The WUSA (Women’s pro soccer) collapsed this week. The timing was brutal for the US team preparing for the women’s world cup, but league officials stated that keeping operations going for even one more day would have been financially irresponsible.
The WNBA has been hanging on by a thread, and only the goodwill of the NBA has allowed it to continue as long as it has.
The LPGA is barely a blip in the pro sports landscape, despite the fact that it has existed for over 50 years. Their biggest star, Annika Sorenstam, recently played with the men to gauge here ability against the best players in the world. Their future star, Michelle Wie, has expressed interest in playing against men at least half of the time.
The common thread in the struggles of women’s professional sports leagues seems to be that they cannot generate corporate sponsorships. Also of note is that they cannot generate ratings (when they manage to get broadcast at all) and they cannot generate ticket sales.
My take on this is that women just aren’t as interested in sports as men are. If they were, you’d see better ratings and better gate receipts at women’s sporting events.
If my assumption is correct, then does this weaken the justifiction for Title IX? I would have to say it does.
Could you fellow dopers please remind me of the correct reasons that Title IX is a good thing in today’s world? (Today’s world being the one where professional women’s sports continually fail, from the point of view of profits, ratings, and ticket sales.)
You’re mixing the desire and opportunity for women to play sports with the desire of the broader public to pay to watch them. The rationale behind Title IX is providing the opportunity for women to participate in, and receive all the benefits of, college sports. It has nothing to do with their commercial viability at the professional level. Most men’s sports aren’t commercially viable either, but in no way does that undermine their value to their participants.
First: Title IX is not about women’s sports. Woman’s sports programs are an unintended byproduct of Title IX.
Second: Some sports that are unpopular at the professional level may be popular at a university level - schools with good womens basketball programs get decent turnout to their games. Admittedly, I don’t know of others
Third: If success at the professional level is the best indicator of the usefulness or desire of participants to take part in that sport, then 90% of all high-school and college athletic programs are a failure. We should drop track and field, swimming, etc. - all but football, soccer, baseball, basketball, tennis, golf and hockey for men and tennis for women. Pretty much all of the olympic events are marginal.
Oddly enough, one of the biggest critics of Title IX, men’s wrestling advocates, have the exact same problem you attribute to WUSA and other women’s athletics, a low potential to be financially viable.
The OP, instead of being an argument against Title IX, actually endorses the portion that applies to women’s athletics. If Women’s Field Hockey was a big money maker, they wouldn’t need to force universities to comply.
WNBA hanging by a thread? 22,000 showed up for the third game between the Shock and the Sparks.
This from a league that was expected to average at best 5000-6000 per game. Thanks to a great promotion program aided by the NBA, they doubled that. It does help that the US women’s team is the dominant team. Notice that the men’s national team, because of the debacle at the Pan American Games, is changing from the dunk-and-tug-shirt style to a more fundamental style that the women play.
NBA is cutting of the WNBA so they could pay those third stringers $8 million. And because they are stupid.
Why does that make them stupid? From what I understand, the NBA is losing millions of each year on the WNBA experiment (I’ll try to find a cite). It also seems that the WNBA has lost momentum over the last few seasons (fewer national TV games and fewer highlights on SportsCenter - less buzz in general).