No Support for Women Sport

Women’s professional sports do not get the coverage necessary to sustain a profitable business. Actually, the only coverage of women’s sports I have seen on ESPN or any network station is the WNBA, and they still get minimal coverage in non-prime time slots. The WNBA finals just finished Friday, the Phoenix Mercury beat the Indiana Fever in 5 games. I had no idea the WNBA playoffs were going on until the finals when ESPN would show highlight of the games. That’s about the only coverage the games got, I saw no commercials advertizing the games this year where in the past years I remember advertisements for the games. There are several reasons I can see that account for women professional sports, mainly the WNBA, failing to generate a profit.
The state of the economy doesn’t help women sports at all. The main audience of the WNBA is women. With the economy in shambles many women have had to go back to work and stop going to games, and they have to save money and stop buying apparel. The same is true for men’s sports, but the difference is that men’s sports has built up a huge fan base where minor changes in support have way less effect. Women’s sports are still fairly new, when the NBA, NFL, and MLB first started they weren’t making any profit either they had to build a fan base.
The lack of coverage hinders the building of a fan base. Without people being able to watch and see the games they can’t get into it and follow it just based off of box scores and stat lines they read online or in newspapers. There isn’t enough coverage because TV stations are businesses and are trying to make money. TV stations will get low ratings when they show games that have a low number of people willing to watch them meaning less money. It’s an unfair system that seems to have no hope for equal coverage for leagues like the WNBA until they build enough of a fan base on their own without TV.
Several WNBA teams have already gone bankrupt. It is an unfortunate and sad reality that women professional sports are unlikely to ever be profitable in America. If it were not for the NBA supporting the WNBA it would already be another failed league like the Arena Football League, the XFL, and the American Basketball League. There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to making women’s professional sports profitable.
-Eric Fenzke
-Kin338I sec 06