It started with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
The U.S. basketball team, filled with modest, honest, talented and hard-working women, easily won a gold medal while charming fans all along the way.
Nearby, the U.S. women’s softball team, led by Dot Richardson, a charismatic orthopedic resident who had juggled team workouts with medical school, won gold and drew crowds that jammed traffic on the roads of Columbus, Ga.
Women’s sports, it seemed, were hitting stride, and investors believed the time was right to start professional leagues. In the four years after the 1996 Summer Games, four women’s professional leagues–softball, soccer and two for basketball–would launch in the U.S.
What has happened since, though, is a series of mixed signals. While women’s participation in sports spikes annually, women’s professional leagues that haven’t folded are struggling.
WUSA, the women’s professional soccer league, an offshoot from the success of the last women’s World Cup, had a 14 percent attendance drop between its first and second years. Even the WNBA, backed by the powerful and popular NBA, has had little or no growth in either attendance or television ratings in the last two seasons. Another basketball circuit, the ABL, quit after two seasons. So, too, after four seasons, did the professional softball league.
That women’s sports generally lag far behind established men’s games in attendance and TV ratings is certainly predictable. Men’s professional leagues in many cases weren’t overnight sensations, either, including the XFL, the football circuit that lasted only one year despite millions spent on promotion and a network television deal with NBC.
“Right now, we’re midstream in a major historical transformation,” said Michael Messner, professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of “Taking the Field: Women, Men and Sports” (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95).
“In the last 30 years, the athletic budgets for women’s sports have grown to millions of dollars. Taking that bigger historical scope is important now as we sit here talking about low attendance figures, sponsorship problems, marketing and promotion sliced into pieces. … It’s two steps forward, one step back.”
Most of the steps forward can be traced to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which protects people in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance from discrimination based on sex. It requires equal distribution of athletic aid and resources among men and women in high schools and colleges. At the time it became federal law, 1 in 27 high school or college-age girls competed for a school team. That ratio is now 1 in 2.5.
But even Title IX can’t legislate viewership and attendance for the more than 3 million female athletes in high school, college, amateur and professional sports.
The ebb and flow is, in many cases, dramatic:
In the summer of 1999, the women’s World Cup-winning U.S. soccer team toured the country, gathering fans and cachet as if it were the Beatles. Scalpers prowled at a sold-out Rose Bowl, where the U.S. defeated China in the final.
Yet, back at the Rose Bowl in November, only 6,911 sprinkled the seats at the Pasadena, Calif., stadium to watch the CONCACAF Women’s Gold Cup soccer finals and third-place games, a World Cup-qualifying event.
Driven by the red-hot Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, Lindsay Davenport, Jennifer Capriati, Martina Hingis and Monica Seles, a core of top players as interesting and charismatic and they are competitive, the Women’s Tennis Association tour established attendance records at 13 of its tournaments in 2002. Also, women’s Grand Slam events have earned higher television ratings than the men during the past two years.
Yet, late last year, there were afternoon crowds of fewer than 500 and evening crowds of barely 5,000 creating echoes at Staples Center in Los Angeles for a season-ending tournament featuring 16 of the world’s best women’s players.
Unfair comparisons
But most experts say it’s silly to forecast the future or compare women’s attendance and ratings to that of men.
“The problem is when we’re compared to established men’s sports when ours are in their relative infancy,” said Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. “If baseball attendance slips, no one ever asks if it’s in trouble for its survival.”
Indeed, there is a fundamental difference in the way men’s and women’s professional leagues were formed. Most men’s sports developed from small leagues into larger organizations which, after they reached considerable size, had increasingly grand playoff and championship events. The women’s leagues seem to have formed the other way around: leagues spinning off from large, single events.
“You can’t make a pro sports venture successful overnight,” said Donna Lopiano, head of the Women’s Sports Foundation, an advocacy group. “The killer problem in women’s sports is the glut of sports on television.”
Promoters, investors and coaches say that if women’s professional sports are to succeed they must be aggressively marketed and promoted.
Tim Leiweke, president and CEO of Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns Staples Center, blamed the poor turnout for November’s tennis event on a shortened and ineffective sales effort. Pam Shriver, a television commentator and former tennis player, agreed.
“A lot of people I know, friends who play tennis and love the game, didn’t know the significance of the tournament,” she said. “You have to work hard here to get the word out.”
Employing sex appeal
Experts have one other pointed suggestion for women’s sports: If sex appeal sells, use it.
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Leonard Armato, commissioner of the Association of Volleyball Professionals, said he bought the tour a year ago partly because of the relatively untapped marketing power on its women’s side.
“You can’t deny that beach volleyball can be a sexy sport without being shameless,” he said. “Because of that, there is so much potential for us to build our sport very quickly. Look at tennis. A lot is made of what Serena Williams wears, if she’s wearing that body-clinging cat suit. …
“The LPGA goes on and on about finding a beautiful player, but they’d get killed if they ever put a golf club in the hands of a woman in a bikini. Our players compete in bikinis and they are very attractive.”
Amy Love, founder and editor of Real Sports, a magazine devoted to women’s sports and athletes, said too many investors in women’s teams and publications have misjudged what should be their core audience.
She invested her own money to start up Real Sports–and has watched larger operations funded by Conde Nast and Sports Illustrated fold. Those competing publications overestimated their market, Love said.
Whereas Conde Nast sought a circulation of 700,000 for its Sports for Women and SI for Women wanted 500,000, Love’s magazine projected about 250,000. “That’s a sizable market,” she said. “It’s not a home-run market. But do we ignore that market?”
She said women’s professional leagues would be wise to use the same tactic. Average attendance of 9,000-10,000 at a WNBA game might not make for an immediate windfall, but “if marketed correctly, those are reasonable numbers, long-term, to grow a market from,” she said.
“I use the scene in the movie `Beautiful Mind’ when John Nash is in the bar with his friends and everybody wants to go after the blond.”
“Nash tried to explain that if everybody went for the blond, everybody loses. Go for the woman who is the friend, then everybody wins. There seems to be this need to hit an immediate home run instead of just getting on base.
“Viewing women’s sports as the blond or the home run or it’s not a success is a guarantee of failure. You don’t make social change overnight.”
For more information
Future general managers and interested players may want to visit the following sites:
Chicago Blaze basketball: www.chicagoblaze.com
National Women’s Basketball League: www.nwbl.com
United States Professional Volleyball: www.uspv.com
National Pro Fastpitch: www.profastpitch.com
National Women’s Football Association: www.nwflcentral.com
Women’s National Basketball Association: www.wnba.com
Women’s United Soccer Association: www.wusa.com