WNBA Legend Sheryl Swoopes And Sports activities Journalist Terrika Foster-Brasby To Headline New Girls’s Sports activities Present From iHeartMedia

In 1997, Sheryl Swoopes turned the primary participant to be signed to play within the WNBA, and in 2000, she received 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 ladies’s sports activities; this time within the podcasting area. Swoopes and long-time sports activities journalist Terrika Foster-Brasby have joined iHeartMedia’s Girls’s Sports activities Audio Community because the co-headliners of the media platform’s latest ladies’s sports activities sequence known as, Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby.

Ranges To This goals to function actual conversations – primarily with ladies – about what it takes to excel on the highest degree of their respective fields. As soon as per week, Swoopes and Foster-Brasby will talk about the exhausting work and obstacles that come together with being on the high of their recreation, 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 an expert feminine athlete.

“For me, it is essential that folks get to see a distinct aspect of me. I believe lots of occasions when individuals take a look at skilled athletes or film stars or celebrities, they do not assume we’re human,” mentioned Swoopes. “My hope is that when individuals tune in they usually pay attention, they will join. They’ll join with myself, they will join with Terrika.”

iHeartMedia Continues To Make investments In Girls’s Sports activities

Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby is a part of the newly fashioned Women’s Sports Audio Network (WSAN), which is the first-ever audio platform solely devoted to ladies’s sports activities. Earlier this yr, iHeartMedia and Deep Blue Sports activities + Leisure fashioned a strategic partnership to create WSAN with the purpose of leveraging the iHeartMedia community to scale ladies’s sports activities protection throughout broadcast radio, podcasts, streaming and occasions. The dedication to ladies’s sports activities is a part of iHeartMedia’s technique to each capitalize on and support the expansion of girls’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 ladies’s sports activities comes at a time when the recognition of girls’s sports activities is at an all-time excessive. Based on Deloitte, elite ladies’s sports activities are presently anticipated to develop into a $1 billion industry in 2024, representing a 300% enhance in simply three years.

“It is sensible to spend money on ladies’s sports activities as a result of it is simply fairly naturally what any good enterprise particular person would do,” mentioned Foster-Brasby. “You need to enchantment to what’s common, however you additionally need to simply spend money on people which are actually doing wonderful issues? Nobody’s doing extra wonderful issues proper now than ladies athletes.”

To this point, Capital One, e.l.f Cosmetics, and e.l.f SKIN have all been introduced as monetary sponsors of the Girls’s Sports activities Audio Community.

Closing The Gender Hole In Sports activities Protection

Terrika Foster-Brasby has been protecting ladies’s sports activities for over a decade. Finest generally known as the co-host and co-creator of ESPN’s WNBA present Across the Rim, Foster-Brasby has labored to offer protection, particularly of girls’s basketball, even earlier than mainstream media acknowledged leagues just like the WNBA as newsworthy.

For many years, ladies’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 proportion of complete ladies’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,” mentioned Foster-Brasby. “I believe that with ladies’s sports activities, you must be keen to take that probability and take that threat. As a result of as we’re seeing right here most not too long ago, 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 area, and area for anybody who’s in search of actual conversations,” mentioned Swoopes.

New episodes of Levels To This with Sheryl Swoopes and Terrika Foster-Brasby are launched by iHeartPodcasts and the iHeartRadio app each Thursday.