Whoopi Goldberg Announces She’s Launching A Women’s Sports Network

Hope it's not just a sports version of The View. Now, the conversation surrounding the attention paid to women's sports is nothing new. The largest women's sports leagues in America, like women's soccer and the WNBA, get a fraction of the viewership and bring in a fraction of the money that their male counterparts do. The gap narrowed in the WNBA this year thanks to a stellar rookie class highlighted by superstar Caitlin Clark and her college rival Angel Reese. But even there, the drop in viewership when Clark's Indiana Fever was eliminated from the playoffs was substantial, showing that a lot of the new interest is player-driven and that there's still work to do to build up interest in the WNBA itself. And there's also the issue of player pay, which was a major talking point a few years ago when the US Women's National Soccer Team won the World Cup back in 2019, and many began calling for women to be paid the same men in sports. Of course that doesn't take into account the money the sports bring in. The WNBA is heavily subsidized by the NBA, and the women's soccer team doesn't bring in near as much money as the men's team. So critics of the "equal pay" movement point to simply economics while also pointing out that women's players are paid a higher percentage of revenue than men: They're just being paid from a much smaller pool to begin with. Yet sports networks like ESPN have to try to find the line between showing sports that don't bring in as many viewers for the sake of fairness versus prioritizing viewership (and therefore revenue). Well, luckily for all of us, Whoopi Goldberg is here to save the day. Ok, stop laughing. The host of The View announced during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that she's launching a global women's sports network called AWSN, or All-Women's Sports Network: "I'm launching the first global women's sports channel called AWSN. It'll be the home for live women's sports from around the world. Everything from soccer, basketball, tennis, cricket, curling, you name it. If a woman is playing it, we're showing it." Gotta admit, I've really been searching for somewhere to watch women's cricket lately. Thankful that Whoopi has me covered there. Whoopi says her motivation for starting the network is wanting to play sports herself growing up: "I wanted to do this because ever since I was a little kid I always wanted to play sports. And my brother could play, you know he played baseball, he played softball, he played basketball, he played everything. And they would say, 'Oh, hi little girl.' And it always pissed me off.  So for years I've been talking to people and saying, 'Wouldn't it be great if we could go around the world, start getting young athletes in high school so that we can grow with them.' We can grow up with them. We can have baseball cards...with our favorite young athlete, because I feel like that will help us show that athletics, when they're done brilliantly, doesn't matter who's doing it. And we don't really have that relationship to women's sports, so I said I would like to do this." The network has already launched in Asia, and says that she has a "big announcement" about the US market coming next week. Who's excited to tune in? https://twitter.com/FallonTonight/status/1854387239968494044