Women’s Sports Coverage Faces Critical Information Gap Despite Growing Popularity

Despite the unprecedented popularity of women’s sports stars like Caitlin Clark, Coco Gauff, and Trinity Rodman, comprehensive daily news coverage of women’s athletics remains startlingly scarce, creating an information vacuum that threatens the sustainable growth of leagues like the WNBA and NWSL.

Former ESPN host Sarah Spain highlighted this systemic problem during a recent appearance on the “Casuals” podcast with Katie Nolan, pinpointing what she calls “a failure of the media, over the course of the past however many decades, to invest enough in women’s sports so that there can be established, veteran, trusted voices.”

This information deficit creates multiple challenges for fans and media alike. Basic statistics, injury updates, and substantive analysis—staples of men’s sports coverage—remain remarkably difficult to find for women’s sports, forcing even established journalists to scramble for reliable data.

“When I was at ESPN, I often relied on facts and figures from external outlets,” Spain explained, noting that these resources simply don’t exist at the same level for women’s sports, leading producers and researchers to overlook women’s athletics in favor of men’s sports with more readily available information.

This void has serious consequences. Misinformation flourishes in the absence of authoritative sources, with fake quotes—particularly those falsely attributed to athletes like Angel Reese—spreading rapidly across social media with no easy way for fans to verify their authenticity.

“There’s a lot of misattributed quotes or fully made-up quotes. And because there’s nowhere to go to say, ‘Oh, she never said that,’ it just travels,” Spain said. She contrasted this with men’s sports resources like NBA Centel, where fans can quickly fact-check statements. “Where do you go for women’s sports to be sure that if it happened, it would be there?”

The problem creates a challenging environment even for dedicated women’s sports journalists, who find themselves navigating unexpected controversies rather than building the fundamental knowledge base fans need.

“It can be a barrier even to the people covering it, because there are landmines everywhere,” Spain noted. Reporters focusing on substantive coverage often inadvertently step into online controversies they weren’t aware of, finding themselves “accused of aligning with X or doing X” without understanding the context.

Spain has attempted to address this gap through her “Good Game” podcast and work with the iHeart Women’s Sports Network, which launched last year. On her show, she deliberately focuses on explaining “the stars, stakes, stats, and stories” of women’s sports events—basic contextual information that mainstream broadcasts often fail to provide.

“We don’t do that for women’s sports,” Spain observed about traditional media. “We tell you one story about a woman who plays and also helps in her community, and we’re like, ‘Don’t you want to watch the game now?'” This superficial approach fails to build the knowledge foundation that sustains fan engagement.

The current landscape has created an unusual dynamic among existing women’s sports fans, who Spain describes as protective of their space “that has been poisoned over and over again by people who have no interest in seeing it succeed.” This defensiveness can sometimes resemble the attitude of music fans who resent their favorite indie band becoming mainstream.

While some specialized outlets have emerged to fill this information void, and major networks have increased their investment in women’s sports coverage, the industry remains far behind the curve. Established journalists with institutional knowledge of women’s sports struggle to compete with content creators on platforms like TikTok and YouTube who may spread misinformation but have larger reach.

As women’s sports continue their ascent in popularity, Spain’s analysis suggests that building reliable, comprehensive information infrastructure is as crucial as broadcasting the games themselves. Without it, leagues risk losing new fans who cannot find the information they need to deepen their engagement with teams and athletes.

The sports media industry now faces the challenge of not just covering women’s sports more extensively but creating the fundamental information ecosystem that men’s sports have enjoyed for decades.