'Long Way to Go': WNBA Executive makes feelings clear over women’s sports

Sports Business Journal recently reported a new study about women’s sports coverage on televised news and highlight shows.

The study found that women’s sports made up 9.2% of the coverage in its latest sample. That is a clear improvement from a few years ago, but it is still below 10%.

On that, Toronto Tempo Assistant GM and Senior Vice President of Basketball Strategy Eli Horowitz pointed out that the share had grown remarkably since 2018, but it’s still not enough.

“When I started working in the WNBA in 2018 it was less than 4%, interesting to see some updated numbers. Progress but long way to go,” Horowitz wrote on X.

Before he started working in the WNBA in 2018, he was actually covering the league as a member of the media.

He spent more than two seasons as a WNBA reporter. During that time, he wrote for outlets including The New York Times, ESPN, SB Nation, and Excelle Sports.

So, Horowitz had seen this problem from the other side.

In May 2018, the Los Angeles Sparks hired him as Director of Public Relations and Communications.

He spent seven seasons with the organization and later moved into more basketball-focused roles. He became the Sparks’ Assistant General Manager and Vice President of Scouting and Analytics.

Then, in May 2025, Horowitz joined the Toronto Tempo, Canada’s first WNBA team.

During his time as an executive in the WNBA, the women’s sport has seen remarkable growth. Especially, the WNBA, under commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s leadership.

WNBA secured a media rights agreement worth $3.1 billion over 11 years. The league scheduled an expansion to 18 teams by 2030 and planned an expanded 50-game regular season schedule. Franchise valuations also exploded from an average of roughly $10 million in 2019 to around $460 million.

That’s why Horowitz’s comment matters most.

Off the court, women’s sports grew into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse. But on mainstream TV news and highlight programs, coverage merely crept from roughly 3.5% up to 9.2%.

The findings reported by Sports Business Journal come from the long-running ‘Gender in Televised Sport Report,’ published in the academic journal Communication & Sport.

It’s a research project that has tracked gender representation in televised sports news roughly every five years since 1989.

For their 2024 study, the researchers examined three separate one-week periods across March, July, and November.

They recorded and analyzed three flagship highlight shows: ESPN’s SportsCenter, CBS Sports HQ’s Spotlight, and the Big Ten Network’s B1G Today.

However, the researchers discovered that this growth was largely an illusion. Once they removed the niche accounts, the numbers dropped to just 8.8%.

It offered a striking example.

During March 2024, when Iowa star Caitlin Clark was leading one of the biggest women’s college basketball stories in years, the B1G Network’s social account posted only 19 times about women’s basketball, or 6.4% of its March output. For men’s basketball, the number was 275 posts, or 92.6% for the same time period.

That’s the problem that needs to be changed if women’s sports need real growth in TV and news media coverage.