By the way -- Sports Guy's and my Red Sox books will be coming out at the same time. I'm sure he feels threatened by this.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Sports Guy on the WNBA
I missed this when it first appeared a few days ago, but at the risk of taking on the accusation of being a sexist, I assert that Sports Guy nails it on the head when he eviscerates the WNBA. Don't get me wrong -- I support women's sports. I have coached both boys' and girls', men's and women's, teams, and have been as committed to the success of my female athletes -- probably moreso to my girls in 2002 when I coached both the boys and girls' track teams at Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria Virginia and my girls won a state championship. I support the principles of Title IX, even if I think the execution has been botched. I have no problem with women's professional sports leagues. What I do have a problem with is this charade that the WNBA is a major professional sports league and that it thus takes up, say, space on ESPN's bottom line. The WNBA is a minor sport, and that should be ok. But there is this fiction out there that it is not. Sports Guy honestly confronts this issue. And he is 100% right.
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6 comments:
Lee --
That's shocking about the Red Cross and the mobile home.
I agree that areas like Raleigh-Durham would be ripe for women's professional sports, but also that such a transition would require admitting that women's professional sports leagues are not really big time -- if they punched their weight, they would probably be much more successful, especially when the standard for success would not be so outsized.
Boston is different from the Triangle for a host of reasons, of course, not the least of which is that pro sports dominate, and the college sports have to be content to be second class citizens (which in all honesty is how it should be, both from a qualitative perspective but also from a societal health perspective -- these are 20 year old kids, for goodness' sake). In the triangle the question is whether pro sports would find that foothold. But between the three cities there certainly is enough population base and should be enough interest.
Wasn't the women's soccer league the WUSA?
dcat
Lee -- I watch a lot of sports. A lot. And I can tell you that while the standard you use might make it seem as if the WNBA is not placed all that high in the hierarchy, read Simmons' article again -- the WNBA has a major network contract to have its games televised, often during prime time. The XFL was mocked and made a laughingstock for its ratings a few years back, and yet the ratings of that illfated league, enough to get it yanked, were treble what the WNBA's are. look at ESPN sometime -- while you are waiting for major league baseball or NFL scores, inevitably you also have to sit through WNBA updates that have no business on there, and they appear with far more regularity thanm, say, golf or tennis results, eccept during the weeks of the majors, and yet by any measure golf, tennis (hell, poker) are far, far more popular than women's pro basketball -- like Sports Guy, I am being specific about the WNBA here, and not college basketball, for which there is a market, even if the play simply is not that good (every year the Tennessee women's team picks a bucnch of guys who have no more credentials than that they play pickup ball in UT's gyms to scrimmage against her women, the best college program in the country save perhaps the one in Storrs Connecticut, and these anonymous guys wax the UT women.)
I have no opposition to women's sports. What i do have is an opposition to the WNBA being a welfare case in the sports spectrum.
dcat
Lee --
Again, with all due respect to great women's athletes, any woman who says that top level women's athletes can beat top level men's athletes are simply insane. If they say it about track they are willfully ignorant.
The 24 hour women's sports network sounds good to me. Cries of segregation would seem a bit disjunctive in a world with the Oxygen netwiork and Lifetime televisioon for women.
dc
A couple of years ago, the main sports cable network here in Canada tried a women's sports ofshoot. Despite heavy promotion on the brother channel (heavily owned by ESPN) and good media coverage, the network failed miserably. Not saying that the same would necessarily happen in the States, but it is a precedent.
Mark --
I think that such a network might work in the US simply because there is a lot more room for niche programming because there are so many cable options. A cable network can survive with pretty low ratings as long as it maintains at least a core audience. But if it cannot -- if, say, a WNBA contract could not keep it afloat, that would tell us a great deal, would it not?
dcat
Oscar --
Team sport versus individual sport might help explain things. In an individual sport you can meet and learn personalities and can see rivalries develop. Although it is not as popular as a tv sport, women's track is compelling in a similar way, as is women's golf (plus, as we've seen, there is the sidebar that in golf, a small group of women can compete with the masses of the men even on the pro tour). I also wonder what the ratings are for most women's tennis outside of the majors. In other words, in the equivalent to a WNBA regular season game, how often do non-major women's tennis tournaments appear on network television during prime time? The WNBA championship round probably should be on network television or one of the big sports networks. But much of the regular season?
dcat
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