A labor of love: How fans of women’s sports navigate streaming subscriptions and slow changes in coverage

Extensive scholarship has documented women’s sports coverage and its slow growth in visibility across televised sportscasts, print, and online news. Relatively little research has considered women’s sports audiences and their ability access women’s sports coverage. Through interviews with 19 self-identified fans of women’s sports (FoWS) in the U.S., this study explores FoWS’s perceptions of current patterns in coverage, their practices for finding it, and their interpretations of those practices. The interviews indicate that extensive “work” is required of FoWS should they want to find live sportscasts of their favorite teams. However, the use of social media networks to encounter specialized, grassroots outlets’ reporting has made accessing women’s sports news easier for some. This quest for access is constrained by media availability, resulting in a form of fan labor that is inherently aspirational.