Only a few years ago, the Women’s National Football Conference debuted, bringing full-contact women’s football to the masses. As the sport has grown in popularity, the league has continued to expand.

New, multi-year sponsorship agreements with Adidas, Riddell, and Vyre Network promise to continue the rise of one of the fastest-growing athletic competitions in the country while providing the athletes with the most up-to-date protective equipment.

“The structure of sports is changing, the next generation, the next two generations of girls, and frankly, boys are going to consume sports differently than we did,” said founder and CEO of the WNFC, Odessa Jenkins, in a telephone interview with The Dallas Express. “They’re gonna participate in sports in a different way. So I think when there’s a federal day of recognition and acknowledgement like the National Girls and Women in Sports Day (NGWSD), it really does bring attention to those kinds of changes in the growth in sports.”

NGWSD was observed this year on February 2.

Historically, the first U.S. professional women’s league was the Ladies Professional Golf Association, founded in 1950. But women’s leagues in other sports have taken much longer to be established.

The Women’s National Basketball Association was formed in 1996, while professional women’s leagues for sports like soccer and hockey only began in the last decade.

Despite nearly zero major-media coverage of women’s professional sports, viewership has continued to grow by leaps and bounds.

In 2020, the Women’s National Soccer League became the first sports team in the nation to resume play after the COVID-19 pandemic. Television viewership was up 500%, NorthJersey.com writer Melanie Anzidei reported. And the increase isn’t just one sport, either.

“You have an audience that is agitating for more coverage of women in sports, and women’s sports — and you have now platforms that are developing that allow those voices to be heard,” said Jane McManus, director of the Center for Sports Communication at Marist College and a former ESPN journalist. “What you have now is, you can see people through social media saying that they are interested in women’s sports.”

Historic sponsorship agreements with some of the major providers of sporting equipment, along with a massive streaming deal agreed to this offseason with Vyre, means that more Americans will have the ability to watch professional women’s tackle football in 2022. Every game will be live-streamed by Vyre and available on numerous platforms, including Roku, Apple TV, and Samsung TV.

With the growth of viewership numbers, recognition has also grown. In 2019, the National Intercollegiate Athletic Association became the first national body to add women’s flag football through a partnership with the NFL.

“We stand on the shoulders of those Titans who are the first to walk into a basketball gym, the first woman to jump into a 10k, or the first woman to jump into a football game and the first woman to decide that she was going to play a contact sport,” Jenkins said. “So I think standing on the shoulders of those Titans and knowing it wasn’t that long ago should also make us all realize that we have a long way to go for these girls in sports and there’s plenty of reason to keep celebrating and promoting.”