their favorite WNBA players, and there will no doubt be a wave of general sports fans who are turning in simply because the new shows in on ESPN in a primetime window. \u201cYou have to be kind to the accidental viewers,\u201d he notes., \u201cWe get a lot when you do playoffs. You get a lot of people who are tuning in who maybe otherwise just want to see what\u2019s up, and, yeah, I definitely feel that.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tDisney has hopes of bringing more women\u2019s sports to more fans. A bespoke studio show for \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sunday\u201d will appear on July 26, says Piotrkowski<\/a>, and will lead into an NWSL match. \u201cIt will act as a \u2018state of the state\u2019 of women\u2019s sports,\u201d she says. And there are thoughts about airing the program at other times of the year, with executives scanning game calendars. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to expand for expansion\u2019s stake,\u201d she says. \u201cWe are not just looking for this to be one and done. We are looking at this to be a headliner.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plenty of media companies are filling their schedules with all kinds of women\u2019s sports, ranging from WNBA games…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":707876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[352,99,434,305542],"class_list":["post-707875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-espn","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-womens-sports-sunday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/707876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}