Setting the stage: The driving forces behind the WNBA’s growth

A temporary basketball court was built inside the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium for the women’s basketball team to play an outdoor game on Oct. 15, 2023. The hardwood looked small against the football field, wedged in the north end zone and surrounded by the familiar yard markers of a sport that never needed to justify its scale.

Iowa coach Lisa Bluder moved a preseason exhibition against DePaul University out of 15,000-seat Carver-Hawkeye Arena and into the 70,000-seat home of Hawkeye football. By tipoff, 55,646 people showed up, setting the women’s basketball single-game attendance record.

The number nearly doubled the previous record of 29,619, set at the 2002 NCAA title game in San Antonio. While Iowa beat DePaul 94-72 and Caitlin Clark notched a triple-double, the real victor was the data.

If the afternoon felt like a spectacle, it also functioned as a cleaner test than most “growth” stories ever get. The crowd did not need a championship on the line, a playoff bracket, or the madness of March. They showed up for an outdoor exhibition in a football stadium.

The event isolated the variable often denied to women’s sports: the stage. It wasn’t that people wouldn’t watch, but rather that the sport rarely received the kind of spotlight that makes events discoverable and widely discussed. One year later, the gap between interest and infrastructure became harder to ignore.

In 2024, the WNBA set new records across the board. Average attendance rose 48% to 9,807 per game, the league produced 154 sellouts, and merchandise sales jumped 601%. Social video views approached 2 billion. Twenty-two regular-season games averaged at least 1 million viewers, a benchmark previously reserved for the WNBA Finals. Teams shifted matchups into larger venues to meet demand, including games moved to NBA arenas in Washington and Atlanta.

The last detail may be easy to overlook, but it’s one of the clearest signals that the sport is no longer operating as a novelty. When a league begins changing its buildings and calendars to meet demand, it has moved past symbolic visibility and into operational response.

In July 2024, the WNBA announced new media rights agreements with Disney, Amazon Prime Video and NBCUniversal that stretch from 2026 through 2036, with partners distributing more than 125 regular-season and playoff games nationally each season.

Soon, the league’s growth began to reorganize ownership expectations. The WNBA awarded Toronto an expansion franchise beginning in 2026 for a reported $115 million fee. By mid-2025, the league announced three more future franchises in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia, each with a $250 million expansion fee, a figure that would have sounded implausible just a few years earlier.

For much of its history, the WNBA has operated under constraints. Games were scattered across channels and platforms. Start times varied. The marketing cadence rarely communicated urgency. Fans and sponsors are unlikely to build a product that is hard to locate and treated inconsistently by the companies distributing it. The league’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has described the issue as structural rather than sentimental. 

“It’s a male model discounted by 80 to 90%,” she told ESPN in 2021, describing women’s sports as “historically and dramatically undervalued.”

The WNBA has begun, slowly, to build the machinery it previously lacked. In 2022, the league announced a $75 million capital raise funded by selling equity in the league, money earmarked for marketing, growth initiatives, and what Engelbert called long-term transformation.

If women’s basketball is discussed primarily as culture, then its rise is framed as public enlightenment. If it is discussed as a business, then the rise looks like a delayed implementation. People cannot watch what they cannot reliably find. Broadcasters cannot profit from what they treat as a low-priority asset. Leagues cannot scale what they do not consistently sell.

The WNBA has already signaled where it wants to go, with bigger rights deals, bigger venues, more franchises, and more inventory for broadcasters and sponsors. The looming question is whether the people on the court will be treated as the engine of that growth, with compensation and working conditions that reflect the league’s new bracket, or whether they will continue to serve as the proof that a product is valuable only after someone else has collected the return.

The court at Kinnick was a spectacle, but it clarified that the space was always there and that the audience was closer than the industry admitted. Once the stage finally matched the demand, it became harder to argue that women’s basketball needed to be “discovered.” It needed to be distributed like it mattered.