In changing world, familiar dilemma haunts women’s sports
More girls are participating in athletics, but opportunities for pro careers remain limited
Megan Reilly is one of millions of viewers closely following the FIFA World Cup this month — the Women’s World Cup .
Women’s sports don’t always draw that kind of attention. In fact, they rarely do.
But to Reilly, 15, who never has lived in a time when women’s sports weren’t a normal part of her life, the fact that several million Americans have gathered to watch the national team doesn’t seem uncommon.
“I’ve played soccer since I was 3,” Reilly said. “It’s always been a part of my life.”
Reilly, a sophomore at Fort Bend Austin, always has had female athletes as role models. She has never been told it wasn’t OK for her to play sports.
Hers is a new generation in a battle for gender equality in athletics that has been taking place for decades. And Reilly’s generation shows women’s sports, while they have a long way to go, have made massive strides.
But for all the success stories
— increased participation and national attention during an Olympic or World Cup cycle — issues remain. Pro leagues for basketball, soccer and softball are trying to gain a foothold, with a small TV presence and salaries that make being a professional a hard financial choice for many.
“What happened in the wake of Title IX is that we built them a ballpark and a playing field and women have come in overwhelming numbers,” said Mary Jo Kane, a University of Minnesota professor and the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. “There is a tremendous interest in women’s sports. It’s a huge untapped market.”
And when it comes to participation, women’s sports are a growth industry.
Increased participation
According to the Tucker Center, in 1972, there were approximately 295,000 girls playing a sport at a high level in the United States. By 2012, that number had jumped to 3.2 million.
“When I played, there were a handful of colleges you could go to and get a scholarship,” said U.S. soccer star Brandi Chastain, who scored the winning penalty kick in the 1999 World Cup, which was one of the watershed moments in U.S. women’s sports. “Now, there are hundreds. I see the growth there.
“And I see it in youth sports. So many more girls have the opportunity to play. We are getting somewhere.”
But after college, there aren’t many places for women to pursue pro sports careers. Since 1991, there have been just seven professional sports leagues for women in the United States. Three of them — the WNBA, the National Pro Fastpitch league and the National Women’s Soccer League — exist, and only the WNBA has a national TV contract.
With so few options, many female athletes are forced to choose other career paths after college or national team careers.
That was the case for Houston native and former University of Texas standout Christa Williams-Yates, who won two gold medals with the U.S. softball
“When I played, there were a handful of colleges you could go to and get a scholarship. Now, there are hundreds. I see the growth there. And I see it in youth sports. So many more girls have the opportunity to play.” Brandi Chastain, former pro soccer player “I would like to see men, women, diverse groups of people supporting women’s sports. I would like to see no stigma attached to girls who play sports, and that’s not just here in the United States, that’s globally.” Chiney Ogwumike, WNBA player and former Cy-Fair and Stanford standout
team in 1996 and 2000 but her pro career was short-lived. Unable to make a living, she turned to high school coaching.
“I want my kids to be able to play at the next level and enjoy it the way a professional baseball player would,” Williams-Yates said. “I would have given anything to play the sport I loved and worked so hard at and be able to live off that because it was your whole life. You grew up doing that, just like guys did.
Williams-Yates was a part of what was one of women’s sports biggest milestones — the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
That was the year softball was in the Olympics for the first time. Williams and her teammates won the gold medal and had a country rally around them and their sport.
That was the case across the board, as U.S. women won team gold medals in soccer and basketball and dominated individual sports like swimming, gymnastics and tennis.
Female athletes were household names, they were on the covers of magazines, featured on sports broadcasts. They were signing autographs and posing for pictures.
WNBA success
The WNBA, with the marketing theme “We Got Next,” was formed in 1997 with the backing of the NBA. Its success has fluctuated, beginning with eight teams, expanding to 16 and dropping to the current 12. The Comets, who won the league’s first four titles, attracted crowds of more than 12,000 in two of those seasons but were down to 6,500 by the time they disbanded in 2008 because they couldn’t find new ownership. League attendance last season averaged 7,500, with an average of about 240,000 watching games on ESPN. The results were encouraging enough for the league to sign a nine-year deal with Disney and Turner.
But even with a new TV deal, salaries in the WNBA can’t always hold the top stars. The league average is $72,000, but former Baylor star Brittney Griner spent an offseason in China where she earned $600,000 for four months. And 2014 WNBA Finals MVP Diana Taurasi will skip this season and her $107,000 salary to rest at the request of her Russian team that pays her $1.5 million.
Even with those examples, the WNBA is the exception for women’s pro leagues in the U.S.
The National Women’s Soccer League has nine teams — including the Dash — and the salaries range from $6,800 to $37,800. Many players live with local families during the season to help make ends meet. The Dash’s Morgan Brian and Meghan Klingenberg, who are competing in the World Cup, live in Houston with former Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy’s family.
Pro soccer struggles
When they return to the Dash after the World Cup, they will rejoin a league that averages 4,137 in attendance and has only six of its regular-season games carried by a national television network. A far cry from the 3.3 million average for their opening games in the World Cup on Fox Sports 1.
In softball, only five pro teams remain and the salaries range from $4,000 to $25,000 a season, which runs during the summer months.
The story is different in the individual sports.
The LPGA has high payouts throughout the year for golfers. Some tennis players and marathon runners make the same amount of money as their male counterparts for the top events.
Endorsements and sponsorships also can help the select few who get them. Team USA soccer forward Alex Morgan is set to make several million dollars through endorsements with Panasonic, Coca-Cola and Nike, for example.
And there are women who are finding their places in the men’s game. The San Antonio Spurs hired former WNBA player Becky Hammon as an assistant coach. Melissa Mayeux, a 16-year old shortstop on the French national under-18 baseball team became the first female added to the MLB International Registration list last week.
“You can see progress,” Williams-Yates said. “I just hope and pray that we can bond together and continue it. It makes me sad because we all work our butts off so hard to be athletes. The gender doesn’t matter.”
Changes on horizon
The barriers are there, but they are being torn down.
Former Cy-Fair and Stanford standout Chiney Ogwumike said the opportunities for women in sports are there and she expects they will grow.
For now, though, she said females need to go into the sports they play with all the heart and determination their male peers would, but they also need a dose of reality to go with it.
“You can’t just sit around and say ‘Man, I wish I got paid more; man, I wish there was more profit,’ ” said Ogwumike, the WNBA Rookie of the Year in 2014. “You have to look at the landscape, be smart and plan accordingly.
“Think ‘I know that I can get a scholarship if I put myself in a good position and try my best. I have a chance for a scholarship and to have my education paid for with sports. I have a chance, depending on if there is a pro league — I could play here, I could play overseas.’ You have a chance to broaden your horizons. It may not be the same way that men do, but you do have a way to really use sports to propel your life.”
Ogwumike understands that her playing career has a shelf life, but she hopes she can help the WNBA grow, help bring in fans and continue to be a role model to a younger generation of players — a generation she hopes will have fewer barriers.
She said that growing up, people questioned why she and her sisters played sports. There was a stigma for females who played. Those labels have gone back for years, long before Title IX.
Stigma fading
“Female athletes who were great athletes, especially in team sports, they were stigmatized often for being too manly, for not being feminine enough,” Kane said. “You have an entire culture that says to men that being a man is about being an athlete. At the same time, we are telling young females if you want to be an athlete, what’s wrong with you. So not only was there no support for a young female athlete, she was stigmatized.”
Ogwumike has seen a lot of change, and she wants to see more. She, too, is excited for the World Cup, but she hopes soccer can use the popularity of the event to get more fans on board to watch women at the professional level.
Ogwumike is positive that it will happen. She expects to see growth from top to bottom for female athletes. In 20 years from now, she hopes it will be a completely different landscape.
“I would like to see men, women, diverse groups of people supporting women’s sports. I would like to see no stigma attached to girls who play sports, and that’s not just here in the United States, that is globally,” Ogwumike said. “I want to see us eradicate that stereotype because sports can bring so much.
“I want to see people using their platform to effect change. We need to take girls sports into our hands. At the highest levels, girls sports are run by men. Whether AAU, high school, we need to get ownership of our game and get involved and give back as much as the sport has given us.”