Raising the Game: A Women’s Sports Podcast

The Protect College Sports Act just cleared the Senate, and the fine print may hand universities a way around Title IX. The bill calls revenue sharing "compensation" rather than athletic benefits, and that one word swap could let schools sidestep the equal-opportunity obligations Title IX was written to enforce. The programs that get cut first are the ones that don't generate revenue...

WNBA playoffs are here, and game one already told us something uncomfortable about the Minnesota Lynx. The one seed dropped its opener to the New York Liberty 91-75, and Breanna Stewart looked unguardable doing it. Meanwhile the PWHL announced the first women's professional hockey all-star game in history, the NWSL playoff picture came down to a tiebreak system almost nobody has read, and the...

The WNBA regular season ends Thursday and the playoff bracket from the four seed down is still completely unsettled, with six teams able to finish almost anywhere. Minnesota, Golden State and Las Vegas have the top three locked, but Atlanta, Indiana, New York, Washington and Dallas are all bunched together with two games left, and four of those teams are playing each other to close the season. We...

Team USA won its fifth straight FIBA Women's World Cup gold in Berlin, and the whole thing turned on one quarter of basketball. France led 45-43 at halftime, shot the lights out from three, and looked like the more consistent team for most of the tournament. Then the U.S. won the third quarter 30-12 and closed it out 97-79. Breanna Stewart took home her second World Cup MVP, the first player e...

This bonus episode is our full conversation with Jeff Goldberg, the Hartford Courant writer who covered UConn women's basketball from 2001 to 2006 and whose books became source material for Apple TV's The Dynasty: UConn Huskies. If you already caught this week's regular episode, this is the same conversation pulled out on its own so you can share it or revisit it without the rest of th...

Women's basketball has been so busy fighting for its future that it never learned to look after its past. That's Jeff Goldberg's line, and it anchors our first-ever RTG interview. Interview starts at 49 minutes. Goldberg covered UConn women's basketball for the Hartford Courant from 2001 to 2006, wrote Bird at the Buzzer and Unrivaled, and is featured as one of the main interviewee...

Angel Reese just set the WNBA's single-game and single-season rebounding records, and the comment section already has its rebuttal loaded: they're all "me-bounds." So we ran the numbers. Alex pulled every rebound Reese has this season, stripped out the putbacks off her own miss, and the answer is not what the discourse wants it to be. We walk through the math, the league-average...

The Portland Thorns and Portland Fire just opened a $150 million training facility built for two professional women's teams, and it might be the clearest answer yet to the "nobody watches women's sports" crowd. The Kaiser Permanente Performance Center in Hillsboro, Oregon is 100,000 square feet on a 12-acre campus, and it's the first facility in the world designed to house tw...

The WNBA is in its 30th season, records are falling almost nightly, and the conversation around the league keeps getting uglier. We spend a chunk of this episode on why that is and what could actually fix it. We're back from vacation with two weeks of catching up to do. Caitlin lays out the pattern: the Stephanie White press conference walkout, the Sophie Cunningham and DiJonai Carrington flag...

Women's professional baseball is back after more than 70 years, and the new WPBL is playing its entire first season in Springfield, Illinois. We wanted to know how we got here. This is a history episode with a purpose. Caitlin walks through 160 years of women trying to get on a baseball field, from college teams in the 1860s to a league that finally stuck in 2026, and then we get into how the Wome...

FIFA tried to sell a piece of the World Cup and world football said no. Gianni Infantino's $20 billion plan died in about three days, and the women's game was squarely in the blast radius. Episode 31 walks through the whole timeline: the FIFA Forward Enterprises pitch, UEFA's 55 member associations voting unanimously to boycott, CONCACAF and the Asian Football Confederation following,...

The WNBA All-Star Game just made history: 19,783 fans at Chicago's United Center, the biggest All-Star crowd ever and the first to outdraw the NBA's All-Star Game. Episode 30 covers a packed week in women's sports. All-Star weekend delivered record attendance, a rookie shooting star, and some genuinely messy moments, from invite confusion to a game where nobody wanted to play defense. We also take...

The WNBA is having a leadership crisis, and All-Star Weekend is about to put it under a spotlight. This week we dig into whether Commissioner Cathy Engelbert is the right person to lead the league through its current moment. The reporting is not flattering: Sports Business Journal says Engelbert wasn't going to suspend Alyssa Thomas until NBA commissioner Adam Silver stepped in and pushed her...

Is it still fair to assume the U.S. Women's National Team just wins? This week we dig into how six countries develop their women's soccer talent, and why the American pay-to-play system might be quietly capping the USWNT's ceiling heading into the 2027 World Cup. With men's World Cup fever in the air, we run a full comparison of the development pipelines in the U.S., Spain, Japan, England, Brazil,...

The WNBA's officiating controversy hit a new level this week, and Alex and Caitlin dig into why the Alyssa Thomas–Caitlin Clark incident is really about years of inconsistent officiating, not one bad night. A viral still frame of Alyssa Thomas's hand landing on Caitlin Clark's neck during a loose-ball scramble turned into a media firestorm, complete with a flagrant-two review, a one-ga...

This is The Door Part 2, part of our Trailblazers series — the women's sports history special that picks up where Episode 13 left off, moving into the modern era with six athletes who each forced a renegotiation of the terms the sports world handed them. Timely on two fronts: Venus and Serena Williams are playing Wimbledon doubles together as this drops, and the WNBA is celebrating its 30th annive...

Serena Williams is back in Grand Slam singles for the first time since 2022, and she's doing it at Wimbledon, on the grass, with a wild card and no ranking. At 44, she's entering the draw at its most unpredictable entry point while also teaming up with Venus (who just turned 46) for doubles, where the two have won six Wimbledon titles together. The Queens Club already showed what her prese...

The Men's World Cup is in the U.S., and the NWSL isn't sitting it out — they're turning 1.42 billion soccer fans into a fan acquisition opportunity. With their "Summer of Soccer" initiative, the NWSL is making one of the most intentional marketing plays in women's sports history. Caitlin and Alex dig into the research on who the women's sports fan actually is — the fl...

Hilary Knight's PWHL expansion saga ended with the wildest move of the process: Vegas signed her via an expansion franchise offer and immediately traded her to Detroit for a first-round pick. It was completely legal, it was a long time coming, and it tells you everything about how expansion teams are already thinking about winning before the draft even happens. Episode 23 breaks down both phas...

After a 16-point blowout loss to the Portland Fire, the rest of the WNBA is circling something on the whiteboard: Caitlin Clark's defensive game is a weakness teams are now actively targeting. Alex and Caitlin break down the Fever's recent skid — a viral bench huddle moment, Clark skipping a postgame press conference after the Golden State loss, and Portland's suffocating defensive gam...

Caitlin Clark missed a game this week with a reported back injury, and the Fever's "strategic management" framing — announced less than two hours before tip — raised more questions than it answered. We dig into what it means for her, for the league, and for fans who bought tickets expecting to see her play. Also this week: Montreal Victoire made PWHL history, becoming the first Canad...

The Ottawa Charge pulled off a stunning late comeback to stay alive in the Walter Cup Finals, and the WNBA's new foul-calling emphasis is already reshaping games just days into the season. Episode 20 has a lot going on. Caitlin and Alex recorded this one right after Game 3 wrapped, so the energy is real. They walk through Ottawa's dramatic third-period rally against the Montreal Victoire,...

The PWHL playoffs have been an absolute mess in the best possible way, and the path to the Walter Cup Final is still wide open heading into a postponed Game 5. Ottawa pulled off one of the bigger upsets in PWHL postseason history, eliminating the Boston Fleet in four games despite being outshot 142 to 94 for the series. Meanwhile, the Minnesota-Montreal semifinal has been everything: a triple-over...

The PWHL playoffs are delivering drama on both sides of the bracket, the WNBA's 30th season is officially here, and women's sports infrastructure is growing faster than ever, a lot to unpack this week. Ottawa stole a road win in Boston to even their series 1-1, then headed to a sold-out Canadian Tire Center with a freshly repainted PWHL logo under the ice. Minnesota took game one against t...

The PWHL playoffs are here, and Montreal made a pick that has Frost fans cautiously optimistic. The PWHL wrapped its regular season with Kelly Pannek setting a new single-season points record (33 in 30 games), the league surpassing one million fans for the first time, and Montreal selecting Minnesota as their first-round opponent instead of the weaker Ottawa Charge. We break down why that may have...