Sheryl Swoopes and long-time sports activities journalist Terrika Foster-Brasby have joined iHeartMedia’s … [+] Ladies’s Sports activities Audio Community because the co-headliners of the media platform’s latest girls’s sports activities sequence referred to as, “Ranges To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby.”
In 1997, Sheryl Swoopes turned the primary participant to be signed to play within the WNBA, and in 2000, she gained her fourth WNBA Championship with the Houston Comets. In 2011, Swoopes was acknowledged as one of many 15 best gamers in WNBA historical past, and in 2016, she was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame.
Quick ahead to 2024, and Swoopes continues to trail-blaze in girls’s sports activities; this time within the podcasting house. Swoopes and long-time sports activities journalist Terrika Foster-Brasby have joined iHeartMedia’s Ladies’s Sports activities Audio Community because the co-headliners of the media platform’s latest girls’s sports activities sequence referred to as, Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby.
Ranges To This goals to characteristic actual conversations – primarily with girls – about what it takes to excel on the highest stage of their respective fields. As soon as per week, Swoopes and Foster-Brasby will focus on the onerous work and obstacles that come together with being on the prime of their sport, and can dive into their private highs and lows. The inaugural episode of the present centered on the subject of motherhood, discussing being pregnant, stepmotherhood, and Swoopes’ journey as a mom and knowledgeable feminine athlete.
“For me, it is essential that folks get to see a special aspect of me. I feel a whole lot of occasions when individuals take a look at skilled athletes or film stars or celebrities, they do not assume we’re human,” stated Swoopes. “My hope is that when individuals tune in and so they pay attention, they’ll join. They will join with myself, they’ll join with Terrika.”
iHeartMedia Continues To Make investments In Ladies’s Sports activities
Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby is a part of the newly shaped Women’s Sports Audio Network (WSAN), which is the first-ever audio platform completely devoted to girls’s sports activities. Earlier this yr, iHeartMedia and Deep Blue Sports activities + Leisure shaped a strategic partnership to create WSAN with the objective of leveraging the iHeartMedia community to scale girls’s sports activities protection throughout broadcast radio, podcasts, streaming and occasions. The dedication to girls’s sports activities is a part of iHeartMedia’s technique to each capitalize on and support the expansion of ladies’s sports activities. Different exhibits within the WSAN embrace Good Game with Sarah Spain and In Case You Missed It with Khristina Williams.
IHeartMedia’s funding in girls’s sports activities comes at a time when the recognition of ladies’s sports activities is at an all-time excessive. In keeping with Deloitte, elite girls’s sports activities are presently anticipated to turn into a $1 billion industry in 2024, representing a 300% enhance in simply three years.
“It is clever to spend money on girls’s sports activities as a result of it is simply fairly naturally what any good enterprise individual would do,” stated Foster-Brasby. “You wish to enchantment to what’s fashionable, however you additionally wish to simply spend money on people which can be actually doing wonderful issues? Nobody’s doing extra wonderful issues proper now than girls athletes.”
To date, Capital One, e.l.f Cosmetics, and e.l.f SKIN have all been introduced as monetary sponsors of the Ladies’s Sports activities Audio Community.
Closing The Gender Hole In Sports activities Protection
Terrika Foster-Brasby has been masking girls’s sports activities for over a decade. Finest referred to as the co-host and co-creator of ESPN’s WNBA present Across the Rim, Foster-Brasby has labored to supply protection, particularly of ladies’s basketball, even earlier than mainstream media acknowledged leagues just like the WNBA as newsworthy.
For many years, girls’s sports activities have acquired simply 4% of complete sports activities media protection. Final yr, a brand new study performed by The Collective at Wasserman revealed that the share of complete girls’s sports activities media protection has grown to fifteen% – nevertheless, conventional and linear media nonetheless stays at simply 5%.
“From a media perspective, the protection remains to be unbalanced, the funding remains to be unequal,” stated Foster-Brasby. “I feel that with girls’s sports activities, you need to be prepared to take that probability and take that danger. As a result of as we’re seeing right here most just lately, that return on funding is completely occurring.”
Foster-Brasby and Swoopes hope that Ranges To This will assist fill in a few of the gender gaps that exist in sports activities media protection.
“We giggle, we cry, we curse, we share tears, we joke. It is a protected house, and a great house for anybody who’s in search of actual conversations,” stated Swoopes.
New episodes of Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby are launched by iHeartPodcasts and the iHeartRadio app each Thursday.
