“Don’t be a fan later”, women’s sports are making waves among increasing supporters and its television ratings. Look no further than the Women’s Collegiate Basketball Championship between the LSU Tigers and Iowa Hawkeyes, which boasted almost 10-million viewers on the ABC broadcast in April during the Tigers victory.
Those 9.9 million viewers (12.6 million if you include other platforms) were more than the Cotton, Orange and Sugar Bowl’s for college football last season.
The Lady Tigers basketball team is not the only great news happening for women’s sports in the Bayou State. Olivia “Livvy” Dunne of the LSU Tigers Gymnastics team, she sports a whopping 2.3-million-dollar net worth range, and she is also considered the biggest commodity of all women’s collegiate athletes in the country by receiving an NIL valuation of 3.5 million-dollars (according to one of the recruiting industry leaders, On3). That ranks second among all collegiate athletes (male or female) in that category.
Let’s face it, women’s sports are growing rapidly and do not receive nearly enough of the coverage they actually deserve. Did you know that a woman coached an NBA game before?
Becky Hammon, a class of 2023 inductee in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame was thrusted into an acting head coach position on December 30, 2020. San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich had been ejected from a game against the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James. Hammon became the first woman to serve as an acting head coach in the history of the NBA.
Prior to that, she stepped in as the head coach for the Spurs during an exhibition game in the NBA Bubble (July 23rd, 2020). At the 2016 NBA All-Star Game, Hammon became the first woman to be on an All-Star coaching staff. She is also the first-ever female head coach in the NBA’s Summer League when the Spurs appointed her to lead their summer league team in 2015. She coached the Spurs all the way to the Las Vegas Summer League title on July 20, 2015, becoming the first female NBA head coach to win a Summer League Championship.
Her success in the coaching space has only continued, collecting more hardware with a WNBA Championship in her first season as a head coach for the Las Vegas Stars during the 2022 season.
She became the first rookie head coach to accomplish such feat in WNBA history, and it was sealed in fate as she played for the Stars in San Antonio before their move to Las Vegas, from 2007-2014. Hammon was a three-time all-star during her time with the team as a player (six all-star selections in total during a 13-year career in the WNBA).
She’s even well respected among her peers in the NBA and WNBA. One of the NBA’s all-time greats and two-time champion, Pau Gasol, wrote an open letter about female coaches with an emphasis on Hammon; where he said, “I’ve played with some of the best players of this generation… and I’ve played under two of the sharpest minds in the history of sports, in Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. And I’m telling you, Becky Hammon can coach. I’m not saying she can coach pretty well. I’m not saying she can coach enough to get by. I’m not saying she can coach almost at the level of the NBA’s male coaches. I’m saying Becky Hammon can coach NBA basketball. Period.”
Well, that statement by Gasol is a reality, game recognizes game, and Hammon is linked as one of the candidates for the vacant head coaching job with the Toronto Raptors today in the NBA. She is an absolute pioneer in the field for women’s sports and still paving the way for more women in the future to reach what was once thought to be impossible. Never say never.
Meanwhile, everyone loves the FIFA World Cup and it’s coming back to the United States for the first time since 1994, in 2026. The ninth edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup will take place this summer for an entire month starting on July 20th in Australia and New Zealand.
Thirty-two teams are set to take to the pitch, and FIFA officials came in with some impressive numbers ahead of the tournament. According to an April 24th report, the world soccer’s governing body had calculated the value of Women’s World Cup broadcast rights and deemed it to be worth 300-million dollars, that figure would make the Women’s World Cup the most valuable among women’s-only sporting events.
FIFA contingents expect the value to grow prior to the 2027 tournament. The U.S. Soccer Federation and the Mexican Football Federation have both informed FIFA of their intention to submit a bid to co-host the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
There are a few women’s sports broadcast rights that are expected to enter the open market in the upcoming years. FIFA has sold the rights separately in the past before packaging the men’s and women’s versions as one to telecast companies. They may have to reconsider that option when you consider their current monetized evaluations, the boom of women’s sports in recent time and its television ratings.
More people are taking interest towards women’s sports, it is a ticking time bomb, and the viewership continues on an uptick trend. Look no further than the women’s collegiate basketball championship, how well received it was and how much sports fans talked about the event in the following days after it concluded. It was one of the most discussed sports events of the year on all social media platforms.
Maybe it prompts the question, should FIFA follow suit with the alignment that the NCAA is planning on taking, in terms of how they offer sponsorship and viewing rights for its March Madness tournaments separately? Newly appointed NCAA President Charlie Baker, had this to share, “… a giant opportunity, and we better not blow it.”
FIFA probably should, considering there’s a good possibility the women’s tournament could be coming to the United States of America in 2027, four years is plenty of time to sort it out.
On the discussion of re-alignment and tournaments, LIV Golf Tour CEO Greg Norman, recently expressed some interest in the possibility of an expansion of the event for women’s players. The tour has only featured men’s golfers to date, but it could come with some complications if it were to happen in the future.
The Men’s LIV Golf Tour has quite its share of highly climatic situations since it arrived on the golf scene. One of them being it’s Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which is financially backing the tour.
Saudi Arabia’s views on human rights violations, mainly racism, are an issue for select groupings of people around the globe. On the other end of a spectrum, it is sort of swept under the rug by a contingent of golf’s most recognizable stars. They have garnered payouts worth exuberant amounts of dollars in the form of long-term deals with LIV.
Although, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund did put together an event in February, the Aramco Saudi Ladies International, that event raised 5-million dollars’ worth of cash prizing. They also have financially aided the Ladies European Tour events.
While women’s golf prizing is not nearly within the same figures of men’s in the sport, the LPGA majors’ prize earnings did increase in the past year, totaling 1.87-million dollars, a stark comparison to the PGA’s 9.1-million dollar figure. (Which excludes the five majors and CME Group Tour Championship)
The PGA on the other hand, has not taken too kindly to the LIV Golf Tour, but the LPGA sits on a different stance. The LPGA Tour commissioner, Mollie Marcoux Saaman, said almost a year ago that she would be willing to hear what LIV Golf would have to say by responding, it is her “responsibility to evaluate every opportunity,” in attempts to further expand the women’s game.
The LPGA Tour’s golfers all sit on different sides of the fence when it comes to this matter, but it raises the question if the LPGA could even withstand a Saudi Arabian funded tour.
