It’s 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and Lawlor Events Center is filled with 8,906 University of Nevada, Reno students and Wolf Pack basketball fans as the men’s basketball team snags a win against Wyoming, a conference competitor.
Just a few days before, there was another exciting win, except this time, only 1,344 got to experience seeing the women’s basketball team defeat Wyoming in an overtime thriller, securing their second conference game win of the season.
Nationally, women’s basketball has grown exponentially, especially in the college world, thanks to what many call “the Caitlin Clark effect.” In her collegiate career, former University of Iowa guard Caitlin Clark drew huge crowds, setting attendance records and creating a ripple effect of interest in women’s basketball.
That ripple effect has seemingly not reached Reno.
Besides last season’s 10,689 fans who showed up for the “When I Grow Up” game against Fresno State, where many of the attendees were students from local elementary schools, the average attendance for women’s home games was between 1,200 and 1,500.
The men’s team at Nevada, in comparison, averaged between 7,500 and 11,000 attendees during their 2024–2025 season.
In terms of records, Nevada basketball teams ended their seasons with similar outcomes. Nevada women’s basketball ended their 2024–2025 season going 6–12 in conference play, while the Nevada men’s basketball ended their 2024–2025 season going 8–12 in conference play. Despite similar records, the teams saw a vastly different number of fans.“The girls play just as hard, they just don’t seem to be as celebrated,” Whitney Welker, a sophomore cheerleader at Nevada, said.
Welker, who attends nearly all sporting events at Nevada, gets to see and feel the difference in every event’s atmosphere.
“Overall, the attendance is obviously less, but it’s also the energy that’s brought to [the games],” Welker said.
With similar records between the teams proving the women’s performance isn’t less than the men’s, what other factors could lead to a lack of attendance?
Nevada Sagebrush Sports Editor, James Wolfgang Perez, suggests it could be caused by game schedules.
“In comparison with the men’s team, [who] usually get the prime time slots,” Perez said.
These “prime time slots” described by Perez include the typical Tuesday at 7 p.m. or Saturday at 2 p.m.
“Those are the prime times where people are typically available to go to a game, right?” said Perez.
However, Nevada’s Faculty Athletics representative Paul Mitchell, a journalism professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism, disagrees.
“If you’re not coming at 7 p.m. on a Friday, you’re not coming to 7 p.m. on a Thursday, that’s true,” Mitchell said. “Prime time slots” or not, Mitchell doesn’t believe lack of attendance is derived from lack of care, but rather the students’ ability to attend the games in the first place.
“This [Nevada] is an institution where the bulk of our students have to work,” Mitchell said. “Your time is very limited as students who attend this institution. I think that is a huge thing that is overlooked.”
Understanding game schedules and the schedules of students who make up the majority of attendance draws the question of how more fans could be enticed to attend women’s games.
Starting at the university level, teams need to market themselves, whether it be partnerships, sponsorships or even social media fan engagement.
The Nevada men’s basketball team’s official Instagram, @nevadahoops, has over 24,000 followers. The Nevada women’s basketball team’s official Instagram, @nevadawbb, has just over 6,000 followers.
Despite the gap in follower count, their content is roughly the same, likely due to Nevada Athletics providing each team with professional photos and video.
If the content being produced is the same, but the engagement with the women’s team is still drastically lower, what more can the university do to bring attention to the team?
“What the university is going to have to do is, they’re going to have to get creative,” Mitchell said.
If a connection between the women’s basketball team and fans can be built before the season, it could help increase the number of purchased season tickets, almost guaranteeing consistent attendance.
This 2025–2026 season, 4,368 people hold season tickets for men’s basketball games, but only 528 people are season ticket holders for women’s basketball. Assuming that each season ticket holder attended the home opener game for each team, a majority of the games’ attendance was made up by season ticket holders.
Revenue is important to any media company, but staying behind now may do harm in the future. Perez, as sports editor of a student newspaper and a student studying sports journalism, often recognizes trends that make covering typically unnoticed sports now a long-term investment.
“If you watch where the money is going, there’s a greater investment going into watching, attending and reporting on women’s basketball, especially at the professional level,” Perez said. “So if you want to take advantage of that, you should start covering it at the college level,”
“I’d say it’s always been important to cover women’s sports ,” Perez said. “We [sports reporters for The Nevada Sagebrush] treat athletes with the same amount of respect across the board.”
“When it comes to the media side, it’s more because they know what gets clicks and what doesn’t,” Perez said. “So why would you want to spend labor [on] something that will get less clicks?”
As a woman and as assistant sports editor of The Nevada Sagebrush, I have also witnessed the profound difference in attitude towards women’s sports.
My first assignment as a sports writer for The Nevada Sagebrush was coverage of a women’s basketball home opener against Bushnell, a game they won 70–48. I was thrilled to be able to provide coverage on this game as both a former athlete and female journalist.
However, this excitement didn’t seem to be shared. As I also provided coverage for men’s basketball, the contrast became noticeable. The engagement on my stories on men’s basketball was drastically higher, giving me a firsthand look at the unequal interest given to coverage of a game depending on what gender is competing.
Nevada men’s basketball is also able to continue their growth in popularity as a new arena gets built at the Grand Sierra Resort. As money gets poured into this project, it is important to note that this arena will only be used for the men’s basketball team, once again furthering the gap in opportunities between teams to gather a crowd.
