Plenty of media companies are filling their schedules with all kinds of women’s sports, ranging from WNBA games to League One Volleyball match-ups. ESPN wants to do them one better.
When the Disney-backed sports-media giant launches “Women’s Sports Sunday” this weekend, it will mark a quiet revolution of sorts. ESPN’s nine weeks of WNBA or NWSL games will replace what had been an end-of-week mainstay, “Sunday Night Baseball,” which aired for 35 seasons. The symbolism is not lost on anyone.
“We actually don’t even use language like ‘initiative,” says Susie Piotrkowski, vice president of women’s sports programming at ESPN, during a recent interview. “We build franchises, and that’s what we think we’re doing here.”
ESPN is giving women’s sports a primetime perch on a night that has long been dominated by sports-media stand-outs like “Sunday Night Football.” 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, “Women’s Sports Sunday” 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.
Having a Sunday-night program dedicated to women’s sports is a landmark move, says Rebecca Lobo, who played for the New York Liberty during the WNBA’s inaugural season in 1997. “People will know on Sunday night, if I want to watch the WNBA, I know where to turn to,” she says. “That’s pretty significant.”
Lobo will be on hand Sunday as an analyst, calling a game that comes with some history — her own. “Women’s Sports Sunday” on June 21 will feature the New York Liberty taking on the Los Angeles Sparks , exactly 30 years after the WNBA’s first game was played on June 21, 1997. It’s 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 “NBA on NBC” heyday.
“There were a ton of resources put into that first game,” recalls Hannah Storm, who will anchor a telecast of “WNBA Countdown” before the first “Women’s Sports Sunday” debuts. Storm has direct knowledge of the earlier Sunday event, because she did the play-by-play for it — all under an intense spotlight. NBC put a lot of work into its WNBA debut, driven in part by David Stern, the league’s former commissioner, who believed there was new business to be found in a women’s basketball league.
“It 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,” says Storm. The debut broadcast featured a female lead producers, and an all-female announcing team.” She recalls feeling “fairly terrified. I had just had my first baby. There were a lot of resources in place to make it succeed.”
One 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’t need to rely on traditional channels to call attention to their favorite teams and players.
Sports 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’s 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 — and now need to do so because of the audiences they draw.
Sports are of paramount importance to all media companies this year, because TV-advertising budgets are down noticeably, according to five executives familiar with current “upfront” 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.
Media 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 seeking $10 million for a 30-second ad in its coming 2027 broadcast of Super Bowl LXI, a significant jump up from the price NBC initially sought last year for its broadcast of Super Bowl LX.
Even sports, however, are open to scrutiny. Assigning “Women’s Sports Sunday” 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 of a seven-year deal that started in 2022. But the two sides allowed for an “opt-out” clause in 2025, with either side able to break the pact under certain conditions — 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’s market — widely seen as some of the most passionate and enthusiastic among followers of the national pastime.
In 2026, there is more than just hope for the WNBA and other womens’ sports leagues. There is active interest. WPP Media, the media-investment consortium, in 2024 vowed to double the amount of money its clients spend on women’s sports and said it would seek to create a dedicated marketplace for the programming genre. Publicis Media last year launched Women’s Sports Connect, 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.
Ally, the financial-services company, believes consumers will grow more attached to women’s sports 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’s sports. “I 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,” says Andrea Brimmer, the company’s chief marketing and public relations officer. “I’d like to see that continue to grow,” she adds, citing leagues devoted to women’s hockey and football. Already, sponsors have come out to support Unrivaled, an early-stage three-on-three women’s basketball league that plays on Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT.
“The momentum behind women’s sports has created new opportunities for brands to engage with fans in meaningful and authentic ways,” says Danielle Brown. senior vice president of sports and streaming brand solutions for Disney Advertising.
The sports sector simply seems more open to women, says Odessa “OJ” Jenkins, founder and CEO of the Women’s National Football Conference, a league in its early stages that recently expanded its rights deal with ESPN. “More people are open today. Now, if you asked me seven years ago, frankly, it wasn’t as easy. I think this boom that’s happening in women’s 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. “I think today we have much less resistance.”
The WNBA has helped by staying the course. “You are getting ready-made stars coming into the WNBA:” from college, says Storm, and many observers agree that the arrival of Caitlin Clark in 2024 has turbo-charged interest in the league. “She took it to a completely different stratosphere,” says Ryan Ruocoo, who will also be on hand to call the first “Women’s Sports Sunday” action. Support for the league was swelling, he says, “and then she turned it into a full-blown inferno.”
The assignment at “Women’s Sports Sunday” 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. “You have to be kind to the accidental viewers,” he notes., “We 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’s up, and, yeah, I definitely feel that.”
Disney has hopes of bringing more women’s sports to more fans. A bespoke studio show for “Women’s Sports Sunday” will appear on July 26, says Piotrkowski, and will lead into an NWSL match. “It will act as a ‘state of the state’ of women’s sports,” she says. And there are thoughts about airing the program at other times of the year, with executives scanning game calendars. “We don’t want to expand for expansion’s stake,” she says. “We are not just looking for this to be one and done. We are looking at this to be a headliner.”
