When I was growing up as a sports-mad young girl in the 1990s, visibility for women in sport was so low as to be almost nonexistent. Women were playing sport, but you wouldn’t have known it from turning on the television or opening a newspaper. I was relatively lucky in that netball was my first love and we were granted one game a week broadcast on the ABC on a Saturday afternoon. The matches would all be played on a Friday evening and almost 24 hours later, one of them would be broadcast at a time when many netball fans were playing netball themselves. I set up the VCR to record each week and hoped no one would spoil the result for me before I got a chance to watch the game.
The announcement last week that Nine will broadcast all 48 games of this season’s NRLW competition stands in stark contrast to the lonely experience of being a women’s sport fan in my childhood. These days a young netball fan can watch every Super Netball match live across Fox Sports and Kayo. The Women’s Big Bash League and AFLW have broadcast deals that split games between Seven, Fox Sports and Kayo. The A-League Women’s games are available on streaming service Paramount Plus and the Super W is on Stan Sport.
Despite this vast improvement in visibility over the years, the battle has not yet been won. Much of the progress has come through the proliferation of streaming services, which have the benefit of unlimited time slots and channels on which to show a multitude of fixtures. This means even pathway competitions and state leagues are broadcast in a variety of sports, which also gives exposure to the next generation of talent to impress coaches and selectors. However, anyone who has tried to navigate these streaming services knows they can often be unwieldy and – just like in the newspapers and television programming of old – women’s sport is rarely given prominence. Fans who know what they are looking for can find their way to a game with relative ease, but there is something to be said for the ability to stumble across a game while channel surfing to convert new fans to a sport.
This is what makes broadcast deals such as the NRLW’s so important. Of the 48 games that will be shown, 45 of those will be on Nine’s main channel, leading to more casual viewers finding the match, a higher likelihood that it may be switched on in a crowded pub and providing an incentive for Nine to invest in the broadcast product, which will make it more appealing to those who tune in for the first time. While the use of streaming services continues to rise, with 68% of Australians subscribed to at least one, the urgency and time-specific nature of sport means these older-style broadcast deals still hold great importance.
It is hard to overstate the importance of this kind of visibility for women’s sport. The phrase “if she can see it, she can be it” is repeated so often these days it has begun to lose all meaning, but the visibility itself will never cease to be important. Not just for the young girls who have come to see this kind of representation as the default, but for the women who grew up without it.
Traditionally girls have dropped out of sport as teenagers at very high rates – studies have found that by 14 years old, girls are leaving sport at twice the rate of boys, as school and work begin to take priority. However, the last decade has shown a consistent increase in community sport registrations for women across a range of sports – particularly those that were typically viewed as “masculine” sports. Women who were denied opportunities and pathways as young girls are now seeing what is possible thanks to the increased visibility of women playing sport on their televisions and signing up to give it a go themselves. It may not be for a shot at professionalism, but the ability to experience the thrill of a first goal, try or wicket holds a special kind of magic in itself.
To see women’s sport beginning to gain equal prominence with men’s can be so powerful for those women, especially when they feel guilty about taking time out from their families to play their weekly netball, football or cricket game. It is a reminder that their sporting pursuits are valid and that they have as much right to this weekly leisure time as their male counterparts.
When the first NRLW game of the season kicks off on 22 July, the eyes of the sports-mad young girls will be on them. But equally important will be the eyes of the women who didn’t know what was possible in their youth, cheering them on and making up for lost time.
