ESPN plans to replace a 35-year-old Sunday-programming mainstay with what executives believe could become a new franchise — devoted to sports that haven’t always gotten their due.
The Disney sports-media giant will use Sunday primetime in the summer to launch “Women’s Sports Sundays,” a hub for top match-ups from the WNBA and NWSL. The program represents one of the biggest investments in women’s sports programming by a major sports-media provider, and follows a surge of interest in both leagues, as well as other women’s-focused entities such as Unrivaled, the three-on-three women’s basketball league that features most of its games on Warner Bros. Discovery outlets.
“Sunday is a day of the week when we see a ton of our best women’s sports programming, and we will have events outside of our primetime window,” says Susie Piotrkowski, vice president of women’s sports programming and espnW, during a recent interview. ESPN plans to run nine weeks of “Women’s Sports Sundays,” she says, and expects to surround the games with bespoke studio programming that could rely on talent already assigned to coverage of either league. There are some hopes, she says, of running a similar destination during other times of the year when pivotal women’s sports events take place. ESPN also has an eight-year pact with the NCAA for many women’s sports, including basketball, and also has rights to the Little League Softball World Series and Athletes Unlimited Softball League.
“Women’s Sports Sundays” isn’t an experiment, says Rosalyn Durant, ESPN’s executive vice president, programming & acquisitions, during an interview: “It is a flag in the ground, and a continuing commitment.”
Disney has worked for months to build women’s sports programming — and woo sponsors to it. In 2023, ESPN tested an 11 p.m. version of “SportsCenter” that was anchored and produced by women, and focused heavily on women’s sports. Financial-services firm Ally, which had struck a deal with Disney to have 90% of its ad dollars allocated to women’s sports programming, supported the show with custom promotional vignettes. A Disney initiative called “Level Up” aimed to help advertisers devise creative ways to use the ad time available around women’s sports.
Ally is likely to support the new Sunday program, says Piotrkowski.
Other entities have worked to support women’s sports. 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.
The ESPN executives say the company isn’t just opening a new front and hoping female viewers will visit. “We are setting in an expectation,” says Durant. “We want it to be a mainstay and part of a sports fan’s plans,” she says, noting that fans are less focused on whether men or women are playing and more interested in the athletes and the quality of the games.
A group of 60 ESPN staffers from across the company has been meeting regularly to devise “Women’s Sports Sunday,” says Piotrkowski. The idea for the concept has its origin in ESPN’s decision to rework its previous rights deal with Major League Baseball. ESPN last year opted to exit its pact with the league, which was the underpinning of “Sunday Night Baseball,” and instead created a new deal centering on rights to show out-of-market games that have traditionally been the province of MLB.TV as well as a package of midweek games.
“We saw an opportunity to have access in what I would call women’s sports season, the summer months,” says Piotorkowski. “This was an opportunity to be intentional and make sure our most premium women’s sports properties” were presented in a regular showcase that would make more fans familiar with them.
ESPN plans to announce matchups, talent, and surrounding programming in weeks to come.
Source: variety.com
