Friday and Saturday Night Lights: Ion Television Reaps the Rewards of Investing in Women’s Sports

Two years ago, executives at Cincinnati-based E.W. Scripps Co. saw a big opportunity for their local TV stations with professional women’s sports. So they made like the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark, took a shot — and scored.

Scripps Co.’s Ion Television network has become a hub for women’s sports on Friday and Saturday nights. It did so just in time to reap the rewards of this year’s miracle season for women’s basketball.

“They certainly look smart right now,” says Daniel Kurnos, a media analyst with Benchmark who covers Scripps Co. “The WNBA has gone from a building league to sold-out stadiums with [star players] Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Cameron Brink.”

Last year, Ion Television began a three-year deal with the WNBA to carry a Friday-night doubleheader of live games from 7 p.m.-midnight ET during the league’s May-to-September regular season. This year, Ion kicked off a multiyear deal with the National Women’s Soccer League for back-to-back regular-season games to air from 7-midnight ET on Saturday nights from March to November. So far in 2024 Ion has carried more WNBA and NWSL games than any of the league’s other TV partners, including ESPN and Amazon Prime Video.

“Any household in America with a TV can get Ion one way or another,” says Brian Lawlor, a Scripps veteran who is now president of Scripps Sports. Female-skewing sports are a perfect fit with Ion’s largely older female audience. The backbone of the network’s lineup is reruns of workhorse network dramas like “Law & Order: SVU,” “Chicago Fire,” “NCIS,” “FBI,” “Blue Bloods” and “Criminal Minds.”

Lawlor emphasized that the push into women’s sports, a big departure for Ion, was done after more than six months of studying programming options for the Ion group. In time it became crystal-clear that there was demand for a “Monday Night Football”-like consistency in the presentation of women’s professional sports. “We saw that it was hard to be a women’s sports fan — you can never find the games,” Lawlor says. “We got ahead of the curve on the momentum that happened this year. We knew we could solve a problem by putting games on every week in the same time period.

The foundation of Ion is its 48 local owned-and-operated stations and 76 affiliates. Because Ion has so many stations across the country, the network is able to tailor each Friday’s game lineup by region to make the most of hometown fandoms. Ion is also available as a free livestreaming channel via Roku and Samsung TV Plus.

Ion’s role in showcasing WNBA games was overlooked amid the bigger news this month of the NBA and WNBA’s eye-popping 11-year, $76 billion rights pacts with ESPN/ABC, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video. But the WNBA’s deal announcement left the door open for the “additional media partners that will further expand the reach and accessibility of WNBA games,” the league stated, in a nod to Ion.

As the 2024 WNBA season passes the halfway mark this seaon, Ion’s faith in the appetite for more women’s sports has been vindicated. Viewership of the WNBA has increased significantly after this year’s NCAA women’s basketball championship put the spotlight on a new generation of megastars — including Clark and Reese, who went straight from the NCAA playoffs into their rookie seasons at the WNBA. The dynamics around women’s basketball this year have sparked comparisons to the fabled 1979 NBA season when generationally talented star players Magic Johnson and Larry Bird brought their fierce college rivalry into the pros.

“We’re definitely seeing a lot more brands calling, asking how to get into the games,” Lawlor says. “It’s clearly getting a much deeper commitment from brands who are moving money to invest in women’s sports.”

And Lawlor is confident the WNBA won’t bail on Ion when their pact ends after the 2025 season. This year the company has upgraded its studio facilities for the pregame show that leads into the tipoff.

“We bring a lot of value to the WNBA to have a franchise night where the whole country can see it,” Lawlor says.

(Pictured: Ion Pre-Game Show hosts Larry Smith and analysts Meghan McKeown and Autumn Johnson)