Coverage of Women's Sports

The way I see it, the coverage of women's sports gets better as you get more local. I'm not saying that's 100 percent true, or the way it should be, I'm just saying that's how I see it.

Working with the local western Massachusetts papers, I have seen some great coverage on high school girls sports and took part in it myself. I've done recaps and features for girls tennis, softball and soccer, and even put together a "Hampshire Gazzette All-Stars" team for local tennis. If you read that paper every day you have a pretty darn good sense of what is going on with those local teams and you really get to know the athletes.

I feel like the only women's college sports I am exposed to is the March Madness tournament, and even that is usually greatly overshadowed by the men's bracket. However, Brittney Griner has been changing that a bit. Her dominant presence alone has drawn me a little closer to women's college hoops, because I'm always looking to see what impressive feat she will accomplish next.

On the professional level, I'm not really exposed at all to what is going on, and that may be to some fault of my own. But it's also not seen much in the national eye. I see WNBA games on local sports networks occasionally and tune in to hear my boy Mike Gorman, the best play-by-play basketball guy there is in my opinion, do the Connecticut Sun games. But once again, that's a sort of local, New England factor. Very rarely will you see a WNBA game aired nationally, or a highlight package on Sportscenter. Even in the playoffs it's tough to catch most of the games, but at least you'll see highlights when it gets closer to the finals, and the finals are certainly aired (at weird times though, I feel).

One thing in women's sports I do think gets good coverage is the Women's World Cup. Those games are super exciting to watch and are aired pretty frequently. But besides that, I think locality has a lot to do with how well women's sports are covered.