From basketball and biking to snowboarding and fast-pitch softball, women are playing and watching sports as never before. They are a vast new market in the sports-crazy United States, and in the coming months corporate America will mount an unprecedented effort to tap them. But how do you reach women jocks? Just because a woman goes mountain biking on weekends, does that mean she wants to read athlete profiles in one of the slew of new sports magazines soon to be published? Or will females be interested in watching sister athletes’ techniques being dissected on dozens of new TV sports programs devoted to them? Because little girls are sporting the telltale cornrows of NCAA basketball star Rebecca Lobo, will they be faithful enough fans to support one of the two new women’s professional leagues? All these ventures are huge gambles (another athletic tradition). “Is there a body of women interested enough in sports to support all this?” asks Donald Elliman, president of Sports Illustrated, which will also be wooing female consumers. “No one knows.”
The backers of these businesses have one thing right: for the first time in American history there is a critical mass of sports-minded women. When Congress passed Title IX of the Civil Rights Act in 1972, prohibiting schools from discriminating by gender in sports, money for scholarships, coaching and equipment began flowing toward women’s athletics. The effect has been stunning: the ratio of high-school girls on teams has risen from 1 in 27 then to 1 in 3 today. The first wave of “Title IX babies” demonstrated their might during the 1996 Summer Olympics. And women didn’t just deliver gold on the field; a 40 percent increase in female viewers age 18-34 powered NBC to record ratings.
But fans who tune in for just the big events won’t be enough to keep these ventures afloat; women will have to eat, drink and breathe sports like, well, men. Consider that four different attempts to found a women’s basketball league have been made in the last two decades–and failed. True, the WNBA, which will debut this June, already boasts television contracts with NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. But the national audience for women’s basketball is still more than 55 percent male. Organizers of the new women’s basketball leagues know that NBA-style success will require NBA-caliber female fans. WNBA president Val Ackerman hopes to get girls who would have once played with dolls to read the sports pages instead: “Girls 7 to 17 are our priority target.”
Most female players are grateful for the opportunity, even if the future is uncertain. Before she learned of plans for the WNBA last May, Olympian Rebecca Lobo says, “I thought I was going to come back from Europe [where she would have played ball this winter] for a 9-to-5 job.” She can’t help adding, however, that her salary with the yet-to-be-named WNBA New York franchise is “still far from the million-dollar mark.” But Lisa Leslie, another former Olympian with a WNBA gig, is optimistic about her colleagues’ future earnings. She argues that female players will become increasingly attractive to sponsors because of their clean images. “Men,” she says, alluding to scandals involving male sports stars, “have gotten out of hand.”
No supermodels: Male-oriented sports magazines like Sports Illustrated and Outside have seen their female readership increase by as much as 15 percent over the last five years. They believe they can win over still more women if they offer publications geared just to them–ones that men, by the way, aren’t expected to read. Female readers of SI list football as their favorite sport, but Sandy Bailey, editor of SI Woman–a test issue of the quarterly will appear on newsstands in April–says that’s because SI hasn’t offered them anything else. Instead Bailey is going to give her readers less of the “big four” sports and fewer stats, featuring topics like abusive coaches and tennis fathers, as well as hands-on celebrity advice about working out, like IN THE GYM WITH PICABO STREET: BUILDING A STRONGER LOWER BODY. But she wants to be clear that this is not just some women’s magazine in sports drag: “We are not about supermodels on bikes.”
In fact, many of the women publishing the new female sports books are contemptuous of the traditional women’s mags’ emphasis on unattainable beauty–yet they can’t ignore it altogether. Sure, CondE Nast Sports for Women (October ‘97) has lined up top-jock contributors, including Martina Navratilova and Gabrielle Reece. And editor Lucy Danziger insists she is aiming at readers more interested in buffing up than in making themselves over. Still, her publisher, Deanne Brown, readily admits, Sports for Women is going to have to meet the very high esthetic standards of the rest of the industry. “That doesn’t mean if a female athlete was ugly we wouldn’t put her in the book,” Brown explains, “just not on the cover.” In that one, time-honored way, women’s sports still has a long way to go.
