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.
