Decision by leaders of NBCUniversal spinoff to focus on female-led leagues reflects the evolution of sports across media and in culture
Sports anchor Elle Duncan was working for ESPN a few years ago when she heard then-college basketball star Aliyah Boston say that ESPN’s investment in women’s sports over 30-plus years has been transformative for female athletes, but not transformative enough. Boston wasn’t faulting ESPN; her point was that women’s teams and leagues need to be successful on more than one sports network to reach anything close to parity with the licensing money and sponsorship dollars that flow into men’s sports.
Duncan thought about Boston’s comment when she considered a move to the startup USA Sports operation that’s part of Versant Media, the cable company that was spun off in January from NBCUniversal. Versant has made women’s sports a cornerstone of its strategy to reignite growth at the company that’s home to linear cable channels including USA Network, CNBC, MS Now, Golf Channel, E! and Oxygen.
Versant has committed tens of millions of dollars to media rights deals to carry the WNBA, League One Volleyball, the LPGA and an array of women’s collegiate sports. The company’s decision to bet big in this area as part of its corporate launch strategy amounts to a huge test of whether the boom in women’s sports has been a passing trend or an inflection point for the sector. Versant and USA Sports’ performance over the next few years will be a handy way to measure progress for the leagues in TV viewership and advertising revenue.
Duncan has little doubt that the 2020s will be remembered as a historic decade for gender parity in sports. She’s been studio host and the face of USA Sports’ women’s basketball coverage since the WNBA’s 30th-anniversary season began in May. For a long time, major players in sports have been under pressure to invest in women’s sports to achieve social progress, but that’s changing. “We’re now at a place where we’re no longer appealing to people’s morality or it being the right thing to do. Being in women’s sports is just a great business model,” Duncan says. “What sold me on working with USA Sports was they are truly earnest in their commitment. They were like, ‘Listen, with all due respect to all of the other places, [the WNBA] is our biggest show in town. This is everything to us. This is our football. This is our Super Bowl.’”
Mark Lazarus is also a believer. The Versant Media CEO is an NBCUniversal veteran who ran NBC Sports and business operations — including its mammoth Olympics investment — over his 15-year tenure at NBCU. “The level of athleticism is amazing. The game is fun to watch,” Lazarus says of WNBA basketball.
USA Sports will air more WNBA games during the season than any other TV platform. Versant is also hoping to be part of the rise of the next major women’s league (after basketball and soccer) with League One Volleyball (or LOVB, as it’s known). “We can make a significant impact in helping grow women’s sports as a media property,” Lazarus says. “But also, it will help us grow, because it’s bringing in differentiated audiences. The appetite for it from both viewers and advertisers and sponsors is real, and we want to lean into that.”
The reasons why women’s sports leagues have become magnets for investment reflect a confluence of societal trends and marketplace shifts for media. Women’s sports are growing in part because more women have had youth and college sports experience than their mothers and grandmothers did, and because women are watching more sports, including the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, than ever.
And sports leagues overall boast more female owners than at any time in history. Why? For one, women on a broad scale in the U.S. have had the chance to earn serious money from their own work or investment income at a clip since the 1970s. “Women have had sustained decades of economic growth; seeing that flood back into women’s sports is incredible and will likely continue to increase,” says Lindsey Darvin, assistant professor of sport management at Syracuse University’s Falk College. “These investments were inevitable.”
From a media perspective, TV rights fees for women’s leagues and teams are lower than for the long-established male franchises. The price tag for WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League and others is cheap by comparison with the NFL, the NBA, Major League Soccer and such. That lower cost ensures that the upside for all involved is bigger, so long as ratings are high and stadiums and arenas are filling up.
“The evidence is genuinely compelling at this point, especially when you look at what has happened to media rights valuations in just a few years — the WNBA going from roughly $60 million annually to $200 million starting this year, and the NWSL seeing its rights value increase by a factor of 40 after locking in deals with multiple media groups,” Darvin says.
Lazarus sees enormous potential for Versant to ride the wave of women’s college, club and professional volleyball. The sport has seen a steady climb in participation and fandom in recent years. As the architect of NBCUniversal’s media rights strategy around the Olympic Games, Lazarus sees the volleyball showcase at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles as a rocket booster for women’s volleyball. Versant will be well positioned to capitalize on it as the home of LOVB coverage. “Look at what’s going on in college and universities with women’s volleyball, and then translate that to the indoor game at the Olympics, which is fast-paced and shows incredible athleticism. And we do think that we can harness all of that, and it will transfer to growth with League One. We’re seeing that in our early returns,” Lazarus says.
LOVB games were prominent early in 2026 as the Versant Media channels formally detached from the NBCUniversal mothership. The volleyball games helped Versant warm up USA Sports for the start of WNBA season in May. So far, the sports coverage on USA Network has generally delivered higher ratings than the non-sports programs that previously aired in the same time slots. That’s a good sign but not exactly mission accomplished.
Versant is focused on devoting Monday and Wednesday nights on USA Network to women’s sports. That’s in an effort to train fans to get into the habit of checking out channel’s schedule on those nights year-round.
As Duncan was promised, the WNBA occupies pride of place as the most prominent of the leagues on USA Sports’ menu, with 48 regular-season games. USA Sports is investing in pre- and post-game shows to surround its live game coverage. It’s also focused on docuseries and specials that bring context to athletic achievements, and at their best they pique the interest of more viewers in a particular sport or team. “It’s our obligation to build up the personalities and build up the teams in terms of making people aware of who they are,” Lazarus says. “Right now, there are about 15 name brands in the WNBA in terms of individual athletes, maybe a little more than that to those who have been following it. But part of our job is to get there to be 30 or 40 name brands.”
Darvin sees great progress in the strategic decisions of companies like Versant Media and Ion Media, a network that is owned by E.W. Scripps Co. For several years, Ion has heavily promoted its Friday-night WNBA regular-season doubleheader telecasts, which have been a pillar of its schedule since 2023. The following year, the general public’s attention was riveted on women’s basketball as Caitlin Clark notched a historic season in her senior year at University of Iowa before being drafted by the WNBA’s Indiana Fever.
But there are many other measures, Darvin cautions. “What I tend to watch for beyond the headline numbers of the final deal is the quality of the deals being made,” she says. “Are brands signing multiyear commitments, or are they doing one-season experiments to see what happens? Are leagues getting equity structures and revenue sharing or just flat rights fees [from TV networks]? How is the money being generated actually flowing back into player salaries? Because sustained growth requires reinvestment in the product — the players — and that is where the next few years are going to tell us a lot about whether this holds.”
Elle Duncan spent nearly a decade at ESPN, the juggernaut in TV sports. Her instinct about taking the leap to USA Sports has proven to be right so far. She’s been energized by the process of establishing a studio team to provide play-by-play, color and commentary for the WNBA games that USA Sports will air through September. (Duncan’s in-studio team for WNBA game coverage includes league Hall of Famers Tamika Catchings and Chamique Holdsclaw and current WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, with longtime WNBA journalist Terrika Foster-Brasby as sideline reporter.)
The demand for sports content among streamers ranging from Netflix to Amazon Prime Video to Versant’s former sibling Peacock to Apple TV has revved up the marketplace for sports rights and sports-adjacent shows. Women’s leagues have greatly benefited from this heightened appetite for sports overall. And that has also meant opportunity for experienced talent, producers, directors and writers. Duncan is also working as an anchor and host for Netflix’s growing roster of sports and special event coverage, including the Jan. 24 spectacle of free solo climber Alex Honnold scaling a skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan.
“It’s very cool to be in this space now where we’re building this thing from the ground up. We’re hoping that it’s foundational,” Duncan says of her WNBA team at USA Sports. “We’ll make mistakes, and we’ll change things, and we’ll pivot, and we’ll try things out that won’t work. And I love that. Sometimes it’s a scary position for a host to be in — sort of building the plane as you’re flying it.”
Versant’s investment in USA Sports studio teams and facilities and cutting-edge tech for showcasing live games is vital to putting it on the map with sports fans. USA Sports broadcasts need to compete with ESPN, Fox Sports and, yes, NBC Sports.
Matt Hong, president of USA Sports, worked with Lazarus during their respective tenures at Turner Broadcasting, where basketball and baseball rights were key to building up Turner’s TBS and TNT cable channels in the 1980s and ’90s. Hong notes that USA Sports’ coverage of the LPGA golf tournaments, which begin this month, will lend itself to innovative offerings such as custom camera angles and data points crunched in real time. “We’re working with the LPGA to make sure that we continue to showcase these athletes in the most modern way, in the way in which younger viewers in particular are used to watching sports,” Hong says.
As mentioned, Hong’s challenge in his role leading USA Sports is to bring in more viewers by introducing up-and-coming sports such as volleyball. Versant is also hoping to better leverage the company’s overall investment in sports rights by turning WNBA fans into followers of League One and the LGPA, and vice versa. “The goal is to capture eyeballs and fans for folks who didn’t play the sport or are less familiar with the rules of the game, and to educate them inside the telecast, if it’s the first time that they’re showing up. That is something that I think will occur with more regularity as the funnel widens,” Hong says.
Versant Media’s evolution as a new sports player in town should offer a case study on how women’s sports evolve over the next decade. USA Sports is also invested in male-dominated fields such as PGA golf and NASCAR. But the decision to brand USA as the home of top women’s teams on multiple nights of the week is an industry first, in the view of Syracuse’s Darvin.
“The core difference is that women’s sports have always been asked to prove their value before receiving investment, while men’s sports were given investment and allowed to build toward value over time,” she says. “Men’s leagues received infrastructure, promotional support, marketing and prime broadcast windows long before they generated the revenues they have today. Women’s leagues have been told to demonstrate the demand first, but the absence of investment is precisely what suppresses the demand, and then that suppressed demand gets used to justify continued underinvestment.”
Women’s sports also offer networks the advantage of reaching a different pool of advertisers than the brands that flock to highly rated men’s sports. It’s another source of differentiation for USA Sports that should be beneficial in a crowded marketplace, Hong says. “And there are some good brands who may have sponsored genres other than sports who are newly involved and who we’re newly working with because of our women’s sports portfolio.”
As the media landscape evolves, so does the infrastructure of advertisers. There’s no question that the NFL — the brawniest of men’s leagues — will remain the pinnacle of sports and sports media. But at a time when advertisers are trying to target more discrete pockets of viewership, the rising stars of the women’s sports sector are an attractive proposition.
“The most underused asset women’s leagues have is their audience engagement data. WNBA fans consistently outperform every other major professional sports audience in sponsorship influence and purchasing behavior,” Darvin says. “That number should be the first thing on the table in every sponsorship conversation, because it reframes the entire discussion from audience size to audience quality.”