A new voice will serve as the soundtrack for Washington football this fall, and she’s set to make some history along the way.

The University of Washington announced Tuesday that Elise Woodward will be the program’s new radio play-by-play announcer starting with the 2026 season, making her what is believed to be the first woman in the FBS to hold such a role.

Woodward, who is also the play-by-play voice for the Portland Fire in the WNBA, has been a sideline reporter for the Huskies for more than 20 years. She roamed the sidelines for Washington’s run to the national championship game at the end of the 2023 season, and she’ll jump right into the action with her new gig this fall when the Huskies play rival Washington State in the Apple Cup in Week 1.

This is such an honor and a dream come true. I love Husky football to my core. Every game for the last 23 seasons as the sideline reporter, I am filled with gratitude for the chance to cover these great athletes at my alma mater.
New role, same passion. LFG DAWGS!! 💜💜💜 https://t.co/vQNBiKC6yv

— Elise Woodward (@EliseMWoodward) July 28, 2026

“Having the opportunity to be the voice of University of Washington football is the honor of my lifetime,” Woodward said in a statement released by the school. “As a Dawg, I take so much pride in the rich history and tradition of Husky football. I am so thankful for the last 23 seasons that I spent on the sidelines, but I’m also beyond excited to trade in my rain gear for the warmth of the Bob Rondeau radio booth.”

Woodward, an Oregon native, played basketball for the Huskies from 1993-97 and captained the team as a senior. She has a versatile background in broadcasting, having worked primarily in basketball and football but also in volleyball, women’s gymnastics, men’s soccer, track and field, MLB and the NFL. She graduated from Washington with a degree in broadcast journalism.

Women have become an integral part of football broadcasts over the years, but few handle play-by-play duties. Woodward will join some strong company, though, in ESPN’s Beth Mowins and Courtney Lyle, who have both done college football play-by-play for the network, and Lisa Byington, who made history in 2017 as the Big Ten Network’s first woman to take on play-by-play duties for a football game.

With quarterback Demond Williams Jr. returning to Washington for 2026, Woodward should have plenty to chronicle with a team that won nine games a season ago and enters Year 3 under head coach Jedd Fisch.

“Elise has built an outstanding career as a sports broadcaster at both the national and local levels,” Washington athletic director Pat Chun said in a statement. “She has established herself as a trusted voice within the Husky community through her years covering UW Football, Women’s Basketball, and Seattle sports. She knows this university, its traditions, and the rich history of this role. We couldn’t be more excited to have Elise carry forward the legacy of being the voice of Husky Football.”

MLS owners are expected to hear a presentation this week regarding significant changes to the structure of the league’s roster rules and regulations that are centered around a more open salary cap system, sources briefed on the situation tell The Athletic.

The MLS board of governors will meet Wednesday in Charlotte ahead of the MLS All-Star Game. The sporting and competition committee, a smaller group of owners that oversees changes to the roster rules, is expected to present and discuss a preliminary proposal that would revamp the roster-building structure, according to multiple sources briefed on the plans.

That proposal is expected to be centered around a more open structure, removing many of the restrictions on how teams spend on the current rosters, while also maintaining a carveout for designated players, the sources said. There may also be rules designed to incentivize MLS teams to sign young players, be it as young designated players or as a variation of the current under-22 initiative. The proposal would simplify the salary cap structure while allowing teams more freedom to spend across the entire roster if they so choose.

The sporting and competition committee is set to meet on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the proposal.

The movement toward rule changes is not a surprise. The league has been discussing ideas around a new structure since late 2023, after Lionel Messi’s arrival prompted a more aggressive stance around evolution. That eventually led to what MLS executives are calling “MLS 3.0,” which includes flipping the calendar to a summer-spring format to match top European leagues, as well as a new competition structure. The board of governors voted on and approved those changes last year.

Changing how teams spend on rosters is the final — and critical — step.

“It’s a must-do; it’s not a maybe-do,” MLS commissioner Don Garber told The Athletic in the days before the World Cup final. “And it’s going to take time to figure out the way to get it right, because everything that MLS is today, in comparison to many leagues around the world, is about the steady growth based on thoughtful strategy and partnership engagement on figuring out what we need to do to move to the next level. And that’s not ripping everything up that got us here. It’s evolving it. It’s making a couple of bold steps.”

Some owners see it as imperative for the league to find a path forward in which the roster-rule changes can be implemented in time for the calendar switch in the summer of 2027. It won’t be easy. Any changes will likely be tied to a new collective bargaining agreement with the MLS Players Association. The current CBA expires January 31, 2028.

The proposal would undoubtedly help players, however, by freeing up teams to spend money across more of the roster, as they see fit. By eliminating current tools like general allocation money (GAM) and targeted allocation money (TAM), teams would be able to spend more aggressively across the entire roster to lift the overall quality of teams and enhance depth. TAM limits, for example, prevent teams from signing players who hit the cap at more than $1.8 million, lest they be designated players.

While discussions around the new salary cap remain ongoing, a more open system would fundamentally increase efficiency of money already being spent by MLS teams.

“MLS teams already spend a lot of money, that’s not the problem,” former Real Salt Lake, Seattle Sounders and Atlanta United executive Garth Lagerwey recently told The Athletic. “What they need to do is spend it more efficiently if possible. Any type of roster rule simplification, I suspect, is going to be tied to the collective bargaining agreement, and certainly we’d be flippant if we didn’t acknowledge that. But I would go right in, roll up your sleeves if you can, and try to find solutions there. Because if you are able to just increase optionality … it’s going to yield benefits.”

Part of the discussion at the committee level includes whether the rules would keep a carve out for young designated players or U-22 initiative players. While that would essentially keep another “bucket” within the more open structure, some owners see it as vital to maintain incentives for teams to sign younger players that can later be sold in the transfer market. Those incentives could come via the same structure in which they currently exist, including a lower salary-cap hit for designated players under the age of 22 or 23.

In previous anonymous MLS surveys of chief soccer officers conducted by The Athletic, the overwhelming majority favored changing to an open system under a salary cap.

“Unsurprisingly, it would be some version of a cap and a floor that has enough space in it for teams that want to spend a bit more and be more aggressive, but invest across their roster, not just in three to six discretionary players,” one CSO said. “You have to keep DPs, in my opinion, because you can’t have a rule structure that will prevent you from signing the next Messi or Son (Heung-min). So you would need to keep that. But then, essentially, I would like to see the salary cap work where we can invest in players across our entire roster, rather than just a handful of players and then let teams pick their strategy.

Lionel Messi and Son Heung-min are the two premier global stars in MLS (Shaun Clark / Getty Images)

“If you want to invest in young players and grow players to sell, you can do that. If you want to invest in performance impact players like Cincinnati, then you can do that too. Just leave the flexibility there for people to build how they think that fits for their club and their owners.”

There is plenty of incentive for both MLS and the MLSPA to find a path forward quickly enough for the summer of 2027. MLS is facing more competition on all sides, with European leagues looking for more entry points into the American market, Liga MX studying how it can evolve its commercial strengths as the most-watched league in the U.S. and FIFA continually bringing competitions to North America.

Just this week, Apollo, an American global asset management firm, proposed a €1 billion loan to the German Bundesliga guaranteed against future domestic broadcast earnings — an investment meant to make the league more competitive. Apollo previously held discussions with Liga MX about a similar arrangement.

Delaying changes that could allow teams to actually take advantage of that summer 2027 window ahead of the league’s “relaunch” in the new calendar would be yet another setback after MLS failed to get changes across the line in time for 2026 and the post-World Cup boost.

MLS needs to see an increase in television ratings as it prepares to go to market for a new media rights deal in 2029. Its current agreement with Apple ends in mid-2029. MLS and Apple agreed to a reconfigured deal that moved the league out from behind its MLS Season Pass paywall beginning this season. MLS will be paid $200 million for the 2026 season and $107.5 million for the “sprint season” that will run from February to May 2027, according to sources. The league will then receive $275 million per year for the final two seasons of the deal, which will be the league’s first in the new summer-to-spring format. MLS covers production costs on Apple TV, however, which eats significantly into those figures.

The sporting and competition committee presentation also comes at a time when the league is bracing for its first leadership change in nearly three decades. MLS owners are expected to meet next week to vote on a new commissioner. LAFC co-owner Larry Berg and former Fox executive David Nathanson are the two finalists, according to multiple sources. Berg is co-chair of the sporting and competition committee.

Garber, 68, was named MLS’s second commissioner in 1999. He will remain in that role through at least the end of 2026 and intends to stay on in some capacity with the league through the end of his contract in 2027.

CHICAGO — Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti overwhelmingly embraced the on-field rivalry his conference has with the SEC, but he stopped short of committing toward breaking away from the NCAA should Congress fail to pass a Protect College Sports Act, unlike SEC counterpart Greg Sankey.

Petitti, who spoke for nearly 45 minutes Tuesday morning to open the three-day Big Ten media days event, instead focused on working with the SEC and other power conferences to provide a system more palatable to all entities, rather than striking out alone.

“Breakaway is … a word that creates a lot of emotion,” Petitti said. “I’ve never heard that anybody doesn’t want to play anybody else. We want to schedule more good games against teams that our fans expect. We’ve just got to get to a system that allows us to do that.

“I think every league is going to be in a position to say, what are we going to do that’s better than what we have now, and do we have to do it ourselves?”

At SEC media days last week in Tampa, Fla., Sankey said breakaway conversations are “real” and “I do not believe that is a leverage point.” Sankey reiterated later, like Petitti, that he prefers not to reach that point, but frustration over being unable to enforce the NCAA’s rules has bubbled over among SEC administrators. It’s similar for Big Ten brass, but the rhetoric is more measured publicly.

On major issues, Petitti said the commissioners operate in lockstep, especially when it comes to the Senate bill that could reshape the makeup of college sports. However, the two commissioners remain apart when it comes to Petitti’s plan for a 24-team College Football Playoff. Sankey prefers a 16-team postseason tournament or, at a minimum, wants more information related to revenues on eliminating conference championships to accommodate a larger CFP. Those answers should come in mid-August.

“Working with the SEC on the Playoff and working with Greg specifically, I’ve never heard him say that he won’t do the work and consider 24,” Petitti said. “He’s been public about certain preferences he has, but he’s committed himself to doing the work around all formats, and we’ve done the same thing. We have strong opinions about where the right path is.

“I think there’s been an evolution since we were here last year about how people feel about 24 at this point, and we’ve made adjustments in our league. We were focused on automatic qualifiers (in 2025). We’re not focused on that anymore.”

The Big Ten and SEC are college sports’ highest-profile leagues with each earning more than $1 billion in revenue during fiscal 2025. The Big Ten has won the past three CFP championships and owns an 8-2 postseason record against the SEC in the last two postseasons. The SEC, however, largely owned the sport before the 12-team CFP, which was implemented in 2024.

Officials and coaches from both conferences often tout their collective strength and depth, and their competitions have become legendary in every sport. League and school officials from both leagues have met twice in person and expressed interest in playing one another more frequently in the regularly season, which Petitti said “let’s just keep doing that.”

In the 2024-25 CFP semifinals, Ohio State outlasted Texas en route to the CFP championship. Last fall, the top-ranked Longhorns opened the season at No. 2 Ohio State, a game the Buckeyes won 14-7. This year, Ohio State travels to Austin, Texas. In addition, Oklahoma travels to Michigan and Mississippi State heads to Minnesota. Originally, Nebraska was set to face Tennessee, but the Cornhuskers dropped the series in order to schedule another home game.

“Our fans, I think the SEC fans, they really like the rivalry,” Petitti said. “I think it would be great if we played each other more. I think that’s from a fan perspective. Having a rivalry with the Big Ten, the SEC, is a great pair. You see the games when we play them in the CFP, we play them in the regular season, which isn’t that often right now.

“Fans really want to compete. They want to talk about which league is better.”