After more than two decades first as a player, then a coach in both the NCAA and WNBA, Connecticut Sun coach Stephanie White said this season was the first time she saw average college women’s basketball fans follow their favorite players into the pros on a meaningful scale.
The 2024 WNBA rookie class helped launch the league to a new level of popularity coming off of a college basketball season that was already record-setting: The UConn women’s basketball team was a part of the most-viewed basketball game ever on ESPN in its 2024 Final Four matchup with Iowa, and the national championship game between South Carolina and the Hawkeyes was the second most-watched non-Olympic women’s sporting event on record behind the 2015 World Cup Final.
The WNBA season continued to foster that excitement with historic viewership and engagement in 2024: The league announced Friday that it averaged a record 1.2 million regular-season viewers on ESPN platforms, and it also drew its highest Finals viewership in 25 years with an average of 1.6 million tuned in. The Finals also delivered a thrilling end to the season with a five-game series that included two overtime games and ended in the first-ever title for the New York Liberty.
“It’s the perfect storm of integration of of college stars, and the perfect storm of bringing the college fan to the WNBA, because there had been a disconnect for a long time,” White said in August. “It’s just that right time. I feel like at times, we have had to push the league. We have had to push women’s basketball. I don’t feel like we’re there anymore. I feel like the recognition, the respect, is there … The seeds you planted so long ago finally come to fruition, and I think we’re seeing that.”
Legendary UConn coach Geno Auriemma attended Game 2 of the Finals at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where he got to witness a sold-out crowd of 18,040 fans cheer the Liberty to victory. Now, with a new batch of stars taking the reigns in college hoops, Auriemma said the college game has a responsibility to keep the momentum rolling for women’s basketball in 2024-25.
“We have to keep fanning the flames as we go forward here and not let it die,” Auriemma said at Big East Media Day. “You’ve got to build on momentum, because things don’t stay the same forever. You reach a certain point where you’ve got momentum going, you’ve got to keep putting something underneath it because you’re you’re going to keep putting something on top of it, right? So you better make sure that there’s a solid base … otherwise it’s going to collapse — and then we have to treat it a certain way.”
The Huskies are more comfortable with the national spotlight than perhaps any other program in the history of women’s basketball. UConn was selling out of season tickets back in the early 2000s during the legendary careers of Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, and the Huskies again became the face of the sport after winning four consecutive NCAA titles from 2012-16.
With the attention finally becoming more widespread around the country, Auriemma said he feels a responsibility to help other coaches and teams navigate the landscape for the sake of the sport’s continued growth.
“I’ve never said we’re better at Connecticut than any place else, but we are different because we’ve been dealing with this and the unbelievable attention that comes with it for 30 years,” Auriemma said. “This is all new to a lot of places, so we have to make sure we help each other understand how to deal with all of this … All of us in women’s sports and women’s basketball are responsible for that. We need to make sure that we’re all really good at what we do so we keep adding to the brand, we don’t damage the brand or hold it back in any way, shape or form.”
This era feels different, even for Auriemma, after 40 seasons leading the Huskies. Star guard Paige Bueckers is becoming a bona-fide celebrity, appearing this summer in Coco Gauff’s box at the US Open, at multiple New York Fashion Week shows and in national ad campaigns for brands including Gatorade and Nike. UConn is already sold out of Gampel Pavilion season tickets for the first time in 20 years, and its Dec. 21 matchup against No. 3 USC at the XL Center was 95% sold out within 48 hours after single-game tickets became available. The USC game is exclusively being sold in a three-game package that requires purchase of tickets to two other 2024-25 XL Center games.
“It became okay to put a spotlight on a women’s game,” Auriemma said. “I think last year’s NCAA season and a lot of what Caitlin Clark did brought a lot of attention to the game, and I think the the spotlight then started to go on not just (her) team, not just that player, but this team and this player and then the sport,” Auriemma said. “It’s like alright, let’s start showing more women’s soccer games. Let’s start talking more about the women’s hockey league. All of a sudden, these things become all part of the bigger picture. And then you get all the female athletes that won all the Olympic gold medals over in Paris, so it just became like somebody lit a fire, and it just spread.”
Auriemma said continuing the trajectory that women’s basketball has built comes back to investment, something that UConn learned long ago as it rose to prominence. He remembers the explosion of interest during the earlier years of the Huskies’ dynasty and saw conference opponents in the Big East begin to follow UConn’s lead. Eventually in 2011 the conference landed a record nine women’s teams in the NCAA Tournament, a feat that has only been accomplished one other time by the SEC in 2016.
“It’s no different than what happened a lot in the Big East when we came into the Big East and started being really good the first time around. We were the only ones putting money into women’s basketball back then, and we kept winning and winning and winning,” Auriemma said. “We started making a lot of money, getting money from TV and ticket sales, and then all of a sudden we had nine teams in the tournament, and those nine teams were heavily invested in women’s basketball … We’re going to keep investing in it at UConn, so I’m not worried about that part. When you think you can make a return on your investment, you start to invest in it more, but how do you know if you can make a return if you don’t invest in it first?”
