Meet the South Jersey sportswriter who’s literally written the book on women’s basketball

Howard Megdal has worked tirelessly to even the media coverage between men’s and women’s sports. Today, he’s as close as he’s ever been.

In May, Megdal published his seventh book, Rare Gems: How Four Generations of Women Paved the Way For the WNBA, which includes the influence of Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, the South Jersey native who’ll coach the U.S. women at the Olympics.

Through his lengthy career in reporting, Megdal became familiar with several generations of women’s basketball trailblazers, spanning from before Title IX was passed in 1972 to the present day. It started in the 1960s with Elvera “Peps” Neuman and her Arkansas Gems that barnstormed the U.S., then with Reeve and the Lynx dynasty she built in the 2010s, and continues today with the stars of the modern game like Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers and the Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark.

In the book, Megdal pieces together each of their journeys to show their interconnectedness in advancing women’s basketball.

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“They have all built this thing together,” he writes in the introduction.

“Being able to trace that, connect that, and show people that … gives us an understanding not only of where the WNBA has been but where it is going,” Megdal told The Inquirer.

Still, the author calls the gap in attention and investment between men’s and women’s basketball “self-inflicted,” explaining that the women’s game has been held back only by the reaction to its success.

“What is different … is there has always been a backlash to every bit of progress made in women’s basketball,” Megdal said. “I raise that as an alarm now, as we see real progress being made.”

Megdal, a Cherry Hill native, has been an acclaimed sportswriter for two decades. He wrote for the Hudson (N.Y.) Register Star while attending Bard College, where he graduated in 2002, and since has been published in The New York Times, The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Forbes. He has covered the NBA, NFL, MLS, and Major League Baseball.

“When you start to cover sports, it’s impossible to ignore or miss that there is this enormous gap between how men’s sports and women’s sports were covered,” Megdal said. “At a certain point in my career, a few years in, I had gotten to a point where I believed I could start to change that myself.”

Megdal began pitching more women’s sports stories at the outlets where he freelanced, hoping coverage would grow into an everyday undertaking. That task appeared too tall to achieve on his own.

“To a certain extent, I was building in sand,” Megdal said. “To really make sure that there was long-term, consistent coverage of women’s sports, it was necessary to build infrastructure. That’s where that focus over the past six years has been — not just doing the coverage, but building places where the coverage could exist and grow and live over time.”

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That process began in 2019. Megdal thought women’s sports needed an “amplifier effect” like the one that exists in men’s sports, and he sought to provide it by founding The IX Newsletter. The IX delivers six newsletters per week to its subscribers, providing daily coverage of six women’s sports — soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, hockey, and gymnastics.

“There are good people doing women’s coverage all over, and it’s important not to lose sight of that,” Megdal said.

Why turn attention toward someone else’s coverage? According to Megdal, many outlets don’t properly promote women’s sports, either because of a lack of understanding or a lack of effort. Inevitably, analytics don’t react kindly, which can make it more difficult for future women’s sports stories to see the light of day. Megdal wants to bring more attention to those stories getting lost in the pile.

Jenn Hatfield, a reporter at The Next, the women’s basketball newsroom founded by Megdal in 2020, says Megdal has an “endless capacity” for that work. She noted Megdal’s duties with the Professional Basketball Writers Association, where he serves as the chair of the WNBA chapter and aims to make media policies more inclusive for reporters, as an example.

“[Megdal] is always trying to make the coverage better, even if it means there are more people competing with us,” Hatfield said. “He wants that because it’s ultimately good for everybody.”

Megdal started The Next because of a popular belief, which he says still remains, that there isn’t enough to report about in women’s sports to warrant full-time coverage. With the newsroom entering its fifth year, his team is proving otherwise.

“There is no such thing as a vacation,” Megdal said. “This coverage needs to happen all the time to accurately and fully connect to a fan base that cares about it all the time.”

Added Hatfield: “We’re publishing over 100 reported stories every month. That in itself starts to break down that line of thinking, when you see that, not only is it 100 in March when the NCAA Tournament is going on, but it’s 100 in August, it’s 100 in October. There’s always something to say.”

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Megdal says reach has grown exponentially for The IX and The Next — email sign-ups and paid subscriptions continue to surge for the former, and 3.5 million readers visited the latter in May. Interest and engagement in women’s basketball is growing, which Megdal attributes to the everyday coverage his outlets deliver.

In addition to his audience, Megdal hopes there will be growth within his staff. The Next has more than 30 contributing writers and editors, including a beat writer for each WNBA team and several more covering major NCAA women’s basketball conferences. The writers are freelancers, but Megdal is working toward building a full-time staff.

“When we do that, then we have fundamentally changed the industry,” Megdal said. “When we get to that moment and our staff is full-timers, we will have increased the number of full-time women’s sports journalists in this country by a factor of five or six. That is ultimately the goal.”