I’m surprised no one within Google’s almighty reach has invented the word “entitleninement.” A couple of generations into the Title IX-fed growth of women’s sports in the USA, we’re still seeing a few patronizing attitudes.
The College Sports Council often resorts to disingenuous arguments about the impact of Title IX. Internationally, we see many more opportunities for women in Olympic sports, yet women’s ski jumpers have been kept out of the Olympics with arguments ranging from the condescending to the absurd.
Yet the CSC makes a few legitimate points as well, and it takes pains to distinguish its fight to save men’s sports from a fight to deny women opportunities. And within women’s sports, and Olympic sports as a whole, we’re seeing more of a realization of the difficulties of building and maintaining pro competition.
All of which makes softball player Jessica Mendoza’s post for ESPNW rather curious. She explains why she and other U.S. national team players have decided to concentrate on building a pro league rather than playing for the national team, which no longer has an Olympic presence every four years.
The key paragraph:
As much as I want to see softball return to the Olympic Games, there is something this sport needs even more: an opportunity for women to play softball for a living. Not as a side job. Not just recreationally. Instead, they should be able to make a living playing the sport they love so dearly. Softball players shouldn’t have to stop playing at age 22 because there are so few opportunities out there. And they shouldn’t have to live abroad, like basketball players did in the pre-WNBA era, because only other countries’ pro leagues are willing to pay them to play. I have seen more and more women in other sports (snowboarding, basketball, tennis, BMX and golf, to name a few) create opportunities to play for a living because of the professional opportunities they, and sponsors, have created. My dream now is to create these same professional opportunities for every young softball player out there.
That’s ambitious. But is it realistic?
Mendoza cites Billie Jean King as a mentor and gives a brief history of the women’s tennis movement that has proved so successful. Snowboarding also has women’s stars alongside men’s stars, and many Olympic sports have women whose fame and fortune hardly lags their male counterparts. Think Lindsey Vonn, Michelle Kwan, Allyson Felix, Dara Torres, Kerri Walsh, etc.
But at the same time, the LPGA is limping along. Women’s soccer is trying to re-entrench itself in a smaller niche. And most women’s basketball players still go overseas in the WNBA offseason because they’re not raking in the dough while the league tries to keep the ship steady in the USA.
Softball deserves better than it got from the IOC, which has made a mockery of its supposed gender-equity aspirations. But after covering the WPS draft last week in a mid-sized convention room with no players present, I’m not sure I could be bullish on another women’s sports league starting from scratch. And you won’t see any soccer players this summer turning down an invitation to the World Cup to give 110 percent for Sky Blue FC or magicTalk SC / Washington Freedom. WPS made it to a third season only through a couple of owners’ determination to persevere and a couple of new owners’ enthusiasm for moving up to the highest level and, in the case of MTSCWF, promoting a brand name.
If National Pro Fastpitch succeeds, it’ll need either a few benefactors who believe in some combination of the sport itself and the opportunity to get some marketing/self-satisfaction from attaching brand names to it. It won’t succeed merely because that would be the fairest outcome for 22-year-old college softball standouts who somehow deserve a chance to devote themselves fully to their sport. Plenty of people have talents that can’t pay all the bills — in Olympic sports, mixed martial arts, music, creative writing, art … even journalism.
The question will be: How many professional softball players can the USA support? In women’s soccer, we can easily support a national team of 25-30 full-time players, and we’re working on pushing that number to a couple hundred. In beach volleyball, both men’s and women’s, the AVP’s demise has reduced the opportunities so that just a couple of elite teams playing internationally have much of a chance.
Creative solutions can help. Americans are lucky to have college scholarships to provide training environments and an education. Sometimes, an employer like Home Depot comes up with a program to give Olympians flexible jobs to let them work and compete.
Nothing wrong with aiming for full-time professionalism. But staying open to creative business plans will surely increase pro softball’s chances.
Duresport.com 
I think that concept really applies to anything that is a niche sport male or female. Let’s face it, if its not a popular Olympic, X-Game or collegiate sport with network television, the odds are extremely difficult.
Beau–great post.
From the data I’ve seen, the single biggest problem with Women’s professional sports (from softball to basketball to soccer) is that they don’t draw enough female fans to be successful. They draw some male fans. But the explanation I’ve seen on this is that the culture for sports in this country just doesn’t produce enough women who’s idea of a good evening is to stay home along and watch the ole ballgame. There are lots of women who go to games and may even consider themselves fanatics but they tend to be driven by relationships (ie: go b/c a boyfriend/husband/brother is going, watch the game instead of going out b/c friends came over to watch the game). Certainly there are exceptions to this. But the challenge (about drawing more fans) means that either:
(a) women’s professional sports need to draw a lot more men (to the point that there are more men in the stands then women) and that’s problematic. I’ve been to Freedom games before but if I had a choice, I’d go to a DC United match first. So there would have to be a reason why men would really be drawn to that particular sport. It can’t be b/c of winning (b/c for a UConn’s women basketball to win 80+ games, there are a bunch of schools losing). For a long time, many sports argued that they’d draw youth players (NASL in particular) and they’d be the “fans of tomorrow” but that hasn’t been a direct correlation (some people play a sport as a youth and then walk away from it later). This has been especially true of a lot of women’s sports where the demographic research seems to show that around HS, a lot of youth players (the data I’ve seen is for soccer) suddenly find it “not cool” to be a fan of the sport and enthusiasm for going to games wanes. So one option is to get men to go to games–significantly more men than at present. Or…(b) remake the culture we have in this country around women and sports fandom. And that’s pretty tough. B/c it’s not just publicizing a team or getting some players that connect with a fan base (like Mia Hamm for instance). It’s about getting to the value system of lots of girls and then women so their idea of a good time is watching the game (on TV or in person) and they do it individually (not to socialize or be with friends who are doing it). Selling a sport to a guy (to be a fan) tends to be a lot easier than it is to a woman (even though there is, arguably, more competition for a male sports fan’s attention).
Mentioning the College Sports Council in the context of this post is a non sequitur. The CSC has gone to pains to point out that its focus is reforming Title IX enforcement so colleges and universities have more flexibility in complying with the law—a topic that has nothing whatsoever to do with the economic viability of women’s professional sports.
As for your contention about our soccer study, I’ll restate our thesis for your readers. If you look at the participation numbers in Division I NCAA Soccer, you’ll find that the women’s game is far larger than the men’s game by any reliable measure. Why is this? From the CSC’s point of view, the massive disparity in teams and athletes stems from a 1996 decision by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to create a safe harbor for the use of proportionality in complying with Title IX. As a result, schools looking to boost the number of female athletes added soccer teams in droves.
On the other side of the ledger, however, the widespread use of proportionality to comply with the law has had the opposite effect on the men’s game. Handcuffed by a gender quota, schools simply couldn’t add men’s teams without running afoul of the law or any one of a number of trial lawyers looking to score a big out of court settlement against an organization with deep pockets. The result: the men’s game at the Division I level hasn’t grown at all over the same period. To see the disparity in pictures, click the following link for some charts and graphs that the CSC prepared. Please keep in mind that all of the numbers you see in these charts come directly from the NCAA:
http://savingsports.blogspot.com/2010/06/soccer-opportunity-gap-in-pictures.html
You’ve called that argument “disingenuous,” something you’ve done before in private exchanges with me. Then again, you’ve never explained why you think this is the case. So I’ll ask again: how would you explain the numerical disparity between the men’s and women’s game in Division I?
Eric, thanks for prompting me to clarify. As I mentioned to you in those exchanges with you, I find that argument disingenuous when it’s applied to the World Cup. The numerical disparity between men’s and women’s soccer is certainly real — the scholarship limit itself differs between the genders.
And I’d agree that it’s counterproductive to rely so heavily on proportionality. The effect is that schools that already attract more women than men (think North Carolina) have to add women’s sports programs, as if they’re somehow failing to do enough for women. Meanwhile, Georgia Tech can skate by without a women’s soccer team, when you’d think Georgia Tech should be under pressure to get more women on campus somehow. (Maybe the band would be less geeky.)
But it’s also counterproductive to raise the college soccer issue in relation to international soccer. The U.S. Development Academy is pulling hundreds of boys with soccer potential into a professional environment. Any boys who excel in that environment will have options to go pro immediately in MLS or elsewhere. That’s going to account for more than half of the U.S. national team before too long — already, most of them spent less than four years in college. So the gender inequity in college isn’t hurting the men’s national team, and if you add the academy programs to college, the gender inequity as a whole looks smaller.
So it’s that sort of argument, which might win over someone in Congress but not someone intimately familiar with the issues, that ruins my trust in the CSC.
And still, I took pains in this post to say the following:
“Yet the CSC makes a few legitimate points as well, and it takes pains to distinguish its fight to save men’s sports from a fight to deny women opportunities.”
The CSC isn’t inherently evil, and it need not be positioned as an adversary as women’s sports. I know the CSC supports women’s ski jumping (though a timely press release on that subject would help). But the group needs to be open to constructive criticism. I get the sense that it’s losing most of its battles precisely because it’s picking the wrong ones.
Beau, you’re accusing the CSC of something it didn’t do. We never drew any bright line connection between the disparities in NCAA Division I and international soccer. Our concern with NCAA Division I Soccer begins and ends with participation.
If you don’t believe me, go back to our original release and take a look:
http://savingsports.blogspot.com/2010/06/csc-study-on-ncaa-soccer-highlights.html
Beau, the CSC is happy to engage in debate with any and all comers. The problem we have is that many reporters and editors like you either ignore our organization’s position on Title IX enforcement or willingly mischaracterize our positions—which is exactly what you did with this post.
Meanwhile, over the past week, three more men’s teams were eliminated (Track and X-Country at Delaware and Track at Bemidji State) to help schools better comply with Title IX’s gender quota. It’s a shame that there’s not more room for those athletes and their stories in the Sports Myriad.
Eric, please tell me how I was supposed to ignore the connection between the World Cup and college soccer in this post:
http://savingsports.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-title-ix-is-strangling-mens-college.html
Or why the World Cup was mentioned in the first paragraph here:
http://collegesportscouncil.org/newsroom/display_releases.cfm?id=31
Or this blog post thanking Charlotte Allen for “taking notice of our study and its implications” when she explicitly made the point that Title IX will lead to the decline of the men’s national team:
http://savingsports.blogspot.com/2010/06/csc-soccer-study-gets-wider-notice.html
Eric, I respect you, and I respect the need to argue against the elimination of programs such as those at Delaware and Bemidji State. I simply don’t think these arguments help. And rather than put the impetus for spreading the word on those of us with blogs that generate maybe $2.15 in monthly revenue, all while accusing us of mischaracterizing your position, why not try another approach to see if it might be more effective? Frankly, I need to get back to work.
One of those occasions when the comments are as instructive as the blog post itself – thanks.
Softball itself will be a tough go I think – lost of reasons, one of which being folks fancy themselves softball players. Most pro sports are things with which you engage and about which you know you cannot compete at the same level; I doubt softball would be the same way.
Eric – Maybe CSC should look at the NCAA picture as a whole and not just women’s sport X vs. men’s sport X as you do in the soccer post. If you want to get that specific why isn’t their women’s football with 80+ scholarship players for only 50+ rosters spots on game day? The ridiculous amount of scholarships allowed for Men’s football is what crowds out scholarship opportunities in other men’s sports not the scholarship opportunities in women’s sporting programs. I imagine that when Delaware looked at its options for saving money in its athletic programs it never onced considered lowering the number of scholarships in its football program. The title IX excuse is just that a convenient excuse for cutting non revenue producing sports to dedicate more money to revenue producing sports. If it wasn’t for title IX women wouldn’t have the opportunity to compete in the sports they do have. The kicker in your post is that when it comes down to cutting costs those same men’s programs would have still been cut regardless of title IX. Its unfortunate that the NCAA says its for student-athletes, but really is all about the $$$ when it counts and that US sports fans’ preference is only for a small number of sports which limits that profitability. What all these schools are really doing is not limiting men’s or women’s ability to compete in general, but limiting what sports they want them to compete in. Maybe if your blog posts focused more on the diminishing range of athletic opportunities in general it would read more true to the cause.