The Worldwide Chief has re-upped with its lead girls’s basketball commentator Rebecca Lobo on a multi-year deal.
A de facto transactional freeze within the WNBA caused by the continued collective bargaining settlement negotiations hasn’t stopped ESPN from preserving on potential free agent off the board.
Per a report from Austin Karp of Sports activities Enterprise Journal, the Worldwide Chief has re-upped with Rebecca Lobo on a multi-year deal. Lobo, 52, has lengthy been stationed because the lead coloration commentator for the community’s largest girls’s basketball video games on each the collegiate {and professional} stage and can maintain reprising that function.
“I’ve been with them all through a protracted interval of progress for the sport of ladies’s basketball,” Lobo mentioned in Karp’s report. “Any of us who’re concerned in it are simply thrilled with the way in which the game has grown, particularly over the course of the final couple of years.”
Lobo is without doubt one of the authentic stars of the WNBA, allotted to the primary version of the New York Liberty in 1997 after her embellished profession at UConn and a gold medal run with the 1996 United States girls’s nationwide crew on the Atlanta Olympics. Following a seven-year profession, which additionally featured stops with the Houston Comets and Connecticut Solar, Lobo was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2017. She has additionally been enshrined within the Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame and the No. 50 she wore with the Huskies and Liberty has been honored by each each franchises.
Lobo has been stationed at ESPN for many years and has known as probably the most distinguished beginner {and professional} video games on the Worldwide Chief’s schedule. She has held some type of function in all however two editions of ESPN’s protection of the WNBA Finals since 2005 and has known as the final 15 as coloration commentator. She has routinely been paired with play-by-play man Ryan Ruocco and sideline reporter Holly Rowe, forming one of many longest broadcasting groupings in skilled sports activities broadcasting.
Regardless of some potential scores shortcomings (i.e. Caitlin Clark’s harm, the early elimination of the defending champion Liberty), Lobo and ESPN loved a sterling season on the airwaves. This previous common season and postseason was probably the most watched on the ESPN household of networks (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2). The opening sport of the 2025 Finals between Las Vegas and Phoenix was seen by a mean of 1.9 million, making it probably the most watched Recreation 1 since Lobo’s Liberty did battle with the Comets within the inaugural version in 1997.
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
