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At the Shed in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, cameras flashed as a throng of media pushed mini-mics into the faces of a line of WNBA hopefuls. Reporters inquired not only about their pro hopes, but also which designer they wore while walking across the orange carpet—the league’s very own version of the Met Gala. Outside, a crowd of people clamored to capture a clip of eventual No. 1 pick Paige Bueckers in a custom Coach look.
The frenzy at 2025’s WNBA draft is a testament to how far WNBA coverage has come—a path charted by ESPN as it enters its 29th consecutive season broadcasting the league. The network’s desk had the best view of the fashion show as WNBA Countdown went live from the draft.
“I don’t think we stand still in our coverage of women’s sports at ESPN,” reporter and commentator Holly Rowe tells Front Office Sports.
The WNBA’s popularity has exploded since the network first began its coverage with the league’s inaugural season.
ESPN’s very first WNBA broadcast was June 23, 1997, when the Utah Starzz—now the Las Vegas Aces—beat the Los Angeles Sparks 102–89. Good Morning America host Robin Roberts and UConn coach Geno Auriemma were on the call. It was long enough ago that Auriemma, who is fresh off winning his 12th NCAA championship, had just one title to his name.
The first televised WNBA draft was in 2001 on ESPN2 from the NBA Entertainment Studios in Secaucus, N.J. Lauren Jackson—now a two-time WNBA champion and Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame member—was selected with the No. 1 pick by the Seattle Storm that year.
When Jackson entered the league, ESPN’s game broadcasts increased from 13 games to 22. This year marks the most broadcasts ever on ESPN platforms with 26. On May 4, ESPN will air the first nationally televised exhibition game in WNBA history when the Indiana Fever play the Brazil women’s national team in Iowa City.
“It’s been the last three years where you’ve seen a significant amount of growth outside of our lanes,” Rebecca Lobo, who began her broadcasting career at ESPN in 2004, tells FOS. “In that SportsCenter, Get Up, First Take, all the other properties at ESPN. I don’t know if anyone tracks the minutes that have been spent talking about women’s basketball, but the difference in the last two and a half years has been significant.”
The broadcasts are now anchored by a highly recognizable and regarded trio: Lobo, Rowe, and Ryan Ruocco, who linked up in 2013. The three have, over the course of 12 years, worked to become ESPN’s A eam on WNBA broadcasts.
They are constantly anticipating what the other needs, finishing one another’s sentences and, in the words of Rowe, allowing “the ball to move.” During broadcasts it might look like a hand signal across the court from Ruocco to Rowe, or a thumbs-up from Lobo after hearing her partner drop one of his iconic lines live. That kind of chemistry takes time to develop, but with the very best teams, it’s innate.
“Brittney Griner’s rookie year,” Ruocco says about their first broadcast together.
“Was that the Rebecca shot in the butt year?” Rowe replies.
“No,” Ruocco responds as the three break into unanimous, unfiltered laughter.
(The infamous “shot in the butt” was a steroid shot in Lobo’s arm to help improve her vocal cords the morning of a game. It was a tip she got from Ruocco.)
Collectively, Lobo, Ruocco, and Rowe have seen ESPN’s WNBA coverage through all of its iterations. Lobo and Ruocco both credit Rowe—the WNBA coverage veteran among them—for championing for more support. When Rowe pauses to reflect on the evolution of coverage from 1997 to 2025, it’s impossible not to notice her look of vindication for the years of pushing a product she adamantly believes deserved more attention and time.
She points to a moment of Sabrina Ionescu’s career history to emphasize what she means when she says women’s basketball deserved more. When Ionescu broke the all-time scoring record at Oregon in 2020, Rowe was stewing about how ESPN had handled the moment.
“Why is this not a bigger story?” Rowe asked herself out loud while lying in bed.
After seeing Kobe Bryant tweet the goat emoji following Ionescu’s record-breaking performance, Rowe sent an email at 2 a.m. to her bosses at the network. “If Kobe is tweeting about this woman, why aren’t we putting her on our air?” she wrote.
Some coverage areas improved faster than others.
Broadcasts of women’s basketball, for instance, were staffed by less experienced people, which also underscored lower prioritization of the sport. Lobo recalls ESPN’s women’s college basketball broadcasts in the early 2000s serving as a “training ground” for up-and-coming producers and talent attempting to get on NBA productions. The best moved on within a year, contributing to a mentality that women’s coverage wasn’t as important. Dedicated production executives, lead producers, and talent were a revolving door.
Talent like Rowe as well as some executives were pushing for change, including more individual programming like studio shows, previews for the WNBA Finals, and other lead-in coverage. But another major catalyst of the league’s growth in the past five years hasn’t come from inside the network.
“I remember distinctly getting a call from a sales rep [in 2021] on the ESPN side saying, ‘Carol, we have Google here and they’re not going to spend a dime on the NBA or the WNBA unless they see 25 games in the regular season. Can you add more games?’” says Carol Stiff, former VP of women’s sports programming and acquisitions, and current president of the Women’s Sports Network. “I’ll do it in a heartbeat. I’ve been wanting this for years. Until sales and advertisers spend, nothing will happen.”
The six extra games during the WNBA’s 25th anniversary season were added with ease, Stiff says.
Advertising dollars still hold a massive amount of sway over the WNBA’s future. “Women’s sports is a business, not a charity,” Stiff adds. “Advertisers are holding the cards for women’s sports’ future, for all women’s sports.”
When Hilary Guy—ESPN’s VP of production for WNBA Studio and NBA Studio—considers what success looks like for their women’s basketball coverage going forward, it doesn’t necessarily mean emulating exactly what they’re doing on the men’s side. She sees pockets where they can veer from the norms of a typical broadcast and lean in to new ideas and concepts—such as the WNBA’s orange carpet at the draft.
WNBA Countdown—which is hosted by ESPN’s very own Big Three as Elle Duncan, Chiney Ogwumike, and Andraya Carter have been admiringly referred to by fans on social media—is a prime example. The show has also become a staple in the network’s postseason programming, airing through the entirety of the WNBA playoffs. They’ve also begun airing special programming like their live WNBA Free Agency Special, which started in 2022.
One show fans have been begging for on social media is a WNBA counterpart to ESPN’s NBA Today. When asked whether a WNBA Today show could stand alone, Guy was careful not to give too much away but did emphatically say, “Yes, it could.”
“Lots of plans in the works,” Guy says. “I can’t reveal all right now. We will at some point be announcing our plans for the full season and they are very exciting. But I will say from an NBA Today perspective, which I also oversee, we have a WNBA Today segment that we do all the time, and I only see that growing within that show itself. There’s more on the horizon as well.”
Rising ratings have only helped. The 2024 season was the most-watched season on ESPN platforms ever, averaging 1.2 million viewers, up 155% from 2023. And throughout the last 10 years, ESPN’s WNBA draft ratings have steadily improved as well, leading up to the 2024 draft. The nearly 2.5 million people who tuned in as Caitlin Clark was selected No. 1 overall by the Fever—up 328% from 2023, making it the most-viewed WNBA draft ever—were a precursor to the eyes that would show up to watch her rookie season.
Viewership for the 2025 draft as UConn star Paige Bueckers was selected No. 1 by the Dallas Wings dipped to 1.25 million Still, it was the second-most-watched WNBA draft of all time, which many took to indicate the Caitlin Clark Effect was not a one-off, but rather the mark of the league’s proper arrival in the mainstream.
For Lobo and Rowe, who have seen the evolution of ESPN’s coverage since the very beginning, and others such as Carter and Ogwumike, who went from being stars on the court to conduits of the game’s stories, the elation over women’s basketball’s visibility is palpable.
But for all of them, the work to establish an even stronger foothold in the mainstream sports entertainment zeitgeist is never finished.
“I’m excited about everything that’s to come,” Ogwumike tells FOS. “There’s been a lot of rumblings about, ‘We need a women’s show,’ something daily. To me, that’s been the biggest goal of mine. Things happen in the WNBA and women’s college basketball. Making sure we have a platform to story-tell those moments and also our own platform so we can give our own history.
“Having a show like that would show that we’ve arrived.”
