Last week, Complex Sports created a post declaring we'd entered "the worst part of the sports calendar." The caption read: "Now that the World Cup is over all we got is baseball for a couple weeks."I read it twice. Then I looked at the graphic. Grammar aside, it is absurd. Their chart mapped out a full-year sports calendar that included the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, PGA, NASCAR, MLS, college football and college basketball. The only women's league included was the WNBA.
That's a choice. Think about that. This wasn't posted in 2006, or 2016, it was posted in 2026. No NWSL. No PWHL. No LPGA. No WTA. No AUSL. No WLL. No mention of the dozens of women's college sports drawing record attendance. No acknowledgment of one of the fastest-growing sectors in all of sports.
That's what stopped me. Not because it was a sloppy social post, but because a major sports media company could publish it, and apparently no one thought anything was missing. The sports world ignored women's sports for decades. The industry decided those stories weren't worth telling, the games weren't worth airing, and that fans wouldn't watch or show up. They were wrong.
Generations of misguided beliefs don't disappear overnight. A few years of ratings growth don't erase generations of bias. This isn't a one-off of a post, it's a fundamental lack of respect.
For decades, women's sports received somewhere between 3% and 5% of the total coverage on highlight shows like SportsCenter. Even today, a tiny fraction of athletes receive the overwhelming majority of the attention. That means generations of extraordinary players, teams, rivalries, stories, and defining moments remain largely unknown.
Some conventional media athletes don't want women's sports in the club. It's the sports pages version of the culture war: No girls allowed. Complex Sports knows there are women's leagues. Not including them is a choice. That graphic didn't just leave women's sports off the calendar. It exposed how much of the sports world still doesn't think women's sports matter.
