WNBA Defies Odds in 5th Year

By GREG JOHNSON

June 5, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Most of the WNBA’s 16 franchises remain unprofitable and attendance at games last year was flat. But the basketball league that tipped off its fifth season over the Memorial Day weekend remains the most visible of women’s professional sports leagues.

The fact that the WNBA has survived is touted by fans and the league as proof of a market for women’s sports, both at the arena and on television. Yet, as the Los Angeles Sparks return to Los Angeles for tonight’s home opener against the Cleveland Rockers, the league’s future is far from assured.

“The basketball part of the equation is in great shape,” said Val Ackerman, WNBA president. “We’ve got many talented, proven, veteran players and we’ve got our most heralded incoming [rookie] class ever.”

There are encouraging signs--the most obvious being the WNBA’s continued existence in the wake of the 1998 failure of the competing American Basketball League. But it’s a hotly competitive sports market and even traditional male sports are struggling to lure and keep fans.

“Deep pockets are not a guarantee, as the XFL partnership involving NBC and the WWF proved,” said Stephen Greyser, a Harvard Business School professor who studies sports marketing issues. “With any league, it’s repeat viewers drawn by the caliber of competition. It’s not the value of the marketing and promotion.”

Yet the WNBA clearly benefits from the marketing might and business savvy of the NBA, and cooperation starts at the top: UCLA Law School graduate Ackerman previously worked directly with NBA Commissioner David Stern.

The most noticeable difference between the WNBA and the ABL is that players are hired by the league, not individual teams. That central business model, similar to that used by Major League Soccer, has meant that the WNBA has not been hit by skyrocketing salaries.

In addition, the WNBA schedules its games during the summer, when competition from other professional leagues is pretty much limited to baseball. The league also plays in arenas owned or managed by NBA teams and can cut costs by sharing front-office and behind-the-scenes operations.

And the league has attracted a full complement of sponsors, including Sears, AOL Time Warner, L’Oreal and Johnson & Johnson, which are not traditionally found in the sports marketing arena.

Marketers describe the WNBA as a welcome addition because women and girls increasingly view themselves as athletes and fans. Crowds at WNBA games are 75% female, often including a hefty percentage of young girls. The TV audience is moving toward equal parts men and women, buoyed by fans hungry for basketball action during the summer.

The demographic blend plays well with Sears, a WNBA sponsor since 1997. “We want to reach the female as well as the family,” said Sears spokeswoman Rebecca Sullivan. “And the WNBA fits perfectly with our core female customer. Our target is right on with their target.”

“In the arena, the WNBA presents a unique, female-skewed audience for us,” said Kathy Casso, senior manager of sports marketing for Anheuser-Busch, which uses the league to market its Bud Light brand. Half of Bud Light’s customers are women, Casso said.

And, as sports marketers note, the league is starting to draw more fathers and sons to its games, rounding out its popularity among mothers and daughters.

The WNBA boasts such bona fide stars as the Sparks’ 6-foot-5 center Lisa Leslie, one of 50 Olympians from the U.S. and abroad now playing in the league. Leslie also serves as a spokeswoman for Nike and Anheuser-Busch.

Talented rookies who have been honing their skills in college or overseas continue to flow into the league. Just 29 of 110 players who suited up during the inaugural season are still around.

But Ackerman acknowledges that the league has its work cut out. “Most of our teams are unprofitable at the moment. But we’re not looking for quantum leaps in our business. Our business plan calls for . . . managing costs and growing revenue. The plan has always been to start small and expand.”

And profitability isn’t the only problem. To start, two of the league’s most popular players--who anchored the four-time WNBA champion Houston Comets--are not in uniform this season. Cynthia Cooper retired to take a coaching job and Cheryl Swoopes suffered a season-ending knee injury.

The recent transfer of some nationally broadcast games to ESPN2 from the female-oriented Lifetime is expected to bolster television ratings, particularly among male viewers. But although the league’s summer schedule ensures less competition on the programming front, the WNBA’s broadcasts compete against everything from a day at the beach and theme parks to out-of-town vacations.

And the WNBA has yet to reach the Holy Grail of the big leagues--the ability to auction its broadcast rights to the highest bidder. The WNBA, like many lesser leagues, instead spends millions of dollars to buy time on broadcast and cable channels and then sells advertising to fill commercial breaks.

Some WNBA games are broadcast on NBC, ESPN and ESPN2, but the time slots vary; the league doesn’t yet enjoy a prominent anchor spot akin to Monday Night Football. The league’s games bounce from NBC on some nights to ESPN and ESPN2 on other nights. Greyser said that although WNBA ratings are far below those of the NBA, they’re noticeably higher than those the now-defunct XFL managed to generate.

Average attendance at games, which hit 10,869 in 1998, drifted down to 10,207 in 1999 and fell to 9,058 last season. In contrast, the NBA drew an average of 16,784 fans to its games during the recently completed regular season.

The WNBA blames last season’s drop in part on a season that started early to allow players to travel to Sydney, Australia, for the Olympics. Starting before the school year ended hurt, WNBA executives say, because the league draws heavily from children who attend games with parents.

Yet the WNBA’s biggest challenge could come on the labor front. The WNBA Players Assn. and the league are about midway through a four-year contract that expires in 2004. The WNBA’s average salary is about $55,000, according to the league, but players can push earnings higher with bonuses.

Some sports observers believe that the WNBA will lose top players to European leagues unless salaries improve dramatically.

The central model, where players are paid by the league rather than individual teams, “hasn’t been proven in the U.S.,” said Andrew S. Zimbalist, a business professor at Smith College in Massachusetts who studies the economics of sports.

“‘Here, the teams traditionally compete against each other for the best players. The central control model hasn’t worked for Major League Soccer. And you don’t attract great European players at $50,000.”

Zimbalist also maintains that the WNBA’s approach has the effect of pushing the league out of the sports pages during the off-season. “Part of the joy that fans feel comes from talking about trades, free-agent signings and player development efforts,” he said. “That kind of thing doesn’t exist in the WNBA.”

Ackerman defends the relatively low salaries as an economic fact of life. “Our agreement is to a large extent a function of where we are as a business,” she said.

Greyser credits the WNBA’s “slow but steady growth plan . . . [for] avoiding the kind of meteoric rise and fall that we saw with the XFL.”

One thing the WNBA does have in plentiful supply is the enthusiasm that its fans--and players--bring to the arena on game day.

“It reminds me of the level of crowd energy . . . associated with collegiate sports and minor league baseball,” Greyser said.

“And when you see the fan shots [on television], you see a very family oriented type of crowd, lots of moms and daughters but also boys wearing jerseys of the women players.

“That’s a good indicator of the breadth of its attraction.”

Courting Success

The WNBA has attracted many of the sports marketing world’s traditional corporate sponsors. But it also has added a number of companies not usually associated with sports.

Top sponsors of the WNBA:

American Express

American General

Anheuser-Busch (Bud Light)

Diet Coke/Dasani

Foot Locker

Gatorade

General Motors

Hershey’s

Johnson & Johnson (Monistat)

L’Oreal

Nike