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Playing Like a Girl

Transforming Our Lives Through Team Sports

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

GETTING INTO THE GAME

"This is changing the landscape of America."

— Tipper Gore speaking on TV about a WNBA All-Star Game and the Women's World Cup soccer championship, July 14, 1999

Four million dollars. That's what gamblers plunked down on the 1999–2000 NCAA final basketball game between the University of Connecticut and the University of Tennessee. That was the most legal bets ever made on a women's sporting event according to Sports Illustrated for Women magazine. What could be more telling about how women's team sports have captured the American mainstream imagination? Unless it's the recent and first Nintendo video game featuring a female team athlete, Mia Hamm, who is now as popular among teens of both sexes as Michael Jordan, according to recent consumer polls.

The pundits who said nobody would pay to watch women play sports certainly have plenty of egg on their face since record crowds attend women's basketball and soccer games. The attention to Women's World Cup soccer was not a surprise to anyone following the trend of growing audiences at professional WNBA games and women's college games. Television executives are falling over each other to buy into the phenomenon of so many millions of people watching women run and jump and sweat and knock each other down on TV. Women's college athletic programs are booming, and new women's professional leagues are blooming.

Women now account for 37 percent of college athletes, and in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, 44 percent of the competing athletes were women. In 1996 and 1998 U.S. Olympic women's teams brought home the gold for hockey, basketball, softball, and soccer.

More than 90,000 people filled a Palo Alto, California, stadium on July 10, 1999, for the Women's World Cup in soccer. Another 4 million were tuned in to the television coverage and 500 reporters covered the game. In contrast, a broadcast on the same day of a men's baseball game in Philadelphia showed empty stands.

Nearly 2 million fans attended WNBA games in 1999, with average attendance around 10,000 and higher for games between combative rivals like the New York Liberty and the Houston Comets, which draw nearly 20,000 fans and are sold out as soon as they are announced. It took the men of the NBA 28 years to get 10,000 fans to a game. The WNBA did it in two. Television viewers were up to 50 million in 1999, 1 million more than the previous year. WNBA president Val Ackerman announced in 2000 that 2.5 million viewers a week are tuned in to the WNBA on NBC, ESPN, or Lifetime Television for Women.

Attendance at women's college basketball games tripled from 1984 to a high of 5.2 million in 1996. The women's college basketball finals had three times the Nielsen rating of men's hockey at the same broadcast time in 1999 and 14 percent better ratings than NBC men's professional basketball games (not to mention an increase in the number of gamblers, for whom there isn't a reliable rating system).

The success of the Women's National Soccer Team has also prompted colleges and universities to put up more money for women's soccer. Some call it the Title IX equivalent to football and now see women's soccer as a revenue-producing sport. The crowd for a midweek women's soccer match in 2000 at the University of North Carolina was nearly 5,000, up from just over 3,000 the previous year.

In fact, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) appears to be doing some reverse discrimination by increasing the number of Division I soccer tournaments for women to 48 and holding the number of men's tournaments at 32. Women's programs have been given priority over the men's for the past few years. There are now 260 women's programs and fewer than 200 for men. Coaches in women's soccer programs are now under pressure to produce on the field, and this has resulted in higher job turnover.

When it comes to money, women now spend more on sports apparel and athletic shoes than men do. Women have out purchased men in these categories since 1991, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association. Footwear is an $18 billion industry, and Nike, with its focus on women's sports in the "Just Do It" media campaign, has 37 percent of the market.

THE NEW GLADIATORS

The best news is that the rest of us — in droves — are getting in on the action. Team sports are no longer just for girls and women in college or professional leagues. Soccer moms are becoming soccer players. Women from all walks of life are teaming up for basketball, softball and baseball, volleyball, ice hockey, lacrosse, field hockey, sailing, rowing, and even football. They are secretaries and social workers, doctors and lawyers, police officers and teachers, systems analysts and stay-at-home moms. Most are in their 20s through 50s, and there are an increasing number of women over 60. These new gladiators play on community recreational leagues, with private sports clubs, and on semiprofessional and Olympic teams. Some women have never played team sports before, some are playing after years of abstinence following high school or college. Whatever the experience, women's team sports are the fastest growing sports in the country.

Several things are happening here. Government intervention has created more opportunity, public attitudes about women are changing, and corporations are putting money into women's sports. In the 27 years since Title IX changed the law to grant equal opportunity — and dollars — to women's sports, one in three girls, compared to one in twenty-seven, participate in sports, and these girls are more apt than are non-athletes to succeed in all areas of life.

• More than 7 million American women play soccer.

• Girls and women account for one of the fastest growing segments of USA Hockey membership categories with a 171 percent increase in women 20 or older. During the 1990–91 season, 5,573 female ice hockey players registered with USA Hockey. Now there are more than four times that many with more than 27,000 registered girls and women playing ice hockey in the United States.

• The Women's National Adult Baseball Association in San Diego reports 85 teams in 20 cities in America.

• More than 14 million Americans play softball, and half of them are women.

• Women's master rowing is the fastest growing women's sport, and women's crew had the fourth highest increase in participation among all NCAA sports in 1997.

• Volleyball, now an Olympic and professional sport, is dominated by women.

• More women and girls participate in basketball than any other sport according to the National Association for Women in Education.

• Women's lacrosse is growing by leaps and bounds. More than 20 schools were added to the list of colleges offering women's lacrosse in the first few months of 2000. High school teams grew from 562 to more than 1,000.

• The first all-women America's Cup crew inspired the phenomenal growth of women's sailing teams.

THE MOST AGGRESSIVE SPORTS ARE GAINING FASTEST

The latest Title IX report from R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, two retired physical education professors from Brooklyn College who have been keeping track of the progress of Title IX for more than a decade, tells us that most women are going after the more aggressive sports. The popularity of ice hockey is illustrated by the women in the next chapter, and the fledgling National Women's Hockey League is lining up media and corporate support.

Football

Football, perhaps the last bastion of male identity and domination, is being tackled by women, too. In its first year, 1999, the new Women's Professional Football League (WPFL), based in Edina, Minnesota, toured the United States with two teams playing exhibition games in Chicago, Green Bay, St. Paul, Minneapolis, New York, and Miami, and an exhibition at the Super Bowl in Atlanta in early 2000. By 2001 the league had 11 teams with more expected. Women's tackle football has been popular in Australia for 13 years, and the sport thrives in Germany and Tokyo, as well.

According to WPFL president Carter Turner, this is "real smash-mouth football." A 40-year-old woman who grew up playing football with her brothers told a San Francisco Examiner reporter that she had always wanted to put on the pads and play real tackle football. As a player in the WPFL, she gets to do this every Saturday afternoon. WPFL players have been quoted widely about how they love to crush their opponents, talk trash, and run opponents down. They have also said they like to get all that aggression out and then dress up and go out to party.

Players are paid $100 a game for ten games in a season that runs from October to February, so most have not given up their day jobs yet. In Colorado, 300 hopefuls turned out for tryouts for the Valkyries. Players come from the ranks of other sports and flag football, but many have never played football before. Some former NFL players are getting involved as coaches or owners, and coaches have also been recruited from high school and college teams.

Turner told a reporter at ABC News he was raised by feminists and is raising his own 16-year-old daughter. He believes the other half of America should be playing football.

Lacrosse

A field sport that began as a war game among Native American men, lacrosse is exploding as one of the fastest growing women's team sports, according to Cathy Samaras, who founded Quickstix with her husband so that their daughters would have a chance to play. (One of those daughters is now the assistant lacrosse coach at Yale University.)

"It's like lightning," Samaras said. "Kids go around and introduce it to others." More and more women are joining recreational leagues as well.

Samaras, 57, played lacrosse in college at the University of Maryland at Towson, but she quit because the game just wasn't fun if she couldn't play on a competitive team. There was no interest in women's sports, and, Samaras said, "It was more fun to go to my husband's school and party." Today the University of Maryland is the most competitive, with six national championships in women's lacrosse, the longest streak of national championships in Division I women's athletics.

Lacrosse is different from field hockey in many ways but most obviously because it makes use of a netted stick to scoop the ball off the ground and throw it. The stick is used to carry the ball down the field, catch the ball, and get the ball into the goal. The game is named for the French word for "the cross" because of the curved stick. Agility and speed count more in this game than do brawn and size.

The women's game, which began in Philadelphia in 1939, has no body contact, just finesse, Samaras said. Sticks can make contact, and some checking with sticks is allowed. Samaras said the goalie wears a helmet and the other players carry a stick and wear a mouth guard. Ironically, the lacrosse game women play today is more like the Native American game of the past than is the men's version.

According to Samaras, for the past 10 years Quickstix has been promoting the game across the country and getting it into the national spotlight. Quickstix trains coaches and umpires, administers leagues to increase opportunities for competition, and sends athletes to neighboring states and overseas. They sponsor a recruiting tournament for rising high school seniors where the players can be seen by more than 150 college coaches. Only 15 percent of the women's lacrosse coaches are men because, Samaras said, they don't know the game as well as women do.

One of Samaras's pet peeves is that "we have to call it women's lacrosse. When men play it is simply lacrosse."

Sailboat Racing

Sailboat racing is another highly aggressive team sport that has drawn women, especially since the 1994 America's Cup all-women team nearly won the race. Some women have raced with mixed-sex crews, but all-female racing teams now compete in tournaments like the competitive Rolex International Women's Keelboat Championship (RIWKC), which began in 1985 in Newport, Rhode Island. The event, held biannually, is sponsored by U.S. Sailing and was designed to encourage women sailors who want the challenge of planning, training, and competing together on keelboats.

The competition's original mission was to get more women into keelboat racing, according to Denise MacGillivray of Middletown, Rhode Island, chair of U.S. Sailing's International Women's Keelboat Championship committee. "Now women all around the world are organizing keelboat campaigns, and the event is well established as one of the highest profile, most competitive all-women keelboat regattas in the world," MacGillivray said.

In 1993 there were 43 teams competing, and that number increased with each event. When these women were asked what makes them rearrange their lives for this week-long trial, they said they love the competition — the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenge. One said, "It made me realize how fun the sport is and how much I still need to learn."

In 2001 the race was to be held in Annapolis, Maryland. The original J24 sailboat has been replaced with J22s, thus reducing team size from six to four and hopefully allowing more women to compete.

Womanship, a sailing school based in Annapolis, and Sail magazine surveyed 950 women in 1996 and reported that 87 percent claimed the best part of learning to sail was learning to be part of a team; 91 percent also cited the camaraderie.

The National Women's Sailing Association sponsors the aptly named "Take the Helm" program to teach women all over the country how to take charge at sea. They also sponsor AdventureSail for inner-city kids, a program that reaches more and more girls each year.

GOING PRO

With the success of Women's World Cup soccer and the WNBA, more professional sports leagues are being organized for women. In 2000 investors in the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) were reportedly putting up 5 million dollars each to launch at least 8 teams and to expand to 12 to 15 teams in cities such as Atlanta, Boston, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Diego, Tampa/Orlando, and Washington, D.C. WUSA is a semipro league that operates under the umbrella of United Soccer Leagues (USL). Current and former college players, amateurs, and professionals make up the 36 teams in the United States and Canada. Members of the women's national team that won the World Cup have played in the USL.

Media companies, including Discovery Communications and AOL Time Warner, have committed $40 million to WUSA for the first five years and are projecting an average attendance of 6,500 with plans to present the games in 15,000- to 20,000-seat stadiums. Tony DiCicco, former coach of the United States Women's National Team, is the acting president of WUSA. Unlike the professional women's basketball league, which plays in the summer after the men's season ends, the WUSA playing season will coincide with the men's season from April through August. However, without the backing of an established organization like the NBA, WUSA may have more of a struggle getting started than did women's basketball.

Women's professional basketball has expanded faster than expected with the WNBA adding 4 more expansion teams in 2000, bringing the number of teams in the league to 16. In order to open a franchise, each team must receive deposits on 5,500 season tickets, and apparently this is not a problem. The original plan was to add two teams per year. Because of stable attendance and television ratings, as well as talent available after the demise of the short-lived American Basketball League (ABL), the WNBA added four new teams in 2000 — the Indiana Fever, Miami Sol, Portland Fire, and Seattle Storm. (The first 12 teams were in New York, Houston, Orlando, Cleveland, Charlotte, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Sacramento, Detroit, Utah, and Minnesota.)

With the growing number of women athletes in college, there is a growing talent pool for professional leagues. Before the WNBA and the ABL, talented athletes who wanted to work had to join professional basketball teams in Europe. Now, girls and women coming up through the ranks are getting scholarships and being scouted and recruited to play at home.

Volleyball has the first professional women's sports league without a "W" in its name. United States Professional Volleyball (USPV) was organized in 1999. It is a professional volleyball league. Period. It is the first time in history a women's league will precede a men's league. USPV, six-on-six indoor volleyball, plans to expand in five-year increments with teams in the southeast, northeast, and west. It was scheduled to begin in January 2002 with 6 to 10 teams in Midwest cities and a season from January to April with finals in May. In the spring of 2000, USPV held the Millennium Cup with a $60,000 purse, the largest ever for women's volleyball. The televised event matched the American teams with teams from Japan and Poland. Arie Selinger, coach of three Olympic teams including the 1984 silver medal winners, coaches this new "Dream Team."

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Excerpted from Playing Like a Girl by Marian Betancourt. Copyright © 2009 Marian Betancourt. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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