It’s time to give women’s basketball the respect it deserves
With the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament now wrapped up (congratulations Stanford), and the WNBA getting set to kick start their historic 25th season, it seems like interest in women’s basketball is exceptionally high right now.
It’s no secret that the sport has grown exponentially in recent years. Stars like Sue Bird, Breonna Stewart, Candace Parker, and A’ja Wilson, just to name a few, have certainly helped in that department.
Despite this growth in the game, we are yet again in a position of needing to defend women’s basketball against false information, both blatant and subtle discrimination, and condescension from those who know little about it.
It’s not just the drastic discrepancy in training resources provided to the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, or Shaq telling a WNBA superstar that if the nets were lower and players could dunk, more people would watch. It’s the fact that we still need to have these conversations. No matter how much progress this game has made, we are often brought right back to square one in the public eye.
It’s time to dispel some of these common arguments (or myths) against women’s basketball, and give this sport the respect it deserves.
Myth #1: Women’s basketball doesn’t make any money
*Cracks knuckles… Here we go.
This was often the first sentence that came out of people’s mouths when Sedona Prince’s video went viral. In it, she highlights the less-than-stellar weight room (aka a weight tree and a few yoga matts) for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, and the Olympic-level weight room provided to the men.
“Well if the women’s tournament makes less money, there is less money to put into it,” detractors often said.
It’s almost difficult to capture the degree to which this argument is misinformed. Let’s start with the fact that the NCAA is, as we are often reminded, not about making money (or paying their athletes). They are focused on putting money and resources back into the game. So if we pretend that the argument of women’s basketball not making any money is true (which it’s not), that shouldn’t even be a factor here.
If the NCAA’s focus is always on putting money back into the sport, rather than turning a profit, shouldn’t that money go towards equitable training resources for half of its athletes? After all, how do you expect a sport to make money if the athletes are not given the resources they need to be at the top of their game?
Now, let’s talk about women’s basketball “not making money.” As the Washington Post pointed out during the tournament, there is zero evidence to support this argument. The NCAA keeps telling the public that it takes a loss on women’s basketball (coming from an organization that is not supposed to be focused on making a profit). But when independent analysts look at the financial information available to them, this just isn’t true. For example, the NCAA D1 women’s basketball produced almost $1 billion in revenue in 2018-19.
Sally Jenkins, the writer of the Washington Post article, goes on to list the 77 companies who have advertising space during this year’s women’s tournament, and the over 3.6 million viewers who tuned into the championship game between Baylor and Notre Dame in 2019. It’s just not feasible that this tournament makes no money.
Why would the NCAA want people to believe that women’s basketball makes no money? Well, it helps to have people defending you when you fall into a PR nightmare like the one they saw at the beginning of the tournament. The more the public believes this sport doesn’t turn a profit, the less likely they are to ask serious questions of the NCAA regarding discrepancy in resources.
This feels like the tip of the iceberg, but in the last two weeks alone, we’ve seen this myth dispelled. It’s time to move past it, as unfortunately, it’s not the only one.
Myth #2: Women’s basketball isn’t as entertaining as men’s basketball
Let’s get one thing out of the way: entertainment level, by nature, is subjective. If you do not like basketball at all, that’s fine. No one is forcing you to watch. But unfortunately, this is often a sweeping generalization made about women’s sports whenever they make news. To say that women’s basketball isn’t as entertaining as the men’s game is not only inaccurate, but also unfair.
We cannot pretend that the comparison of men’s and women’s basketball is an equal one. It’s not apples to apples, in terms of training resources, funding, marketing efforts, storytelling… the list goes on. The NCAA weight room blunder was just one example of women receiving far fewer resources than their male counterparts. No one expected these athletes to call out the NCAA, because for far too long, women have settled for whatever they are given. Not any more.
As Megan Rapinoe said during her trip to the White House for Equal Pay Day: “With a lack of proper funding, we don’t really know the potential of women’s sports. What we do know is how successful women’s sports have been in the face of discrimination.”
It is not a fair argument to say that one sport is better than the other, when one sport is given a mountain of resources, and the other gets an ant hill at best.
Finally, this bold, sweeping, generalization to an entire sport based on something incredibly subjective, is also untrue. We need look no further than this year’s NCAA Women’s Basketball tournament alone. The Baylor vs. UConn Elite Eight matchup, if not a wild ride by itself, ended in a controversial non-call, potentially costing Baylor the game. Let’s not forget the Freshman Showdown between Caitlin Clark of Iowa and Paige Bueckers of UConn in the Sweet 16. Or Aari McDonald’s dominant performance in the Final Four to help Arizona get into to the finals.
And if you want to look a few years back, we can’t leave out Sue Bird’s buzzer beater for UConn over Notre Dame for the Big East Title. Rumour has it, she went on to have a pretty successful and entertaining career.
If you don’t find entertainment in games and moments like these, then you will not find sports (or life for that matter) all that entertaining. But let’s stop pretending like this argument carries any water, because there are holes throughout it, and water is everywhere!
Myth #3: More people would watch women’s basketball if players dunked more
Does this argument give anyone else a headache? Just me and Candace Parker? Ok.
Much like the previous arguments, it seems like this one just keeps creeping up. It often comes from those who watch little to no women’s basketball… interesting.
The most recent example was Shaq’s comments on Inside the NBA on TNT. Shaq, thinking he had come up with the revolutionary idea that would fix women’s basketball for good, suggested maybe they should lower the rim so that players could dunk more.
Candace Parker was having none of it, and quickly shut this down by informing Shaq that opportunity is coming, and that women’s basketball players would be dunking very soon. “My next child will be drop-step dunking. I promise you,” said Parker.
Parker, a first overall pick, WNBA champion, All-Star, MVP, and Olympic Gold Medalist knows a thing or two about basketball and the future of the game. But in case her argument isn’t enough, here are a few others:
- Dunking does happen in women’s basketball, as Sedona Prince recently reminded us in the NCAA tournament.
- With the speed and finesse of women’s basketball, the game is much more focused on three-point FGs, which is where men’s and women’s basketball in general seems to be shifting anyways. You don’t need a dunk every few seconds for the games to be entertaining (see argument number 2, above).
- Let’s not pretend that the people making this argument would watch women’s basketball if the players were dunking. So often, those who never watch the game give “no dunking” as their reason for not watching. But if there were more dunking, would they watch?
Myth #4: No one watches women’s basketball
Much like the previous points, this is objectively not true. For starters, in a year where most major sports leagues struggled with decreased viewership (probably because of that thing called a global pandemic), the WNBA went in the opposite direction, seeing their viewership increase.
According to ESPN, The 2020 WNBA finals saw a 15 percent increase in overall viewership over 2019. This also included a 34 percent increase over the previous year for Game 3 of the finals, which saw the Seattle Storm win their fourth WNBA title, over the Las Vegas Aces. Game 3 in 2020 also saw a 27 percent increase in viewership over Game 5 of the finals in 2019, which saw the Washington Mystics take home the title. So in title-clinching games, viewership was still up.
Average viewership for the season was up 68 percent, largely due to the fact that a record 87 games were televised during the 2020 season.
What does this tell us? If you build it, they will come. Meaning, if you put the WNBA on television, people will watch! It’s fairly simple.
In case that wasn’t enough to convince you that people watch women’s basketball, ESPN announced this week that 4.1 million viewers tuned into the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament final in which Stanford defeated Arizona. Now just imagine what would have happened if they were given anywhere near the marketing and promotional resources that are available to the men’s tournament, or if they were given the rights to the March Madness brand. People are still tuning into women’s basketball, in spite of the discrimination that this sport consistantly faces.
People want to watch women’s basketball, but for too long it was difficult to find, with so few WNBA and NCAA women’s games being televised. You would need to be a die-hard WNBA fan to actively search out games, whereas casual NBA fans can just turn on the TV and easily find any game they want. When the same thing happens for women’s basketball, people watch.
In addition to traditional TV viewership, the WNBA and women’s basketball overall has proven to be a major influence through online channels as well. We all saw how one video from Sedona Prince sent the NCAA into crisis mode. The WNBA, no slouch in this department, also helped influence the outcome of a congressional election, which saw the Atlanta Dream’s co-owner Kelly Loeffler unseated in favour of Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
The WNBA’s commitment to social justice cannot be understated either. Dedicating their entire 2020 season to social justice, creating a new platform The Justice Movement, as well as a social justice council. Not only does this league have influence, but they are also pointing it in the right direction as well.
But as much as viewership and influence of women’s basketball has increased, people still come back to that uninformed argument of “no one is watching.” Aside from the fact that this is objectively untrue, it’s also blaming the sport and its athletes for the systemic unfair treatment that the sport receives.
Much like with training resources mentioned earlier, women’s basketball (and women’s sports in general) is not given the same marketing efforts as men’s basketball. Networks don’t promote the women’s game to anywhere near the same extent that they do the men’s game, despite the aforementioned sponsorship dollars coming in for the women’s game. The NCAA even withholds the March Madness brand from women’s basketball. Add to this the general discrepancy in overall resources between the men’s and women’s tournament, and you are looking at an unfair comparison from start to finish.
When the playing field is equal, then we can have the discussion of viewership. But we know this much: despite facing consistent discrimination, women’s basketball has only grown in viewership. Imagine what would happen if they weren’t being actively held back.
Very few sports have seen the growth in interest that women’s basketball has in recent years, but there is still much room to grow, and a lot of work to do. Some promising signs have already emerged, with the creation of the media company Togethxr (founded by Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, and Simone Manuel) which focuses on sharing compelling and diverse stories from the world of culture and sport.
But it’s time we stop standing in the way of female basketball players, and give them the respect they deserve. People watch. People care. These athletes just need a fair playing field, and then let’s see what happens.
-Michaela Schreiter
Twitter: @schreids