Sports columnist for USA Today and senior Olympics reporter Christine Brennan gave her keynote address for this year’s annual Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium on March 25. Hosted by the University of Idaho’s school of Journalism and Mass Media, the event was held in the Pitman Center.
This year’s symposium focused on the increasing prominence of women’s sports and the demand for media coverage in response.
Topics included the importance of encouraging girls to be involved in athletics during childhood, how Title IX changed collegiate sports, the rise of basketball star Caitlin Clark and the treatment of transgender female athletes.
As she recounts, when Brennan was a child, women didn’t play sports. Some of this came from outright bans such as in the Olympic 800-meter race, which was deemed unsuitable for women based on false reports from 1928 of them fainting during the race. The other limitation was the lack of female role models in sports, not just in the games, but also on the sidelines and media coverage.
Brennan was able to develop a successful career as a woman in sports thanks to her parents’ support, which at the time was rare. Today, women are encouraged to be involved more than ever thanks to the opportunities athletics-based scholarships and Title IX protections provide.
“[Title IX] is the most important law in our country over the last 53 years,” said Brennan. Title IX was signed into law in 1972, making it illegal to discriminate based on sex in educational institutes which receive federal funding.
Prior to Title IX, 1 in 27 women were in athletics. Now, 1 in 2 women participate, according to Brennan. “All of the women who will be running the country are not going anywhere now that Title IX exists.”
Further discussed were the benefits of athletics in child development, such as teaching sportsmanship, teamwork and overcoming challenges. This is reflected through the statistic that 94% of women who hold C-suite or executive positions played sports and 52% played at the collegiate level, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation.
Women who go on to be professional athletes are proving their worth, too. During the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, women won more than half of Team USA’s medals, responsible for 67 out of 126.
“Why are we seeing these things?” Brennan said. “Because girls who were told no are now being told yes.”
An athlete who is impossible to ignore in this conversation is basketball star Catlin Clark. Clark, who emerged into the spotlight just two years ago during 2023 March Madness, is the subject of Brennan’s upcoming book on the modern revolution occurring in women’s sports. Clark is a phenomenal athlete and inspiration on and off the court; however, her excellence came at a pivotal turning point in women’s sports.
In a private interview, Brennan told The Argonaut that ESPN did not broadcast the first round of the women’s NCAA basketball tournament until 2020, and the women’s teams could not use the March Madness branding until 2022, despite being used for the men’s teams since 1982.
Additionally, collegiate athletes have only had the rights to their name, image and likeness necessary to form a brand and accept sponsorship since 2021. According to Brennan, Clark was able to make an estimated $3 million while playing for Iowa State from NIL deals.
Maddie Duplessie, a UI Public Relations and Exercise, Sport and Health Science student who introduced Brennan at the keynote, spoke on the recent dramatic increase in media coverage of women’s sports. In just five years, coverage increased three-fold from 5% in 2019 to 15% in 2024. This statistic is expected to reach 20% of total coverage by the end of 2025.
Clark’s spotlight and associated viewership of women’s basketball is beneficial to many other players who also get the opportunity to show their remarkable skills. While she may have been the first, other collegiate athletes such as JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers have captured the spotlight for themselves and have continued to increase NCAA women’s basketball viewership even after Clark moved to the WNBA.
However, media coverage of women’s sports is still lacking. The U.S. Women’s National Basketball Team is being discussed as the most dominant sports team in history amidst their eight-gold medal streak following the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. Their unprecedented success, however, went underreported.
At the open forum which followed the address, Brennan responded to a series of questions regarding transgender athletes. “Get rid of the hate,” she said.
In March 2022, American swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA Division 1 National Championship. In response, World Athletics and World Aquatics, the governing bodies of track and field and aquatic sports respectively, banned all trans-female athletes who had gone through male puberty from competing.
The decision by World Athletics was made with doctor and panel consultation, but is considered discriminatory by trans rights advocates. An alternative plan by World Aquatics was to create an open category which allowed trans athletes. This failed partly due to a lack of high-level trans swimmers, which received zero registrations, but also because of the classification of trans athletes as “other,” according to Brennan.
Brennan emphasized that women’s athletics have made many advances since the implementation of Title IX and the rise of individual athletes, particularly in basketball. However, female athletes still receive fewer sponsorships, lower pay and less coverage by the media. Additionally, women’s sports, as Brennan acknowledged, still exist under specified categories, as is the case with the WNBA versus NBA. The fight for equality is still ongoing, but Brennan and many others like her are not going to settle for anything less.
Joshua Reisenfeld can be reached at arg-news@uidaho.edu.