Every morning as a kid, I would hear the background noise of the television while sitting half-awake, eating my Cinnamon Toast Crunch at the table. The voices on the screen conversed about the latest sports news while my grandpa and dad would groan in disagreement at what were apparently awful opinions — at least, according to them.
Not only did the hosts of “Mike & Mike” bring me comfort every weekday morning for the majority of my childhood, but they also introduced me to the world of sports. I would march onto the playground during the day, looking to talk about New England’s dynasty with Tom Brady or Russell Wilson legitimizing the Seattle Seahawks.
Despite the range of topics I listened to alongside my morning cereal, one thing was always the same about them all: They rarely talked about women’s sports.
As a young girl growing up, not just playing sports but loving them, I had to search for athletes who looked like me. Women who understood the difference between being a girl playing soccer at recess and the jokes made at their expense for simply being there. Or girls who knew how much harder they’d have to play to be taken as seriously as their male counterparts in gym class.
Women’s sports were rarely primetime television unless it was the Olympics; the appropriate time every four years when female athletes and sports were celebrated along with the rest. But four years is a long time to wait. And there’s no need for years to go by without young girls getting a chance to watch female athletes play the sports they have grown to love.
Thankfully since the days I was a kid, others have finally come to that same realization.
Before recently, women’s sports were usually celebrated and put on a pedestal only on an individual basis. There was no morning rundown of the WNBA games the night before nor player features, and coverage was limited to highlight reels sandwiched between the men’s sports. Legends such as Serena Williams and Katie Ledecky were always in the conversations, but fleeting.
Growing up, there weren’t professional sports teams for most women’s sports. Athletes could hope to reach the collegiate level to play their sport alongside earning a degree, but materializing a future past that was unlikely. Now, more than ever, people are flocking to invest more time, money and passion into women’s sports. Professional teams and leagues continue to spawn over the country as people continue to prove there’s demand for them. Women’s sports are no longer limited to just the collegiate level.
And because of that, young girls now have the space to not only watch in awe of those who made it, but to hope for themselves.
The PWHL originated with six teams in 2024 and has now grown to eight teams in just two years. In that same year, Major League Volleyball formed, with Michigan earning its own team in the Grand Rapids Rise. The NCAA officially allowed the women’s basketball tournament to use the March Madness label starting in the 2022 season. The WNBA, which drew an average of 1.2 million viewers for the 2025 regular season, created an aggressive expansion plan to expand to 18 teams by 2030.
People aren’t just attending more games, but they are tuning in to every aspect of the game — the same way they always have to men’s sports. With a mass influx of women’s teams and organizations, girls finally have role models that compete at the highest level.
This generation of young female athletes looked up at their screens and watched the United States women’s hockey team win a gold medal in the 2026 Olympics. They saw Coco Gauff win her first Grand Slam title in 2023 at the US Open. On any given weekend in March, there’s the option of watching women’s college basketball without just assuming the men’s games are the only options. For the first time, women’s sports are an available choice and not simply the backup option.
Obviously, there’s always room for growth. There’s still a lack of media coverage for these women’s sports, pay gaps and a plethora of other issues that plague female athletes and their sports. But despite a list of problems still to face, there’s nothing stopping us from recognizing how far we’ve come.
It’s an environment where girls are getting opportunities to watch the sports they love with female athletes at the helm. A childhood where girls are wearing jerseys of their favorite players, because they now have professional teams to play for and a place for fans to watch them.
Now, during my jobs as a before-and-after-school teacher, I have little girls in my program talking about how much they love Paige Bueckers. I have young boys coming in to talk about how exciting the women’s basketball game was at Michigan the night prior. When I visit home now, it’s not just football on the television. It’s my grandpa sitting in his Caitlin Clark shirt while watching an Indiana Fever game.
That’s the change. The small conversations that don’t automatically count out women’s sports anymore— but treat them the same.
