What we cover every week
Raising the Game is a women's sports podcast that covers the
professional and college leagues in depth: the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL,
USWNT, Unrivaled, NCAA sports, and the business forces reshaping all
of them. Each episode pairs a news roundup with one deep-dive segment,
so you get the week's scores and storylines plus the context behind
them.
The deep dives are the heart of the show. Some weeks that means a full
history lesson, like our season-preview episode that traces the NWSL
from the 1999 World Cup boom through the WUSA and WPS collapses to
today's $2.5 billion valuation era. Other weeks it means sitting with
a question nobody else is asking, like whether America's pay-to-play
youth soccer system is quietly capping the USWNT's ceiling while
federation-funded academies elsewhere catch up.
We also follow stories across months, not just news cycles. We
covered the WNBA CBA negotiations from the first missed deadline in
January through the deal that finally got signed in March. If you
started listening at any point in between, you could pick up the
thread. That continuity is the thing we hear about most from
listeners, and it's what a lot of weekly women's sports podcast feeds
skip in favor of a clean recap with no memory of the last one.
Every league, every week
We organize our coverage around the leagues fans actually follow, and
each section below links to a dedicated page with our full episode
archive for that league.
WNBA podcast coverage
The WNBA has been in nearly every episode we've made, and 2026 gave
us a lot to work with. We followed the CBA standoff week by week:
the deadline that passed with no deal in January, the marathon talks
that stalled on revenue sharing, and finally the seven-year
agreement in March that raised the salary cap from $1.5 million to
$7 million, pushed the average salary from roughly $120,000 to
$583,000, and tied player pay to 20% of gross revenue for the first
time. We broke down the EPIC rule that lets All-WNBA players
renegotiate up to a max contract in year four, and MVPs reach the
super max early. Then came the chaos that deal unleashed: expansion
drafts for the Toronto Tempo and Portland Fire, free agency for over
80% of the league, and A'ja Wilson signing a $5 million, three-year
deal with the Aces — the largest contract in WNBA history.
We don't only cover the league when it's good news. We've spent real
time on the officiating crisis, social media harrasment, and the
eleven members of Congress who wrote to Commissioner Cathy Engelbert
demanding action to protect certain players. If you want a women's
sports podcast that treats the WNBA as a serious league with serious
problems and serious upside, start with our WNBA podcast coverage.
NWSL podcast coverage
Our NWSL coverage runs from transfer news to the league's business
story. We did a deep dive on league history ahead of the 2026
season, covering the WUSA and WPS collapses, the 2021 abuse scandal
and Yates Report, and how the league rebuilt into one where
expansion fees jumped from $2 million (San Diego, 2021) to $165
million (Atlanta, 2028) — an 82x increase in under a decade. We
covered Trinity Rodman's three-year, $1 million-a-year deal with the
Spirit that made her the highest-paid women's footballer in the
world, the Denver Summit selling more than 60,000 tickets for their
inaugural home opener at Empower Field, and a season of genuine
parity where last-place teams beat first-place teams most weekends.
We also pay attention to how the league sells itself. The NWSL's
"Summer of Soccer" push during the Men's World Cup, betting it could
convert soccer-curious fans instead of hiding from the tournament,
got a full segment. Find all of it on our
NWSL podcast page.
PWHL podcast coverage
Women's hockey might be where we've done our most distinctive work,
because almost nobody else covers the PWHL weekly. We tracked the
league's third season from the playoff race through the Montreal
Victoire beating the Ottawa Charge 3-1 for the Walter Cup, and we
covered the expansion story in real time: the five-phase process
that built four new franchises in Detroit, Hamilton, Las Vegas, and
San Jose, and the Hilary Knight sign-and-trade that sent the biggest
name in the sport from Vegas to Detroit. When the Players
Association voted for the league's first-ever salary transparency —
revealing 194 players, a $57,000 average salary, and a $37,000
minimum earned by 16 of them — we went through the numbers on air.
The PWHL passed a million fans in attendance this year. If you're one of
them, or you're wondering what you're missing, start with our
PWHL podcast coverage.
USWNT and women's soccer
Beyond the NWSL, we follow the national team through every window:
the She Believes Cup run, Emma Hayes's three-game series against
Japan, and the trip to Brazil that produced a series split and a
1-0 win with eight red cards, including one for Brazil's head coach.
We're tracking the road to the next World Cup with a skeptic's eye.
The USWNT keeps winning, but the pipeline questions underneath - pay
to play vs. federation/state run academies don't go away because of a
friendly result.
Full archive at our
USWNT and women's soccer page.
College and NCAA women's sports
March Madness gets our full attention. UCLA's 79-51 blowout win over
South Carolina for its first title in the modern NCAA was so fun to
watch, while Geno Auriemma's poor behavior during UCONNs lost to South
Carolina left a bad taste in our mouths. But college coverage on this
show goes past basketball — we covered NCAA gymnastics down to Jordan
Chiles' perfect 10 on floor in Minnesota, Wisconsin hockey's Laila Edwards
vbecoming a three-time national champion, and the draft pipeline that
connects college stars like Azzi Fudd and Olivia Miles to the professional
leagues we cover every week.
Episodes and analysis at our
college women's sports page.
The business and history of women's sports
Some of our most-shared episodes have nothing to do with that week's
scores. We built a two-part series called "The Door," telling the
stories of Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Patsy Mink, Billie Jean
King, and Donna Lopiano in part one, then Ann Meyers Drysdale, Lisa
Leslie, and more recent trailblazers in part two, connecting each of
them to the leagues fans watch today. On the business side, we spent
a full segment on Deloitte's Game Changers report projecting
women's sports revenue would top $3 billion in 2026, and another on
the "fluid fan" research from Sports Innovation Lab's Fan Project —
the finding that women's sports fans are sport-loyal rather than
team-loyal, and more likely to spend than the industry assumed. We
also cited a 30-year USC/Purdue study showing women's sports still
gets only about 15% of TV sports coverage, even after real gains.
Start with our
women's sports business and history page.
Why women's sports, why now
The honest answer is that this is the most interesting era the
industry has ever had, and most sports media still treats it as a
niche.
The numbers back that up. Deloitte projects women's sports revenue
will pass $3 billion in 2026. The WNBA just signed a CBA that
quintupled its salary cap in a single deal. NWSL expansion fees went
from $2 million to $165 million in under a decade — an 82x increase.
The PWHL drew over a million playoff fans in its third season and held
its first-ever expansion draft to add four new teams. When Serena
Williams announced a Wimbledon singles wild card this year, ticket
sell-through at the Queen's Club warmup event jumped from 88% to 95%
and social media engagement around the event surged 300% — in a
single week.
But growth stories are easy, and we try not to be a hype show. The
same season that produced those numbers also produced an officiating
crisis, a congressional letter about player safety, a fired GM, and
hard questions about whether league offices are keeping up with their
own product. Covering women's sports seriously means covering both.
That's the show.
