College sports has been a gateway for culture-shifting moments not only in sports history but also in American history. Starting with USC’s football team traveling to play Alabama in 1970 and changing how Black athletes were viewed in the southern state, Trojan legend Cheryl Miller winning consecutive NCAA Championships in 1983 and 1984-becoming a three-time Naismith Award recipient, and recent retiree coach Nick Saban rivaling-if not besting, Bear Bryant as the greatest college coach of all time. College athletics have always shifted beyond just sports.
One shift that is impacting the landscape of not only college sports but also the pros is the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Collegiate women’s basketball always drew attention, especially during March Madness, as the 2025 championship viewership peaked at 9.9 million views, while averaging 8 million views overall. The WNBA is still playing catch-up with its collegiate counterpart, as the Commissioner’s Cup brought in 2.7 million views for the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever game, a 14 percent increase from last year’s.
WNBA is the professional women’s basketball league in the United States, created in 1996 with the support of the NBA. Its first season took place in the summer of 1997, featuring eight teams affiliated with existing NBA franchises.
Nearly thirty years later, the WNBA has become the global benchmark for women’s basketball, enjoying unprecedented popularity. In 2024, the average attendance per game jumped 48 percent to 9,807 spectators, and over 54 million unique viewers followed the season across six national networks. The reason for the increase in popularity is that they adopted how colleges market their players.
This shift happened in 2021 when college sports granted athletes the ability to make money from their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). “The league has only soared since 2021,” said Risa Isard, an assistant sports management professor at UConn. “And so this is the chance for the players to recoup all of the value that they’ve produced in the last five years that they hadn’t gotten to see themselves so directly.”
Angel Reese has been a major part of the WNBA’s growth over the past two seasons, alongside other stars recently entering the league, including Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers. This boom in attention on women’s basketball is partially responsible for the WNBA’s ongoing expansion. Cameron Brink (WNBA), JuJu Watkins (NCAA), and A’ja Wilson (WNBA) are other stars who have capitalized on the boom in attention, helping brands like Skims, State Farm, and New Balance outperform traditional ad campaigns.
The league is now in an era of rapid growth. By 2030, the league will have added six teams in five years, including the 2025 Golden State Valkyries, the Toronto Tempo (2026), a team in Portland (2026), Cleveland (2028), Detroit (2029), and Philadelphia (2030). “Super excited to continue to grow, and more players need to be in this league because this league is great,” Reese said.
The younger generation has also played a major role in supporting women’s sports. According to Nielsen.com, about 84 percent of general sports fans are interested in women’s sports, with younger audiences (ages 18-34) showing the highest interest levels. This age group is important to sponsors because they strongly promote their sports interests and games on social media and have long potential tenures as fans.
Nielsen also noted that when it comes to fans of athletic events for women, 74 percent are the chief income earners in their household, and 57 percent have children under the age of 18. These two demographic factors are important in directing purchase decisions and driving the next generation of fans to support women’s professional sports.
In 2024, companies spent $244 million on women’s sports advertising—a 139 percent increase from the previous year. That number is expected to climb even higher in 2025 as more brands recognize the value of female sports.
The equation has changed, and not just for women’s basketball. The rise across all women’s sports has been steadily gaining momentum recently. From soccer to hockey to volleyball, women’s sports are experiencing a record-shattering surge like never before.
“I would argue in the last two and a half years, we’ve made more progress than anyone thought would be possible. And our work is not done,”
—National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) Commissioner Jessica Berman.
The NWSL’s Portland Thorns and the city’s yet-unnamed WNBA team for 2026 are among the teams that have benefited. The Bhathal family, which owns both teams, is building a $150 million training facility to be used by both teams—a unique partnership between the two leagues.
The NWSL’s Kansas City Current opened the first purpose-built women’s soccer stadium last year. Denver, which was awarded the league’s 16th team and begins play in 2026, pledged to build a privately financed stadium as part of its expansion bid.
Bay FC is building a training center on Treasure Island, a former military base in the San Francisco Bay. Earlier this year, Angel City opened the NWSL’s largest practice facility at Cal Lutheran University, which includes a 5,400-square-foot gym and even a children’s playroom.
“There aren’t too many players, but for those of us who have been in the NWSL since its inception, we’ve played through a lot. We’ve played through understaffed teams, inadequate facilities, and turf so hot it melted the bottom of my cleats,”
—Angel City forward Christen Press.
“We’ve played through investigations and abuse. We’ve played without a players’ association, without the opportunity to collectively bargain. We’ve played without respect and dignity, and we did it because we believed in a day like today.”
This has also spilled into the high school ranks, as the number of women athletes participating in high school sports went from 300,000 participants to 3.3 million participants in 2023. The rise in numbers creates the foundation for developing female athletes for collegiate and professional women’s sports teams.
With the WNBA and soccer seeing a rise, another sport could also be moving into the spotlight: flag football.
Women’s flag football is one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. In 2023, nearly 500,000 girls aged 6 to 17 played flag football, a 63 percent increase since 2019. At the high school level, participation more than doubled in one year, with 42,955 girls playing on school teams in 2023-24. This boom is driven by grassroots initiatives, NFL backing, and state-level adoption of flag football as a varsity sport.
“This reflects the growth of women’s football around the world; it’s one of the most popular, fastest-growing forms of sport around the world. We’ve seen incredible growth in women’s participation in team sports, popularity, and visibility of women’s team sports, with women’s football being an absolute leader in that regard,”
—IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell.
At the college level, the sport is gaining momentum primarily through National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) programs. In 2024, 19 NAIA schools fielded varsity women’s flag teams, up from 13 the previous year. NCAA interest is growing, with around 65 schools offering women’s flag football teams at the club or varsity club level. With the Olympic debut on the horizon, more schools are likely to elevate their programs to varsity status, according to sportscastingbets.com.
