Women’s sports TV exposure for women’s sports is a real game changer

Growing up playing basketball in my driveway, I dreamed of one day playing on television in front of big, energetic crowds. At that time, it was a far-fetched dream. There were no televised women’s basketball games, Title IX was still decades away, and even men’s sports were not on television enough to fill my appetite for live competition.

I remember watching one Boston Celtics game a week and listening to men’s college basketball on the radio. I was desperate for sports content. Today, I coach a women’s basketball team that plays on national television regularly and I watch Olympic-level competition in almost every sport imaginable on Pac-12 Networks all year long.

I have had the pleasure of being the women’s basketball coach at Stanford since 1985. At Stanford, and throughout the Pac-12 Conference, we believe that the pursuit of excellence is meant for all of us. In academics, excellence is the norm, and in athletics, excellence is not confined only to those who play certain sports.

Any given day on any Pac-12 campus, you will run into past and future Olympians, national champions, and All-Americans across more than 30 different sports. The Pac-12 Conference sees intrinsic value in the promotion, growth, and health of all sports. That is why the conference launched a different kind of sports network in 2012 — one wholly-owned by its member universities and designed first and foremost to deliver value to its teams and student-athletes through unprecedented exposure and promotion.

The advent of Pac-12 Networks five years ago has brought with it a new generation of women’s basketball fans and a steady increase in interest in programs up and down the West Coast. For my team, and for so many others, Pac12 Networks has been a game changer.

Pac-12 Networks airs 850 live events each year, across more than 30 sports. Not only is women’s basketball always on the air, but so are softball and baseball, and soccer and volleyball. Even some football and men’s basketball games were not aired on national television before Pac-12 Networks. Now, I can always cheer on Stanford and my colleagues across the conference.

The dream I had as a young girl — to be able to watch athletes from every sport, both men and women, compete at the highest level — is finally being realized.

Over 50 percent of Pac-12 Networks’ live events are women’s sports events, with a total of 16 different women’s sports seeing airtime. Sports that some people only watch once every four years, like gymnastics and swimming, can now be seen on Pac-12 Networks, with the likes of Katie Ledecky competing for conference championships.

The Pac-12 Networks provide wonderful examples of how college athletics is supposed to work.

Thanks to Pac-12 Networks, fans can now see that the young women I coach are not only immensely athletically talented (many of them capable of professional basketball careers), but that they’re also majoring in human biology and political science, they’re doing summer internships, and they’re planning for their futures.

And now that young girls can see my team doing it, they can believe it and they can emulate it. They are able to do what I could not: watch role models like Brittany McPhee, Jordin Canada, and Kelsey Plum live their dreams.

Coaching a college women’s basketball team whose games air regularly on national television is something I could not have fathomed while shooting hoops in my childhood driveway. But today it is my reality, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

The advent of Pac-12 Networks five years ago has brought with it a new generation of women’s basketball fans and a steady increase in interest in programs up and down the West Coast.