Long before I was a broadcaster, I was a big supporter of women’s sports.
Maybe it’s because I had a mom and five sisters.
Maybe it’s because I realized that, to stay involved in sports beyond high school, I was going to need to find skills and avenues beyond playing to do that.
As a high school student, I found those outlets in running the scoreboard at Argos girls basketball games.
I enjoyed doing that very much.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a household led by parents who taught their children to support the underdogs of the world.
It probably was a little bit of all of those things.
Either way, I think my career as broadcaster reflects the fact that I am a big supporter of women’s sports at all levels.
In the last five years, women’s sports have made an incredible swing on the societal spectrum.
In that period of time, we have seen women athletes fighting to raise their income and the respect level for both women athletes and sports leagues to be equal to those of their male counterparts.
I have written twice about this since 2019, and explained the economics of why it will be difficult to level out pay and respect between men and women.
You can’t force people to love something and put their financial support behind it.
ESPN created an entire network called ESPN “W” to focus solely on women’s sports in 2010.
The signal they are sending out now is very, very different.
Last week, just weeks before the NFL season was set to begin, Samantha Ponder was fired by ESPN in what was described as a “budget-related move”.
Ponder was the host of NFL Countdown, the network’s show leading up to the early kickoffs on Sundays. I will be 100-percent honest; I was not a big fan of her work. I just didn’t believe that she knew that much about football. But I also wasn’t so bothered by her enough to worry about it.
But her firing comes so close to the start of the season and the first show that it was curious.
Turns out Ponder has been outspoken about the increasing threat to women’s sports by men pretending to be women.
Before she was let go by ESPN, she posted on social media that men don’t belong in women’s sports.
After the start of the preseason and 13 years after she started working for ESPN, she was out.
ESPN has not responded to the accusations that Ponder was released for her opposition to transgenders moving into women’s sports, but it does follow the network’s behavior. ESPN has lost its place as the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” because of it straying out of its lane and involving itself in political and social influencing.
Sports fans have proven that they want sports from ESPN and sports networks, and when they stopped getting that, the viewers fled. In the old days, no one would know that was happening for certain. Today, with subscriptions being such a big part of watching non-broadcast networks, it’s much easier to track.
ESPN’s subscription numbers are falling.
At the end of the second quarter, ESPN reported 24.8 million subscribers. That’s down 1.2 million from the end of 2023.
It’s important for you to remember that ESPN is a Disney company, and if you have paid any attention at all you know that the current leadership at Disney is more interested in liberal social agendas than telling us fun, family-friendly stories.
Women’s sports will never make the money that men’s sports do, but it doesn’t have to for it to be considered healthy and successful. And with quality people like Caitlin Clark leading the way, now is the time for women’s sports to make a move forward.
But that will not happen with entities like ESPN, who is still a major player in sports programming despite losing market share to Fox Sport and other networks, allowing it’s political point of view to lead to the firing of a woman in a highly visible position on their station.
It comes back to this: women’s sports are for women to participate in.
Men have no business being a part of it except to support the women who are.
That includes anyone who tries to change Title IX to include transgenders.
Too many people have worked too hard for too long to start heading backwards on these issues.