HAS RAPID RISE OF WOMEN’S SPORT COME AT A COST?
AS we prepare to head into a welcome summer of sport, Gold Coast sports media consultant, Game Plan Communications’ director Wayne Hickson looks at where women’s sport in this country is headed.
THERE is no doubt women’s team sport in Australia has exploded on and off the field over the past five years. You don’t have to look far. The Gold Coast has a Suns team in the AFLW, women’s rugby league has a full-on premiership competition and women’s cricket is going so strong that names like Meg and Ellyse are as household as Mitchell and Davey, even if our national cricket teams remain curiously without a nickname.
‘Straya’ is the best go-to we can muster.
Indeed, these sports are suddenly commanding live television and radio coverage on the channels watched and listened to by grown-ups and are receiving massive attention from advertisers that not too long ago struggled to peek over the top of their unashamedly blokey-looking budgets.
And while that sounds all well and good, maybe there is something not entirely right with this picture.
It is possible the only way women are achieving any real street cred in sport these days is by limping back into the sheds bloodied and bruised?
Is the pub test demanding that we will give women sporting equality, but only if they pass the ‘blood sport test’ first?
In other words, could it be that women have had to whack in the mouthguard and put on a grilled helmet and take full contact hits to appease sponsors and a Y chromosome-heavy public baying for something more from their X chromosome sports offerings?
After all, netball and hockey and soccer get their time to shine every four years at Commonwealth Games or the Olympics, but we don’t really give much of a stuff about warming the set and cooling the tinnies to watch them in between, do we?
That could be because they’re hardly ever on TV in the first place.
And here’s the real curve ball …
Could women’s sports like hockey and netball – that have historically enjoyed some of the highest team participation rates in Australia – be in danger of losing what lean corporate sponsorships they have, and indeed participants, as young girls run in increasing numbers towards the big dollar lights of the footy codes and cricket?
There’s no bottomless pit of sports sponsorship money in this country, particularly as the corporate sector tightens its belt to the very last notch because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sponsors will be increasingly select about where best to spend their money and it’s probably not too much of a stretch to conclude that if the sport is not on prime-time television, it’s not really happening.
But will we ever get used to the sight of an AFLW player being stretchered off the ground with a ruptured ACL or a bloodstained top or stars circling her head like they do in the cartoons?
Because, with more women participating in the contact, more-likely-to-bruise sports
where those things are more likely to happen, it’s going to take a long time for many people to get used to this scenario.
It’s a tad awkward reading those last few paragraphs back because any culture that offers any sportsman or sportswoman the opportunity to play whatever they want, as hard as they want, in whatever arena they want, must be good and envied by those cultures that don’t.
And any circumstance that gives a happy little Vegemite like Ashleigh Barty the choice between representing the green and gold in cricket or tennis and whatever bloody else she wants to win at can’t be an entirely bad thing.
It is indeed a fantastic future when those little girls born at the Gold Coast University Hospital today can set themselves to be AFLW Suns players in 16 or so years’ time.
And what’s just as brilliant is that they can surf, be ironwomen, play football, cricket or hockey or whatever code of rugby, netball or lacrosse or even take up an eSport or some crazy XSport not yet dreamt of.
Either way they’ll have many more choices than generations past.
In this heady world of media and sponsorship and magazine covers and a decent pay packet and all those sorts of things, that must be a saving grace.
In these unprecedented times there are more than a few fingers crossed that our national sporting recovery sees equal support for both men and women.
But as we head into 2021, spare a thought for the Matildas, Hockeyroos, Opals and our rugby 7s defending Olympic champions who have largely self-funded their way to next year’s COVID-delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Let’s cheer them on now and for always: ‘Straya’!