I spent an amazing evening photographing the PWHL Takeover Game at Little Caesars Arena Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026 and I came out of that night even more convinced that the next big growth phase for sports shouldn’t be adding MLB, NFL, NBA, or NHL teams but in strengthening and enhancing women’s sports on the professional, collegiate, and high school levels.
By Detroit standards, it was a smallish crowd for a Takeover Game, only a little over 9,600 fans in the stands. The numbers don’t tell the story though. Looking around, I saw much more of a community of fans than I have ever felt when I went to other professional men’s sporting events.
It hits different, as a male growing up, everything on the television was male collegiate or professional sports. Occasionally there might have been a women’s college basketball game or soccer game but those were few and far between. In Olympic years, everyone went gaga over gymnastics but again, that was short lived.
When I looked around the crowd at Little Caesars, I saw generations of women who never had an athletic outlet they could aspire to and I was the new, younger generation of young girls who now had heroes on the ice that they could relate to.
I remember talking to my mother-in-law about her physical education classes in high school back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. She mentioned how much she loved them and how she wished she could have had a basketball team to play on for girls only like the boys did. We have made some progress and girls high school programs are thriving with new sports constantly being added but the penultimate goal of making a career out of playing sports like young boys and men have still isn’t there.
This is the point where I expect comments to start showing the old, tired misogynistic comments about how women don’t have the athletic talent, and if there was a market, then those avenues would already be in place. Both of those arguments if you can call them that are rooted in the thoughts of less than men who only want to protect their egos in society.
The PWHL needs to expand to show young girls that they matter and that there are opportunities past college and high school. The same goes for the WNBA and the newly formed Women’s Professional Baseball League. These leagues are worthy of our sports dollars, television viewing, and advertising dollars.
Over fifty percent of the people globally are women. In the United States, research suggests that seventy-five percent of all discretionary funds will be controlled by women by the year 2028. Ignoring professional women’s sports not only hurts your daughters, your granddaughters, and the other women in your life, it is just plain bad business sense,