The rising recognition of girls’s sports activities is altering the sport of sports activities amenities. With latest sold-out stadiums and document rankings, the numbers converse for themselves: demand is rising, and so is the necessity for amenities that assist the extent of competitors and rising fandom related to ladies’s sports activities.
Girls taking part in sports activities at an elite degree shouldn’t be new; what has modified is the surge in fandom for feminine athletics. For the primary time ever in 2024, the NCAA Girls’s Basketball Nationwide Championship recreation drew extra viewers than the boys’s – and by no small margin. Whereas the boys’s recreation obtained 14.8 million viewers, 24 million tuned in to observe the South Carolina Gamecocks defeat the College of Iowa Hawkeyes. This rising viewers is driving the necessity for modernized amenities designed to reinforce each the participant and fan expertise.
Document-breaking viewership and the ability of the feminine fan
Dale Koger, vp of PCL’s sports activities division, has seen this surge in recognition firsthand.
“There was an enormous rise in viewership of girls’s sports activities previously few years,” says Koger. “Followers are in search of video games, and we’re seeing a stronger effort to advertise ladies’s sporting occasions from the media and the workforce and venue stakeholders.”
Whereas each women and men watch ladies’s sports activities, this rise in viewership can largely be attributed to feminine followers. Extra ladies than ever are watching sports activities, because of actions just like the “Caitlin Clark Impact.” Arguably one of the crucial well-known feminine athletes of all time, Clark was a record-breaking basketball star on the College of Iowa earlier than being picked up by the Indiana Fever within the 2024 WNBA Draft. A lot of the feminine fandom who’ve been loyally following Clark achieve this as a result of they relate to her. No, there aren’t hundreds of thousands of once-in-generation basketball gamers on the market, however there are hundreds of thousands of girls who resonate with Clark’s symbolism of resilience and breaking boundaries.
These followers are demonstrating their shopping for energy by pushing for equal protection and higher amenities, and venue and workforce house owners are taking discover by constructing or renovating amenities particularly for feminine athletes and followers.
Tiffany Whipple, a PCL senior challenge supervisor with intensive expertise in constructing and renovating sports activities amenities, has seen the affect of feminine followers firsthand. “Extra ladies than ever are shopping for tickets,” says Whipple. “They’re going to video games, supporting their favourite groups, and shopping for meals and merchandise. Staff and venue house owners are recognizing this and are constructing and renovating amenities that serve feminine followers in methods they haven’t previously.”
This contains numerous and better-quality meals choices and merchandise that’s fashionable, aesthetically interesting, and out there in varied shapes, sizes and types. The “shrink it and pink it” strategy is now not possible – feminine followers need to attend video games and symbolize the sports activities and gamers they assist with gear and facilities that helps their type of fandom.
“The expansion of girls’s sports activities is a transformative motion, pushed by athletes who use their platforms to champion causes larger than themselves, like gender equality and psychological well being consciousness,” says Ally Forster, a challenge supervisor with PCL who has labored on a number of sports activities amenities. “These ladies are usually not solely excelling of their sports activities, however they’re additionally main with objective and driving viewership to encourage the subsequent technology of younger women and aspiring followers.”
Constructing higher areas for feminine athletes
Along with new and upgraded stadiums, there’s a important surge in skilled groups constructing follow and coaching amenities particularly for his or her feminine athletes. These amenities are incorporating wellness areas, childcare areas and facilities tailor-made to the wants of feminine athletes. Developments in sports activities science are being built-in, providing bodily remedy and power coaching that assist new analysis targeted on ladies’s our bodies.
A 2021 examine from Northumbria College highlighted that from 2016 to 2021, solely 6% of printed sport and train research targeted on feminine athletes, leaving a big info hole. As researchers work to handle this disparity, workforce house owners and supporters are pushing for higher coaching and remedy amenities for ladies.
Equally, PCL constructed a non permanent follow and coaching facility for the San Diego Wave whereas the workforce seems for a website to construct a everlasting facility. The ability contains health and coaching areas, a locker room, a participant’s lounge, a movie room and coaches’ places of work. Amenities like this are incorporating female-driven sports activities medication care by specializing in anatomical, hormonal, dietary and physiological elements distinctive to ladies in sports activities.
Different tasks are at present underway or in growth, with a number of groups asserting the development of recent follow and coaching amenities. In accordance with Sports activities Enterprise Journal, new or renovated follow and coaching amenities have been accomplished for the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League’s Angel Metropolis, and the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries and Phoenix Mercury. Different groups are establishing or have introduced plans to construct new amenities, together with the NWSL’s Bay FC, the WNBA’s Chicago Sky, and a shared facility for the NWSL’s Portland Thorns and the yet-to-be-named WNBA Portland growth workforce. All of those amenities are being designed and constructed with the wants of feminine athletes in thoughts.
Danielle “Danny” Colaprico, a midfielder for the NSWL’s Houston Sprint, has witnessed this surge in recognition all through her profession, having performed skilled soccer for a decade.
“Early in my profession, I felt like we didn’t have the sources we would have liked to carry out on the sphere. We didn’t have the amenities to care for our our bodies and guarantee we have been totally ready for a recreation,” says Colaprico. She explains that throughout the starting of her profession, she and her teammates typically needed to share fields with skilled males’s groups and even school groups and steadily lacked entry to personal locker rooms. Whereas Colaprico acknowledges that the amenities out there to NWSL gamers have improved exponentially, she is wanting ahead to additional developments.
“Followers need to see us at our greatest, and we are able to’t at all times be at our greatest if we don’t have the right amenities. What I’m seeing now with groups getting their very own coaching facilities and designated areas is so necessary and such an enchancment.”
Comply with the cash: The rise of personal funding in ladies’s sports activities
The expansion of development and renovation of stadiums, arenas, follow and coaching amenities, and different areas particularly tailor-made to feminine athletes is being supported by personal buyers that weren’t beforehand engaged in ladies’s sports activities. This has contributed to the valuations {of professional} workforce to skyrocket.
In 2023, personal fairness agency Sixth Road invested $53 million to ascertain Bay FC, an NWSL franchise workforce within the San Francisco Bay Space. Simply two years later in early 2025, the NWSL introduced a franchise growth in Denver with a $110 million funding from IMA Monetary Group. That is the very best charge ever paid solely for a ladies’s growth workforce, throughout any sport. The funding is already paying off, with hundreds of followers buying tickets to the workforce’s inaugural season inside weeks of the growth announcement. The group of buyers have introduced plans to construct a stadium and a coaching facility for the brand new workforce.
The WNBA can also be experiencing a big improve in franchise valuations. In 2023, the Golden State Valkyries have been established with an funding workforce paying $50 million for the workforce. Only a yr later, the league introduced a franchise growth in Toronto, with Kilmer Sports activities Ventures paying $115 million for the Toronto Tempo and a brand new follow facility. In early 2025, Serena Williams, one of many world’s most profitable athletes, joined the Tempo possession workforce.
“The expansion potential for ladies’s sports activities over the subsequent decade is super,” says Koger. “We’re solely seeing the start of this development.”
These investments are being incentivized by confirmed information displaying their profitability. In October 2024, AT&T, Capital One, Cisco and Deloitte introduced the institution of the Athena Pledge, a platform devoted to investing in ladies’s sports activities. The platform shares information and funding success tales that spotlight the monetary advantages of supporting ladies’s sports activities.
Feminine buyers are a serious a part of the driving pressure financing groups and amenities in skilled ladies’s sports activities. The Monarch Collective, based in 2023 by two feminine enterprise capitalists, focuses solely on investing in skilled ladies’s groups. They’ve to date invested within the NWSL’s San Diego Wave, Angel Metropolis FC and the franchise growth set to debut in Boston in 2026.
“As a former aggressive athlete, I’ve skilled firsthand the challenges of trailblazing a path in an area that lacked alternative and correct funding,” says Forster. “Investing in these new amenities is about extra than simply creating equal alternatives; it’s about constructing areas the place ladies can thrive, compete on the highest ranges, and have the sources and assist they should break boundaries and redefine what’s doable.”
With elevated funding and rising demand, the ladies’s sports activities business is poised for continued growth and monetary success.
Kicking off a brand new period for ladies’s sports activities
Because the panorama of girls’s sports activities continues to evolve, the funding in fashionable amenities and the surge in devoted fanbases highlights this transformative period. PCL Building excels in sports activities facility development and is devoted to advancing ladies’s sports activities by constructing world-class amenities for world-class athletes. The dedication to constructing state-of-the-art venues and coaching facilities not solely enhances the expertise for athletes and followers alike but in addition signifies a broader recognition of the worth and potential of girls’s sports activities. With rising viewership, substantial personal investments and a rising neighborhood of passionate supporters, the way forward for ladies’s sports activities and the amenities they follow and play in, is brighter than ever and PCL is wanting ahead to assist construct it.
