ESPNW’s Growth Engine

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1:17Congratulations! You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John Aran, and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. And today, Susie Petrosky joins us. Susie is a top executive at ESPN, overseeing women's sports programming and ESPNW. And I asked her to join the varsity because ESPN is just a couple of months away from branding its Sunday nights as Women's Sports Sundays. And Susie, of course, played a huge role in making that happen. But before we get to Susie, today is Sunday, March 29th, and here's what I'm watching. I'm back on the World Cup kick, and it kicks off in just over two months.

1:59And the negative headlines? Well, they're everywhere. FIFA is canceling hotel bookings. That suggests that fans are reticent to travel to the U.S. The TSA? It's warning about travel chaos. The head of the TSA warned the House Homeland Security Committee that we are facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers at our airports for the World Cup games in less than 80 days. Once again, I am telling you that the World Cup is going to go off without a hitch. There's work to be done, sure, but this is following the same trajectory as every other big event like previous World Cups and the Olympics.

2:41There's always a ton of sky is falling headlines followed by a hugely successful event. Now, the main reason that I'm not worried is because the big money isn't worried. Just a couple of days ago, FIFA's top business executive told my old publication, Sports Business Journal, that the World Cup has sold out of all of its global sponsorships already. Not only that, but FIFA already is calling this year's event the most successful commercial program in FIFA's history. So yes, I feel reasonably confident that this year's World Cup is going to be as successful as predicted. Okay, now let's get to Susie Petrosky.

3:22Susie, first of all, thank you very much for joining the pod. I have been wanting to get you on this pod because you have a big role at ESPN, overseeing women's programming, overseeing ESPNW. And I want to start our conversation just kind of with a really open-ended 50 ,000 foot view of women's sports. Right now, in the year 2026, what is the state of women's sports? Well, John, first and foremost, thank you for having me. Platforms like this, opportunities like this are invaluable as we continue to grow. I like to say that I have the best gig at ESPN. I've been here a little under four years.

4:04And I remember when I was, you know, first interviewing, I thought, man, what a hand, right? Majority of women's sports rights exist with ESPN. How do we maximize those? So I would say we're continuing to mainstream women's sports across our established ecosystem. We are ESPN. We do sports better than anybody else. And women's sports are sports. So I think what you're seeing is us really intentionally programming, really, you know, being really thoughtful about how and where we expand our portfolio and really kind of maximizing those rights. So I've never felt more confident about where we are and where we're going.

4:44And I think you've seen that consistent growth over what we'll call the last four years. And now what we're doing is we're raising the floor across our properties. And I think we've seen that, you know, women's college basketball, the women's college World Series, volleyball, our partnership with the NWSL. And I couldn't be more excited about where we are, where we're going. All right. So, you know, you referenced the growth over the last four years. And I'm trying to view women's sports like just as a business, you know, and you had you had like the startup mode. And I know, you know, four years ago, if you anywhere you went in New York and you talk to people with money and that they they wanted to invest in women's sports, there's no ceiling in women's sports.

5:28And it seems like it seems to me like you're out of the startup mode and sort of into into the growth mode. Or do you feel like you're still in the startup startup mode? Like just again, not necessarily ESPN and women's sports, just women's sports, just as a general, you know, genre that's out there. Like, how do you view that? Characterization, John, I think that's a perfect characterization. Right. We you know, I talk a lot about our life cycle. Our most established professional women's league in this country is the WNBA. And we're about to celebrate our 30th anniversary with them. So when you compare that against other more established properties, look at where we are, look at where we exist.

6:10So I think certainly I would still in some spaces characterize us as in our infancy. And I think when we talk about infrastructure, how are we building a sustainable infrastructure as a media company? How are we building a sustainable infrastructure at various leagues and properties? And I think that's where we are now. What does that mean? Where are we putting our dollars? And how do we make sure, you know, I like to say growth is good, scale is better. And that's where we're going right now. We are getting to scale, be it women's college basketball, WNBA, professional women's soccer. And that's really where we're going.

6:45You are seeing a lot of change across our landscape. We can, you know, you talked about your fandom when we were preparing for this in DC, and you have one of the best owners in the game. And what we've also seen over that time period is kind of an evolution from millionaire owners to billionaire owners. And that's what we see, of course, in the NFL and the NBA. And that has resulted in tremendous growth, be it in practice facilities, the amount of dollars being invested in rosters, in coaching staffs and just facilities generally. So you're certainly right in that characterization. And I still believe we are just getting started.

7:20Not every league, not every property is at the same level of kind of growth within their life cycle. And I actually think we have a huge role in that development. We'll look at AUSL as an example. Softball is a huge category for us, a huge sport with tremendous opportunity. And we have that at the little league level. We have that at the collegiate level. And of course, we have that at the pro level. So I think that kind of shows where we're going directionally. And you're going to continue to see growth within, you know, not just women's basketball. That's certainly the top of our pyramid for us with women's college basketball and WNBA.

7:56But you're seeing tremendous growth across multiple sport categories. Yeah, you mentioned that we have such a great owner down here. That's with the Washington spirit, of course. And I tell people all the time because I am new to I've jumped on the bandwagon of women's sports. I wasn't always there, but I have jumped on. And the Washington Spirit is one of the big reasons. We have the Washington Spirit and we have D.C. United, and they share the same stadium, Audi Field in Southwest D.C. And I can tell you, if you walk around D.C., more people can identify Trinity Rodman than any player on D.C.

8:36United. I've been to Washington Spirit games. It's packed, the Audi Field, as opposed to D.C. United. Of course, the Spirit are one of the best teams in the league competitively, and D.C. United decidedly is not, which is one of the main reasons there. But I definitely, in this market, in the D.C. market, you can certainly see what you're talking about. It stars, right? You just mentioned Trinity Rodman, and you can kind of, what we take very seriously is star building. That exists on the men's side. Name your sport. I'm a Giants fan, so Jackson Dart, right? I always have to plug my Giants fan now.

9:17I think we're on the up and up. Honestly, Susie, we are on in Nesson, and you're going to bring up the – you're a Boston resident. You're bringing up Jackson Dart. Come on. That is my only New York fandom, okay, for what it's worth. We're going to get canceled. This is my last podcast. Thank you for joining. It's over. You know what? Thank you so much for having me. Goodbye. No, but it's about star building, right? And we see that on the men's side. We see that on the women's side and be it Ilona Mar, Trinity Rodman, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese. That is welcoming people in. They have their favorite player and you see it.

9:55It's a player. It's players leagues. Again, NFL, NBA, WNBA. And if that brings you in, if that is your fandom of Trinity Rodman now creates a diehard fandom in the Washington spirit, we welcome you into that. And I think that that's, you know, we've always had an excellent product on the women's sports side. And now you are seeing this mainstreaming of women's sports talent and just women's sports competition holistically, which is really kind of raising the floor. I keep coming back to that. We are raising the floor from a fandom perspective and everyone is welcome. We're trying to lower the barrier to entry.

10:31So if you might have been a diehard for the last 30 years and since 1999, you've been a fan of the WIBA or you might have just discovered your fandom and we got to serve you the same way because we want to keep you here and keep keep kind of growing fandom and have that kind of add to your your toolbox of fandom, whatever, whatever else it might be. Now you are a fan of the Washington spirit. Now you're a fan of women's boards. So I'm a Maryland grad and Maryland's women's basketball team won the NCAA tournament back in the aughts and it really took over the DMV down here. And to me, like that was noticeable because people that weren't generally into women's sports were, you know, watching and following.

11:17But it seemed to be a very, very local concentration. Like, you know, the local team does well, people follow it, and then they stop following it. And then you referenced Kaitlyn Kark earlier. Like, that final that she was in, the NCAA tournament final, that outrated the men. I still find that hard to believe. Like, that was when it first hit me. Why am I hard to believe? Why, you know? Just because it's – well, it never happened before. So, and, well, like you said, you have stars. I it's less hard to believe now that it that it actually happened. But for me, that was like that was when it clicked.

11:58And I was like, wow, there really is a real business here beyond. What was it for you? When did it click for you that this is a real was there is can you point to one thing that happened or is it just something that you've always been into and you just wanted people to see what you see? No, it's an excellent question. And I can actually pinpoint, I've been working in women's sports since 2017 when I worked for the National Women's Soccer League. And I'll share, totally different landscape, totally different time. At the time, A &E was an equity stake partner in the league. Lifetime had the rights, Lifetime had the logo on the sleeve.

12:38And I was actually employed by A &E and representing the NWSL. And I think it was, you know, 2018, I was in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was sitting next to Jess Smith, now the president of the Golden State Valkyries. She was at Angel City, and we looked at each other and we said, there's something here. We know this business is real. We know there was so much opportunity. Let's bet the house on this thing. And it was really then. And now I'll share anecdotally, I didn't have a single inbound lead when I was leading sponsorship sales for the NWSL in that time. So obviously, the landscape has changed substantively, but we just knew this product was excellent.

13:19I knew this product was excellent. And I couldn't accept that seemingly the only reason why this product wasn't better monetized, wasn't more accessible, wasn't more well positioned from a business perspective, you know, on the basis of sex and gender. So how do we establish a business around this product? And, you know, what I like to say in various spaces is I want to leave the advocacy behind and just build businesses. That's what we're doing here. And I, again, I take this responsibility really seriously. I knew if I got this gig, it was inside the institution. How do you mainstream women's sports?

13:56It's from inside the institution. And I think our progress, be it incremental or really substantive as you're kind of seeing now, matters a ton. So I would say, you know, I, and there's a number of us that saw tremendous this opportunity a bit early on. And then of course, with Caitlin and Angel and that competition and showing what competition among women can look like was transformative. And then you got people, I vividly remember living in Boston and my neighbor's dad who lives in Vermont, he's like a middle school teacher was like, man, that Caitlin Clark. And I was like, You ever watch women's basketball before?

14:38He's like, never. And that those moments mattered a ton to me because I knew we were entering this new territory. You have Dave Portnoy betting on the Indiana fever and, you know, talking about women's college basketball like they talk about men's college basketball. That matters. That's maybe different than we have been. And I'll be the first to say the business has not always matched the product. And now it does. And now you are seeing this tremendous growth. I think it just came out earlier today. From a revenue standpoint, we're up 72 % over a two-year time period for our regular season women's college basketball ad sales.

15:16And we're up like 134 % for our women's tournament over the last two years. That is real substantive, tangible revenue growth. You know, this is a business and it's become, you know, even more than it has historically, a core part of our business pillars. This is not initiative. It's not the right thing to do. It's not causal. It's excellent business. And I think that's certainly reflected. Michelle King is not, you know, really investing in women's sports because it's the right thing to do. She's an incredibly smart business person. Same thing with Angel City with Bob Iger and Willow Bay,$250 million acquisition.

15:51That's incredibly good business. And I think that's reflective of where we are going and how ripe this opportunity is. By those numbers that you referenced, those are a lot of now inbound calls that you did not get in 2017. Boy, it'd be so easy just like, you know, taking their order takers, Rita Farah and everybody at Disney right now. You know, and I'm going to use that as an opportunity to shine, you know, Rita and Jacqueline Dobies and Day Dramatic and Danielle Brown and all these people who, you know, I always say the Jacqueline Dobies story. She leads our revenue yield management team and she wasn't a women's sports fan.

16:32And we met and I showed her we were looking at this clip. I think Kelsey Plum was talking about rev share. Now, how relevant is that today? And, you know, there was the misconception that they want to be paid the exact same as LeBron James. And I remember Jacqueline and I had this conversation. And now Jacqueline Dobies is leading the conversation around women's sports because she recognizes how robust the business opportunity is. And I think that speaks to how many internal partners we've had and how seriously, you know, Disney ad sales and our sales org takes the opportunity with women's sports.

17:31We'll see you next time. and furniture that actually fits your life. Visit Wayfair.com or download the Wayfair app. Wayfair, every style, every home. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.

18:14Susie, you also referenced something in your last answer that I found to be particularly interesting, especially as it pertains to women's sports. And you talked about sort of being an advocate. And I think a lot of times people in executives, especially media look at people that are advocates for things and sort of dismiss them like other advocates uh they're not really running the business i you went through the business metrics behind the past couple of years of women's sports but have you felt the need to become like less of an advocate for women's sports in order to drive it through or do you think that helps you to to push that through as an advocate for the genre of women's sports?

19:00You know, I think I have such a tremendous responsibility in this role. I have to be very aware of the rooms I'm allowed into, the rooms that I find myself in, the conversations I'm having with people. And I view myself as a bridge builder. And I always was very aware of the opportunity I had having those four letters attached to my name, ESPN. I'm one of those kind of few people that did not come up inside the walls of ESPN. So I recognized how big of an opportunity was. And I think we're running a business. We are leading a business here. So if I use certain language, if I, you know, I'm a very passionate person that that's, you know, but I'm not apologetic for that passion because it's rooted in data.

19:48It is rooted in fact. It it is rooted in opportunity. And I also believe every single word I am saying. So how do I reinforce that message? It's being incredibly well prepared. It's making sure that I am incredibly collaborative. I'm talking to you here, but this work doesn't happen without people that came before me, be that, you know, Carol Stiff, people who have been building these businesses for an incredibly long time. Dan Margulis is our programmer for Women's College Basketball. Well, Nick Dawson oversees our college business. Julie Sobieski at the WNBA could like go down and down and down this line.

20:27And they set me up for success. And then I am in these rooms talking about how big the business opportunity is. I don't have my counterparts going and talking about advocacy when they're talking about the NFL. So they're talking about a business and I'm doing the same thing when I'm talking about our women's portfolio internally or externally. That's how we are going to get where we are going. You asked me at the top 50 ,000 foot view. We want to make it as easy to be a fan of women's sports as it is to be a fan of the NFL. That means 365 days a year. So that's what I'm focused on. Where are our priorities from a business perspective internally?

21:02What rights do we have? And then how are we elevating the whole business? Again, we're the institution. 68 % of women's sports consumption comes by way of ESPN. You quite literally, and ESPN platforms, you can't be a fan of women's sports without us. So how do we make sure that we are growing audiences and serving audiences, business first? Inevitably, the intersectionality of women's sports is also why I love this job. That is inevitable. That's not going anywhere. But in my role, I lead with the business first, and that's how we've made so much progress. So Susie, I'm hoping you can tell me the story about I spilled a lot of ink on the MLB deal and Sunday Night Baseball left ESPN, created a hole for the first time in decades on Sunday nights in the spring and summer months.

21:57Take me through how you identified that and then how you got what was in your mind into what's going to be ESPN's Women's Sports Sunday, which I believe starts in June, right? June 21st will be our first Sunday. This was, so I think my superpower is that I sit within the programming org, albeit not necessarily as a programmer, but I report up to Roz Durant, who is truly one of the very best leaders, and she kind of empowered me to always be seeking opportunity that drives our business. So obviously, you know, that was kind of a very long process. And we started to see that there may be opportunity in what were those Sunday night baseball windows.

22:44And for the better part of three years, I worked on our women's sports strategy, which is about mainstreaming women's sports across our established ecosystem. It is about maximizing our rights and creating more opportunities to generate revenue. And this really kind of fit firmly within, you know, those strategic pillars. We also build franchises and we do franchises better than anybody else. So with all those things in mind, it was really kind of more than a year process of saying, hey, we think there's going to be opportunity. Let's do all that background work. What's the revenue best opportunity?

23:16What's the viewership best opportunity? And how are we serving fans? I like to refer to the summer as women's sports season. We have WNBA, we have AUSL, we have a Little League softball, and of course the NWSL. So I knew we had excellent programming. And then we knew we'd have consistency. And then we knew we could generate real revenue. The majority of our women's sports inventory and premium positions is sold out. So we knew to continue to grow revenue to continue to grow revenue we needed to create new ownable opportunities because that's what the marketplace told us so as you can tell i have a sales background so fortunately the sales worry lets me lets me scratch that itch here and there again despite not being a salesperson despite also not being a programmer so we work together um our leadership team um alan ben hannon brent colborn um we really kind of looked at where there was opportunity to maximize you know maximize our women's sports properties with consistency and build a franchise around it.

24:18And then again, over kind of an over a year time, we really kind of pieced that together from a scheduling standpoint, worked across multiple departments, worked across multiple internal teams, and really kind of created a schedule that we knew would serve fans and allow us to develop this franchise. Of course, we are home to Monday Night Football, but this is the women's sports version of Monday Night Football. That's what we're doing. That's what we're building. And again, it's all about sustainability. It's all about raising the floor. So if we can kind of increase our numbers on Sunday night, we're maximizing the opportunity and really growing fan bases with some of our most premium women's sports programming.

24:56ESPN, in my opinion, I was in Bristol recently and said this to you, it's been a leader among media companies in terms of doing women's sports and carrying women's sports and promoting women's sports. How difficult was that pitch to get in? Because it is something that's brand new. I mean, this hasn't happened elsewhere. So was it difficult to get people to see what you were describing? There, of course, are challenges always, right? I think everyone is advocating for their respective sport categories, and that's an incredibly premium window. So there were challenges, but I would say there were a lot more people working and rowing in the same direction.

25:42We knew there was opportunity. Did the data and the business match what we were trying to accomplish? The answer was unequivocally yes. And you mentioned our leadership position. We take that really seriously. Roz has said this in other spaces, but this isn't just initiative. This isn't a flash in the pan. This is a flag in the ground. And we are building this franchise. Of course, we have our nine week run this summer, but we expect to pick this franchise up and put it in other seasons. We were really intentional with the naming of this franchise to ensure that it was sport agnostic. How do we make sure we can show up in other seasons and create this exceptional platform in other spaces for our most premium women's sports programming?

26:21The amount of calls I got from agents, the amount of calls I got from other leagues that said, how can we get into women's sports Sundays? That's what we want. The same way that teams want to be on Monday Night Football, we want to make sure everyone recognizes the opportunity that we've created with Women's Sports Sundays. And then it's up to us to continue to blow that out. It's up to us to continue to grow that. And, you know, I mentioned this, you know, previously, but we have a 65 plus person internal interdepartmental that has been working on Women's Sports Sunday since December to make sure that we're all growing in the same direction.

26:57And it's probably the most collaborative expression of work since my time here and maybe anywhere else I've ever been because everyone recognizes the opportunity, not just from a business perspective, but in precedent setting. There's a lot of other players in the game now from a women's sports standpoint. We welcome that competition. And we also, again, we take that leadership position very seriously. And we're not comparing ourselves to anyone else. We're comparing ourselves to ourselves. How do we treat women's sports like the NFL, like the NBA, and make it, again, as mainstream and a core part of our business as every one of those other properties?