Tennis Channel to dedicate Tuesdays to women

Tennis Channel will take the unprecedented television step of devoting one day a week exclusively to women’s competition when it introduces Women’s Day on its T2 channel, beginning Tuesday, June 11. Throughout the year, Tuesdays will feature the best women’s tennis players in the world live on T2, widely available throughout the United States – for free.

Both Tennis Channel and T2 will continue to show top-level men’s and women’s tennis interchangeably Wednesday through Monday, as each network has done since its launch. For the first time, however, fans of WTA women’s professional tennis will have an entire television day devoted to the stars they love. It also will mark the beginning of more free live women’s tennis on American television than ever before.

“Because of the nature of our sport, Tennis Channel has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to celebrating women’s competition,” said Irv Schulman, senior vice president, national sports sales, Sinclair Sports Group. “The list of women who were pioneers in both tennis and athletics is long – Althea Gibson, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, and Venus and Serena Williams, to name a few – and they helped to build the foundation for the recognition of other women’s sports over the years. We’re really excited to further commit to the best women’s tennis players in the world and their fans with a day of matches dedicated exclusively to them on T2 every week, completely free.”

Above: Angelique Kerber. Source: Porsche Tennis Grand Prix.

Tennis is the most gender balanced of all traditionally popular American sports, with men’s and women’s headliners for more than 100 years, and both sexes watching men’s and women’s tennis equally. The average viewership skew for women’s matches on Tennis Channel platforms is a perfectly even 50% between men and women, according to Nielsen 2q23-1q24 live plus same day. Similarly, men’s matches attract a comparable 51% men and 49% women. Throughout the year, on average, men’s matches on Tennis Channel generate a mere 6% larger audience than women’s.

The first match Tennis Channel ever showed was a women’s match featuring American icon Venus Williams in 2003.

Introduced in March 2022, T2 has grown rapidly to reach more than 100-million homes today. Most U.S. households already have access to T2 at no extra cost. Platforms that carry the channel include Amazon’s Freevee, Prime Video and Fire TV, as well as Roku, Fubo, Hulu, YouTube TV, Samsung TV Plus, Vizio Watch Free+ and Plex.

Though Tennis Channel is not planning on it, given the nature of live sports, some exceptions to Women’s Day programming may take place in the case of inclement weather or other unforeseen scheduling demands.

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Source: Tennis.com. Top photo featuring Emma Raducanu courtesy of Porsche Tennis Grand Prix.