Women’s Rugby Media Coverage

While rugby has grown quite a bit in media coverage over the last few years, coverage of Women’s Rugby in general is still behind by leaps and bounds. A few nations are taking this insult to heart and are working to organize a call for more media for women’s rugby all around.

The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation is campaigning across the pond to see women’s sports given the respect and coverage that it deserves. They are really campaigning across all media outlets they include newspapers, radio, TV and specifically the BBC. While this might be a campaign across the pond, we can take an example of their example and start a campaign ourselves! Thanks to the Letchworth Girls’ Rugby blog for posting about this and bringing this to attention!

Also I blogged about “Match of the Day” where a group of ruggers are asking for a daily show on rugby featuring highlights, clips and dialogue etc. Check out the Match of the Day blog post I wrote for more information on this topic.

USA Rugby has been increasing their media coverage and the recent partnership with ESPN360.com does seem promising…

ESPN Increases its Coverage of USA Rugby

BOULDER, Colo. – Expanding upon its existing relationship with USA Rugby, in which ESPNU would air selected Men’s National Team matches, ESPN Inc., has officially signed on to broaden its coverage to ESPN Classic and its live broadband sports network ESPN360.com.

“This is a great opportunity for USA Rugby to build a partnership with ESPN, the world’s leader in sports programming. Our goal at USA Rugby is to Inspire America to fall in love with Rugby, and our new partnership with ESPN will certainly play a big part in achieving this goal.” USA Rugby’s VP of Business Development David Voth said. For the rest of the article click here.

An article on Wes Clark’s Rugby Reader’s Review site in 1998 from an interview with Jack Clark highlights the fact that even in 1998 we knew that to keep rugby happening in the US we would have to get on television. So while men’s rugby is accessible through many television networks and online providers, women’s rugby is still struggling to get a foothold. I was partly upset last year when the Women’s Club Championships were broadcast but the servers crashed, but I was partly excited because this meant that women were logging on across our nation and WE crashed the servers!

There is a demand for rugby in the general media, but there is a demand for Women’s Rugby as well! What can we do to work together to make this happen? Do we need to flood Youtube with women’s rugby videos? I for one just bought a sweet new video camera and will be hopefully posting videos of Your Scrumhalf Connection’s video adventures!