Women’s Sports Still Looking for an Audience

It started in 1996, with the 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 their stride, and investors believed the time was right to start professional leagues. In the four years after the 1996 Games, four women’s professional leagues -- softball, soccer and two for basketball -- would launch in this country.

What has happened since 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% attendance drop between years one and two. 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 USC and the author of “Taking the Field: Women, Men and Sports.”

“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, one in 27 high school or college-age girls competed for a school team. That ratio is now one 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 they were the Beatles. Scalpers prowled at a sold-out Rose Bowl, where the U.S. defeated China in the Cup final.

Yet, back at the Rose Bowl last month, only 6,911 sprinkled the seats 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 as they are competitive, the Women’s Tennis Assn. tour established attendance records at 13 of its tournaments this year. Also, women’s matches at Grand Slam events have earned higher television ratings than the men’s during the past two years.

Yet, a few weeks ago, there were afternoon crowds of fewer than 500 and evening crowds of barely 5,000 creating echoes at Staples Center for a season-ending tournament featuring 16 of the world’s best women’s players.

* The Women’s Final Four in college basketball was played before record-setting crowds of more than 29,000 at the Alamodome last April and the 28,210-seat Georgia Dome is already sold out for next spring.

Yet, while the UCLA men’s basketball team spent about $3.8 million and generated revenue of more than $8 million in the 2001-02 school year, the Bruin women’s team spent $1.2 million with revenue of $171,100. At USC, the men’s team spent $2.3 million and brought in $3.1 million and the women spent $1.6 million and had revenue of $27,458.

Geno Auriemma, whose University of Connecticut women’s basketball team plays before huge crowds at home and on the road, had a one-word answer -- “No” -- when asked whether women’s sports such as basketball, soccer and softball will ever draw crowds consistently comparable to that of men’s sports.

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. Poor attendance in our sports calls into question if the team or the league will survive.”

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.”

Lopiano said the advent of a digital environment on television, where everybody can have a channel, will be both a help and a proving ground. “You create your own space, your own product and then you can create your own promotional dollar investments in prime time,” she said.

Brian Donlon, who was a top executive for Lifetime Sports when the network signed an agreement to televise WNBA games, said it’s a mistake for anyone to focus solely on attendance or ratings.

“You can get a better rating by running a movie than you would be airing women’s sports,” said Donlon, who is now vice president of iVillage television, “but your audience composition -- more upscale, younger -- is more desirable in sports, so it was a trade-off worth making.”

Yet, according to a recent national study, most of the 50 million women who avidly follow professional sports prefer to watch male athletes.

A survey by Scarborough Sports Marketing asked women if they were “not at all interested,” “somewhat or very interested” or “avidly interested” in the NHL, NFL, NBA, WNBA, PGA, NASCAR, Major League Baseball or pro soccer, both the MLS and WUSA.

It showed that in the last four years the number of loyal female major league baseball fans grew from 12% to 28%; women very interested in the NFL went from 17% to 31%; female NASCAR fans who are very interested in the sport went from 5% to 13%; and those very interested in the NBA jumped from 11% to 19%. But women’s interest in the WNBA dropped, from 11% to 9%.

The results were of no surprise to some. “You expect that as the [female] fan numbers have grown, their interest will be more focused on the mainstream sports,” said Howard Goldberg, senior vice president of Scarborough Sports Marketing. “What you’ll find in the future is that the sports in their infancy, like the WNBA and WUSA, will have a chance to refine their product while their level of expertise will increase as women evolve.”

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 last month’s tennis event on a shortened and ineffective sales effort. Pam Shriver, a television commentator and former U.S. Open finalist, agreed. “A lot of people I know, friends who play tennis and love the game, didn’t know the significance of the tournament ... You have to work hard here to get the word out.”

As for the tiny soccer crowds, they were likely the result of poor timing. Women’s soccer is traditionally supported by young female soccer players, the Mia Hamm wannabes, and the CONCACAF Rose Bowl games were played on a Sunday afternoon, and then on a Sunday night in the rain and fog. There were similarly poor turnouts at Cal State Fullerton and at Safeco Field in Seattle, too, for earlier round games on weeknights. The one good crowd, of 21,522, come on a Saturday night in Seattle.

The cost of tickets might have been another factor. Prices ranged from $15-$40 and youths didn’t get a discount.

Those factors aside, experts have one other pointed suggestion for women’s sports: If sex appeal sells, use it.

Leonard Armato, commissioner of the Assn. 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. And then there’s Anna Kournikova ...

“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.”

Ideally, Armato said, “Athletes are attractive and that helps sell a sport. Men’s or women’s.”

One high-ranking women’s sports executive, a man, said sex appeal is an undeniable selling point of women’s sports that some miss.

“The WNBA doesn’t have that,” he said. “They’ve chosen to model their league as if it’s a men’s league being played by women, as if they’ve just swapped jerseys. The public doesn’t want women athletes trying to be like men. They aren’t as good as men.”

Ultimately, Connecticut basketball Coach Auriemma said, it is up to women’s leagues to find a marketing niche -- and be ready for a long haul.

“Will we sell out every arena for a World Cup? Yeah,” he said. “Because we sell national pride, it’s international, it’s a happening. A UCLA men’s basketball game is a happening. A USC football game is a happening. If you put together a league, you gotta give people a reason to come. Tell me why. And it’s not enough to say you have the best players in the world. That’s not good enough anymore.

“It’s a new day. You’ve gotta have dynamite teams, dynamite personalities and you gotta work at it. The men didn’t just open the doors to 20,000-seat arenas 100 years ago and people poured in. You gotta build things and that takes hard work and patience.”

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 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,” Love added.

“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.”