Two WNBA franchises folded after the 2002 season. The PWBA, the women’s pro bowling league, went out of business, at least temporarily, in August.
And Monday, the three-year-old women’s professional soccer league, the WUSA, birthed from the excitement of the Women’s World Cup just a few glorious summers ago, called it a go.
Will the last woman to leave the locker room please turn out the lights?
“We can’t forget that mass participation of women in sport in the USA is only 30 years old, in its infancy,” Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano said in a statement released Tuesday. “There will be leagues that make it and leagues that don’t, just as there were men’s leagues that made it and many that didn’t.”
The sad cold truth about women’s pro leagues, however, is that none are making it, for whatever reasons.
One would think that the worldwide attention Annika Sorenstam received earlier this season was a sign of how well women’s golf is doing. It was not. She was a curiosity for a couple of days by daring to play with the men at the Colonial. Meanwhile, the LPGA was down from 35 tournaments just two years ago to 31 this season.
The WNBA exists almost solely on the welfare of the NBA.
A couple of years ago, some investors in Canada rolled out WTSN, an all-women’s sports television network. It was all-digital, the latest in technology. Its last day on the air will be the end of this month. Why? Why else? No one was watching. Not enough subscribers or advertisers.
That kind of sums up the problem with women’s professional sports. They are like a tree falling in the woods when nobody is around. They don’t make any noise.
Did you know that the deciding game of the WNBA Finals tipped off Tuesday night? Or who was in it? Or where it was played? Or on what channel you could’ve watched it?
Did you know that the World Cup of women’s soccer kicks off later this month? Did you know it is in this country, again? You do remember it was here in 1999, don’t you?
“It’s a shame,” Texas women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky said. “The product isn’t the issue. It’s the disposable income. It’s a battle (for it) when you’re not the only game in town.”
And the economy is lousy these days to boot.
“I think that the most critical challenge for women’s pro sports will be lack of a television package with sufficient reach to draw top corporate sponsors,” Lopiano said.
“There is such a glut of men’s sports on TV now, most under long-term contracts with huge rights fees investments on the part of television carriers, that there’s no room for women’s sports to grow in this critical medium. This is the puzzle that needs to be solved.”
But how do you turn these supposedly chauvinistic network executives into levelheaded broadcasters if there is no evidence that even lots of women want to watch other their own play pro sports?
TV networks aren’t going to televise games that advertisers won’t support. It may be time that women who want to see women play sports protest against all the consumer product companies that turn their backs on women’s sports. But TV networks aren’t going to show up if women don’t build a critical mass. Women’s pro sports don’t have the built-in loyalty that colleges provide their women’s games.
Take, for example, the Detroit Shock, which won the WNBA title on Tuesday night. After going from last in 2002 to first this season, the Shock faced early-round elimination at home earlier this month. It attracted a “crowd” of 6,000, according to officials. A columnist on the scene figured maybe 2,000 people turned out.
That’s not going to sustain women’s pro sports. The apathy among potential women supporters of women’s sports isn’t just embarrassing. It is disrespectful, too.
After all, many of the women who play pro sports, especially at the team level, are doing so at a sacrifice. Before the WUSA folded, CEO Lynn Morgan asked her marquee players to take pay cuts of up to 25 percent. The women acceded. Pink slips were their reward.
And what did other women, all those soccer moms, as well as fathers of little girls, get out of this? They got an evening’s broken heart to broken heart chat with their little girls who dreamed like their brothers of some day growing up to play pro ball.
At least girls know now that they’d better continue to take the “free” education an athletic scholarship provides very seriously, for reports about the demise of professional women’s sports leagues are not exaggerated.
Maybe Oprah ought to start a sports club.

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