South Carolina women's basketball notebook: Traveling with the Gamecocks and breaking down the WNBA's $2.2 billion rights deal

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Summer practice is well underway, but that hasn’t stopped the Gamecocks from piling up the frequent flyer miles recently. 

Last week Ashlyn Watkins was in Los Angeles for the “Women’s Sports Rising” Roundtable at the Variety Sports and Entertainment Summit.

Bree Hall was also in Los Angeles to shoot a commercial for SKIMS. Then she went to Dallas for the SEC Student-Athlete Leadership Council Meetings.

Joyce Edwards was also in Los Angeles for a week. She was honored for being named the Gatorade National Player of the Year.

Chloe Kitts has two more summer camps scheduled. The first is on August 3 in Puyallup, WA, and the other is a day later in Milwaukie, OR. That’s Tacoma and Portland for those of us who have never been to the Pacific Northwest. Kitts lived in Puyallup before moving to Florida. 

Dawn Staley was in Las Vegas for the exhibition between the US Men’s national team and Canada on July 10, then she went to Los Angeles for the ESPYS. She was back in Las Vegas during WNBA All-Star Weekend last week and then flew to Chicago where she, Lisa Boyer, Winston Gandy, and Kamilla Cardoso watched top prospects play, including Aaliyah Chavez.

Jazzy Davidson, the third-ranked recruit in the 2025 class, has trimmed her list of finalists to six. She eliminated South Carolina and Tennessee. Her remaining contenders are UCLA, Duke, TCU, Texas, Southern Cal, and UConn. 

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It has been a big couple of weeks for A’ja Wilson. She and Jayson Tatum were announced as the cover athletes for NBA 2K25, and then she was the subject of the cover story of Marie Claire’s Women In Sports issue. She also continues to be the best player in the world as she prepares for the Olympics.

The women’s national team lost its first exhibition to the WNBA All-Stars last weekend. They get one more tuneup on Tuesday, July 23 against Germany in London. The game tips off at 3:00 pm ET and will be televised on FS1. Then it’s on to Paris for the Olympics.

Women’s basketball at the Olympics tips off on July 28. The first games for USA and Canada are on July 29. Laeticia Amihere is making her second Olympic appearance for Canada.

Ahead of the All-Star Game news broke that as part of the new NBA rights deal the WNBA would get $2.2 billion over 11 years, with a look-in in three years to revisit the deal. The expected annual payout of more than $200 million is nearly six times the current annual payout. 

The deal is a huge boost for the league, but it also has its detractors. The valuation was determined by the NBA, not the WNBA, and not allowed to go to the open market. The length also means that if the league continues to grow it is already locked into a fairly cheap deal.

And then there’s the college basketball angle. The NCAA sold women’s basketball rights for a paltry $65 million. NCAA Tournament ratings dwarf WNBA ratings (the championship game drew just under 19 million viewers while last season’s clinching WNBA Finals game drew under 1 million), and even though WNBA ratings have surged this season, the highest-rated game was only 2.3 million (albeit for a regular season game). 

It isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison: the NCAA is only selling the tournament while the NBA is selling far more inventory with the regular season and playoffs. However, the NCAA has perpetually devalued the women’s tournament and appears to have massively undersold women’s basketball again.

Remember that the next time the NCAA says it doesn’t have enough money for women’s basketball.

(Credit to Sports Media Watch for compiling much of this data.)

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