The Women’s Sports Wave Is Here. Now What?

2025 was the future I said was inevitable when I founded Just Women’s Sports.

The fans are here, the brands are here, and the question is no longer if but how.

How do we turn lofty valuations into sustainable businesses? How do we go from “next big thing” to cultural cornerstone?

Five years ago, I was told women’s sports were too niche to be big business.

This year, Just Women’s Sports did deals with three of the five biggest companies in the world (Microsoft, Amazon and Google). We had our biggest revenue year to date. And we just crossed 2 billion views on the year.

Meanwhile, the WNBA averaged 1.3 million viewers per game on ESPN, which is 85% of the viewership of an average NBA game. The first-ever million dollar transfer happened in women’s soccer, followed by four more. And just two weeks ago, the NWSL had its most-watched match ever, with 1.18 million viewers tuning in to the Championship.

As we head into the new year, I think it’s critical for stakeholders to recognize just how much the landscape has shifted.

The fans we said would be here are here. The brands we wanted to dive in are doing it.

That means it’s no longer enough to point at the horizon and say a wave is coming. That wave has arrived. And instead of advertising a distant future, we’re being asked to build it, today.

As we head into 2026, here’s what’s top of mind for me as we enter this new era.

1. Brands are spending real dollars, which means they want real returns

The majority of ad spend in women’s sports used to be incremental spend, i.e., what was left over after the men’s deals were cut.

That isn’t a knock against the brands that were spending. The space was smaller, and at the time, these incremental dollars were genuinely a win for women’s sports and a way for blue chip brands to get in the door.

Those days are now behind us.

Brands today are coming to the table with true sports marketing dollars. And that means we, in women’s sports, are now competing with the big dogs.

It’s no longer enough for us to say “you should invest in women’s sports to help the space grow.” To win these deals, we have to get good at explaining to brands why this audience is so valuable for them.

I’m incredibly proud of the work Just Women’s Sports did on this front in 2025. We teamed up with TurboTax to launch Sports Are Fun! with Kelley O’Hara during tax season, partnered with Microsoft to create a first-of-its-kind AI integration for Between the Lines with Lisa Leslie, and just last week released a content feature with NBA 2K showing off their new WNBA gameplay.

These are just three examples of deals we won because we were able to show why partnering with Just Women’s Sports —and reaching our audience — benefited these brands.

2. Broken records are no longer the best measure of success

In 2024, a record 18.9 million people tuned in to watch South Carolina take on Caitlin Clark’s Iowa in the women’s college basketball championship.

This was an “a-ha moment” for so many people. But while broken records are nice, they aren’t the best barometer for measuring real fandom.

Instead of asking, “How many people can we get to watch one game?” We need to be asking, “How many of those 18.9 million can we turn into regular fans?”

What’s so impressive about the NFL isn’t the 130 million people who watch the Super Bowl. It’s the 20 million people who will watch a random Sunday afternoon game, even if it’s between the two worst teams in the league.

Women’s sports don’t need to “break through” anymore. We’ve already proven that these games can appeal to casual fans. Now we have to build an environment that makes it easy to be a casual fan, i.e., someone for whom women’s sports is just a part of their daily world.

That’s why for me, the biggest wins in 2025 weren’t necessarily the sexy, one-off viewership records. It was the 1.5 million people who tuned in to watch the Indiana Fever play the Chicago Sky even though Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese weren’t playing. Or the 37% YoY growth in WNBA viewership of non-Fever games. Or the 11 million impressions JWS just drove covering NWSL Championship Weekend. Or the 5 million impressions we drove per day during the WNBA Playoffs.

These are the types of metrics we should obsess over: the ones that show we’re becoming a part of fans’ everyday lives.

3. Women’s sports are at the chasm

There’s a concept in marketing called “crossing the chasm.” The chasm is the gap between early and mainstream adopters. It’s the inflection point every disruptive product hits, when you go from proving there’s value to massively scaling your product.

Today, women’s sports are at that chasm. The early fans have held it down, but for women’s sports to truly go mainstream, we have to shift from serving early adopters to reaching the early majority.

The early majority are the casual sports fans. They aren’t the first movers, but they’ll show up when something catches their attention and stay when it feels frictionless, exciting, and everywhere they already are.

Reaching these fans means adopting a new playbook. It doesn’t mean abandoning the core, but it does mean building an ecosystem that’s welcoming to new fans.

It’s another reason why digital remains so essential to women’s sports. Digital media is how we meet these fans where they are, with content that’s engaging, digestible, and makes them feel a part of the conversation from the moment they join.

For Just Women’s Sports, our biggest focus in 2026 is leveling up the digital conversation by introducing and amplifying a new wave of women’s sports personalities and voices. This is how we cross the chasm: by creating conversations that are instantly engaging to both new and current fans.

The women’s sports wave we all wanted was here.

No more pointing at the horizon. It’s time to paddle out.

See you all in 2026!

ICYMI: Just Women’s Sports was named to three of Inc. Magazine’s Best In Business lists this year: Best Marketing, Best Collaborations, and Best in Small & Mighty.