Anson Dorrance, the University of North Carolina women’s soccer coach, is confused. Dorrance coaches the best women’s team in the country, a team that has won 17 national titles in the last 23 years, a team that has supplied more players than any other to the 3-year-old women’s professional league, the Women’s United Soccer Association.
Dorrance said nearly all his Tar Heels players are dying to make the WUSA, which has a franchise barely 30 miles from the North Carolina campus. Yet few want to watch the Carolina Courage play.
“It’s like pulling teeth to get them to go,” Dorrance said. “I have to shame them into it or organize a trip.”
Such a trip took place May 24 when the Courage played the San Diego Spirit, whose roster includes two members of last year’s North Carolina team.
“Even then a lot of people still didn’t go, and I went mainly to say hello to my old teammates,” said Maggie Tomecka, who will be a senior midfielder for North Carolina this fall. “Maybe it’s because we have enough soccer. It’s hard to explain.”
It is, in fact, part of a conundrum that defies a simple, clear explanation. Why is it that an individual professional woman athlete like Annika Sorenstam, Serena Williams or Mia Hamm–a UNC grad who plays for the WUSA team in Washington–can become widely praised and popular, yet women’s professional leagues still struggle to win fans, public acclaim and financial stability?
Caught in paradox
The women’s pro leagues are caught in a chicken-and-egg paradox about recognition and success. They need attention to attract sponsors, marketing and TV exposure, but their games are considered insignificant by the male-dominated sports media, which will pay more attention to a so-called “Battle of the Sexes” event such as Sorenstam’s recent appearance on the PGA Tour than it will to more legitimate competition.
The ripple effect was a huge boost for last weekend’s LPGA event, the Kellogg-Keebler Classic in Aurora. Sorenstam won, helped attendance increase by 20 percent over 2002 despite bad weather and brought the tournament far more media attention.
“Those `Battle of the Sexes’ events will go on as long as men are insecure,” said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “If both parties are secure, there is no threat and no drama. It becomes a brother and sister playing golf together.”
The WUSA’s roster numbers were cut and its players had to take substantial salary cuts this year. Even with continued support from the NBA, the WNBA, the 7-year-old women’s pro league, has had franchises fold and lost “substantial” amounts of money, WNBA President Val Ackerman conceded.
“You have to keep things in perspective,” insisted Hamm, the best-known U.S. soccer player of either gender. “These are difficult times economically. Don’t jump to the conclusion that something wasn’t successful because it was a women’s team sport. But do we have a long way to go? Absolutely.”
More doers than followers
Women’s pro leagues are new. They are battling, in some cases, degrees of homophobia among potential fans, male and female. Women don’t own teams in women’s leagues, and few women have corporate positions that allow them to make decisions about buying season tickets. Women are not yet part of the water cooler and talk-radio discussions about sports.
“Why do guys follow sports? Either they have spent years loving a team like the Yankees, which my husband does, or they are gambling on them,” said Olympic softball gold medalist Dot Richardson, an orthopedic surgeon.
“Women entered sports as doers, and there they are almost equal,” said University of Michigan political scientist Andrei Markovits, whose book, “Offside,” deals with America’s sports culture. “Only recently have women begun to become conversant as followers.
“The language of sport, of schmoozing and worrying about a team’s play, remains a male domain. It is easier to understand an individual woman’s success than that of, say, the U.S. women’s soccer team.”
It still is wrong to assume that individual women athletes thrive at the same level as men, even if most people can at least recognize names like Hamm, the Williams sisters, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Michelle Kwan and Mary Lou Retton. People pay attention to them more as celebrities than as athletes, with the casual sports fan watching only at big annual events like Wimbledon or quadrennial events like the Olympics or the Women’s World Cup.
“As much ground as people say we have gained, it’s a very hard road ahead,” said Joyner-Kersee, winner of three Olympic track and field gold medals. “You need name comprehension. People understand the Olympics and now the World Cup.”
Lacking huge TV pacts
Through last weekend, the WUSA’s average attendance was 7,007, up slightly from last year’s final average but nearly 15 percent below the figures for its inaugural season. The WNBA’s average of 10,185 through its first 10 games is 4 percent better than a similar point last year.
Yet tickets are so inexpensive in both leagues neither has much chance to break even, because both lack the huge TV contracts of men’s professional and collegiate sports. The WUSA buys its own air time on ESPN, PAX and TSN (Canada), while the WNBA gets no rights fee but has a revenue-sharing deal with ESPN and ABC. Without a big rights fee to protect, TV networks and sponsors do minimal promotion.
The marketplace has so many television outlets almost anyone can find a network willing to air events. The problem is there are so many events it’s hard to get people to notice. So Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes and Sue Bird aren’t exactly Shaq, Kobe, MJ and Larry Bird in the public consciousness.
“Michael Jordan wasn’t Michael Jordan after only three years in the NBA either,” Ackerman said.
The NBA, which began with the 1946-47 season, drew an average of 3,583 in its seventh year. It did not reach the 10,000 level until 1975-76, when there still was relatively little competition for media and fan attention in the sports world.
“We didn’t have people questioning the validity of the NBA,” said Olympic swimming champion Donna DeVarona, now a TV sports commentator. “We’re so new, and the marketplace is so crowded.”
The 1996 Atlanta Olympics were seen as a turning point for women’s team sports. The success of U.S. soccer, basketball and softball teams spawned professional leagues in all three, although Pro Fast Pitch Softball ceased operation for a year and has become an exhibition tour this summer, hoping to re-establish itself as a league next year. The WUSA and WNBA are surviving because their ownership remains willing to lose money, and the players have accepted modest salaries, topping out at $60,000 in soccer and $80,000 in basketball.
“Clearly, people have higher expectations about the WNBA because it is associated with the NBA,” Ackerman said.
Sorenstam becomes celeb
None of those pro leagues gets the attention or recognition for women’s sports that Sorenstam did by taking on male golfers for what turned out to be half of the Colonial Invitational tournament. She went from merely being the best woman golfer in the world to a celebrity superstar–or should that be superstar celebrity?
“It’s wrong that it takes Annika to play in a men’s tournament for people to say she is a good golfer,” soccer pro Brandi Chastain said. “That is very confusing to us. But it is good for people to see her who never saw her before. Maybe they will think her tour is worth paying attention to.”
Chastain knows about getting attention. She received more for showing the world her sports bra than for the reason she removed her shirt: scoring on the decisive penalty kick for the U.S. in the 1999 World Cup final before 90,000 in the Rose Bowl.
Men remove their shirts routinely to celebrate goals in soccer. Chastain’s apparently unscripted gesture, shown on worldwide TV and in magazines worldwide, was a sign of how feminism had been transformed to suit a man’s sports world. Bra burning had become bra flaunting, proving once again that sex sells. Hello, Anna Kournikova (and goodbye, as usual, after your first match).
“People are still stuck on looks with women athletes,” Joyner-Kersee said. “Some women want to promote themselves in that direction. But it could be a turnoff, too, especially with parents who want to bring their children to games.”
Hamm said the World Cup final was the perfect conjunction of individual and team appeal.
“You could look at a great team and identify individual moments, like Brandi scoring the goal and taking off her shirt and Briana [Scurry] making the decisive save,” she said.
Hamm, like Jordan, was made into a sports icon through the marketing muscle and commitment of Nike and Gatorade. The difference is, relatively few of the people who recognize Hamm’s name have seen her play. According to a person familiar with the subject, Nike’s current deal with Hamm is predicated more on her remaining a member of the national team than on her presence in the WUSA.
“I’ve been asked more questions about doing commercials with Michael Jordan than anything else,” Hamm said. “But that has helped me to get a focus put on the team.”
There is not the urgency among fans to see Hamm or Swoopes play their team sport than there is with a Barry Bonds or a Tim Duncan or even a LeBron James.
“I went to see Jordan and Gretzky because you know there are only so many opportunities to see special people,” Chastain said.
The gay factor
Other gender issues are factors in why individual women athletes are appreciated far more than women’s teams.
“The achievement of individual women athletes can be viewed as a feel-good story by a broad array of people,” said Martha Biondi, assistant professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. “When women succeed, it reinforces the idea of a meritocracy where there is equal opportunity, a sense of fair play, that anything is possible.
“Women team sports, pro and college, are politically a different kind of question. The sharing and shifting of resources is controversial. People feel their piece of the pie–sponsorships, facilities, scholarships, prime time, prestige–is threatened.”
Although many of the best WUSA and WNBA players are married and mothers as well, athletes, administrators and women’s sports leaders like Lopiano acknowledge the perception that women’s pro teams are filled with gay athletes has had an effect on popularity.
“Many male friends I talk to have the stereotyped idea that a lot of female athletes are homosexuals,” said Ruth Riley, former Notre Dame star and center for the WNBA’s Detroit Shock. “Maybe that does keep them from coming to watch–unless they are bringing their daughters.”
Northwestern’s Biondi appreciates the irony of that.
“Homophobia probably affects sponsorships, advertising and institutional support,” Biondi said. “It is a factor, and we need to bring it out.
“Sports is symbolically an important area of women’s achievement. Fathers of daughters will become unwitting proponents.”
The WNBA’s audience is 80 percent women, according to Ackerman, who called the league’s fans “different” and said the appeal to gay women “is a plus.
“But it really is a non-issue.”
Not season ticket-holders
The issue is women do not buy season tickets, either for their corporations or as individuals. Lopiano’s take is that a woman will look at a schedule, decide she can’t make all the games and, from lack of experience with such purchases, not consider splitting the ticket with friends, as men do for reasons of cost and scheduling.
That soccer is not a traditional U.S. sport makes it even harder to attract a fan base.
“We’re trying to overcome resistance in two areas to integrate our sport into society,” Chastain said.
Dorrance said youth soccer coaches have to take the lead by going to games and talking about them in a way that makes others feel they missed something by not being there.
“You can create a Greg LeMond or a Lance Armstrong, but that doesn’t mean bicycle racing has become part of the hegemenous sports culture,” said Markovits, the Michigan professor. “I can foresee women’s team sports becoming an important subset of that sports culture.”
How long the women’s leagues survive may be a matter of altruism more than economics. Subset audiences never will lead to the sort of TV and sponsorship contracts to make them profitable, no matter how much salaries and necessary expenses are trimmed. The question then becomes the lingering damage to the perception and reality of women’s sports if a league folds.
“I hold my breath,” DeVarona said.
