March Madness branded Powerade bottles before the sport between the Maryland Terrapins and the South Carolina Gamecocks through the Elite Eight round of the 2023 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament held at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, South Carolina, on March 27, 2023.
Grant Halverson | NCAA Photos | Getty Images
The NCAA Women’s Championship between Iowa and South Carolina set a record on Sunday, drawing 18.7 million viewers on ABC and ESPN.
The sport peaked at 24 million viewers, ESPN said, and was the most-watched NCAA women’s college basketball game since 1992. Viewership jumped 89% from last yr’s women’s championship and 285% from 2022, in line with ESPN.
The championship, which saw Caitlin Clark-led Iowa fall to South Carolina, was the most-watched basketball game, either men’s or women’s and college or skilled, since 2019.
“With a record-setting audience of 18.7 million viewers, Sunday’s Iowa-South Carolina title game was a fitting finale to the most-viewed ever NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament,” said ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro in an announcement. “These exceptional athletes, coaches and teams captured our attention in unprecedented ways and it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain the incredible momentum going.”
The semifinals between Iowa and the University of Connecticut last week also shattered viewership records, peaking at 17 million viewers, in line with ESPN.
The expansion was driven partly by players akin to Clark, who has drawn comparisons to a number of the sport’s best of all time, fueling interest in women’s basketball and attracting recent viewers. Clark, 22, has dominated the court and set several records, luring in additional fans with the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”
The March Madness tournament was the newest in a series of lightning rod moments for ladies’s sports in recent months.
Women’s sports broke records in 2023, with estimates from Deloitte predicting that revenue generated by women’s elite sports could surpass $1 billion this yr — that may be a 300% increase from just three years ago.
Between groundbreaking media deals for ladies’s sports and personal investors and celebrities alike trying to get in, valuations for ladies’s sports have been driven to record levels.
