By: Nicole Caporaso
Cameron Indoor Stadium, home to the five-time national champion Duke University Blue
Devils, holds only 9,314 passionate fans, making Duke tickets some of the most coveted in
basketball.
“Cameron Crazies” camp out for hours, days or sometimes weeks prior to games to watch one of
the nation’s powerhouse basketball teams compete with junior guard and big man on campus,
Grayson Allen, on the floor.
Roughly 600 miles away, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team is running
drills in its practice arena.
A dynasty of their own, the Huskies have won four straight national championships. Coach Geno
Auriemma has more championship rings than he can fit on his two hands, with 11, and senior
guard Saniya Chang will be looking to cap off four perfect years at the university with yet
another national title.
But once all the grueling practices are done and the fanfare has faded, when all the blood, sweat
and tears have dried up, what’s left?
What’s left is that the men in Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s program are more likely than the
women in Auriemma’s to make a viable career out of the game they’ve dedicated their lives to.
This holds true for most female student-athletes after graduation because of the lack of
developed professional sports leagues available to them.
College baseball players have the best chance of playing professionally – 9.7 carry on to play in
the pros, according to a 2016 NCAA report. Ice hockey follows with 6.6 percent.
The percentage of players from football, men’s soccer and basketball ranges from 0.9 percent to
1.4 percent.
While the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB form the core four professional leagues available to male
athletes, other options, though not as notable, are possible with Major League Soccer, the
Canadian Football League and Major League Lacrosse.
The only comparable league for female athletes is the WNBA, which has the slimmest odds of
turning student-athletes from collegiate to professional players, at 0.9 percent.
According to Forbes, the NFL, the top men’s league, is projected to surpass a record revenue of
$13 billion in 2016, while half of the teams in the WNBA are operating at a loss at the same
time.
While the highest paid NBA player for this upcoming season, LeBron James, rakes in nearly $31
million this year, the maximum salary in the WNBA barely tops $100,000.
Sylvia Hatchell, head coach of the University of North Carolina women’s basketball team, said
she remembers a time when professional athletes weren’t making salaries higher than the
revenues of some small countries.
In 1970, the average NBA salary was $35,000, which is equivalent to earning about $207,000
today, according to USA Today.
“First of all, you look where the men have come from back in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, their salaries
were nothing like they are now,” Hatchell said. “I think the business part of it has taken over,
especially in professional sports. It’s all about the dollar.”
Twenty-four years after Congress passed Title IX, a law that outlawed discrimination against
women in public institutions, including in athletics programs, the WNBA was established in
1996 by then-NBA commissioner, David Stern. The newly formed women’s league was created
50 years behind its counterpart, the NBA.
“I have tremendous respect for David Stern because he said this was the right thing to do and
even though the WNBA loses money, they still promote it and sponsor it,” Hatchell said. “Men
had opportunities to compete where the women didn’t and it wasn’t a good thing for women to
play sports, but all that’s changed now.”
John Skipper, president of ESPN, said the principal difference between men’s and women’s
sports leagues is not the game itself, but the time they’ve had to evolve.
“Remember, the men’s sport didn’t develop right away, it took a lot of years and it also takes
transcendent athletes,” Skipper said. “You need players that have both the athletic ability and star
power, like Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.”
Skipper said growing a league has to be an organic process, however, he believes there’s a longer
gestation period for women’s sports.
“Over time they generate increasing resources, ticket sales and merchandise and rights fees, so
they will get there and it’s hard to predict the timeframe for that,” he said. “I don’t think there’s
any shortcuts, but I don’t think they’re handicapped over time.”
Not only does a huge salary gap, as well as sponsorships and media attention, differentiate the
NBA from the WNBA, but so do attendance numbers.
According to ESPN, the team with the lowest average attendance in the 2015-2016 season was
the Denver Nuggets, with 14,095 fans. A Sports Business Journal report from September 2015
recorded average WNBA attendance at 7,184.
Though, Hatchell is unsure about the prospect of the WNBA being more successful if it had
equivalent funds and marketing of the NBA.
“The stage is different because WNBA plays in the summer; I think that hurts attendance,”
Hatchell said. “But I don’t know when they would play because during the year they’re going up
against colleges, men and women’s, and against the NBA.”
“I do think playing in the summer, it doesn’t help because people are not in school, they’re on
vacation, they’re traveling.”
However, Skipper said the WNBA is an example of a league that is on the right track in building
up a fan base and making headway in the sports world.
“What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to develop marketing campaigns around their
players,” Skipper said. “We did, with the WNBA, a marketing campaign around Elena Delle
Donne, Skylar Diggins and Brittney Griner when they came into the league.”
“You’ve got to have marketing around athletes, you’ve got to develop local following, which
they’re trying to do with their teams in the local markets like with the Sparks in LA and the Lynx
in Minnesota, etc.”
While the WNBA may not be as developed as the NBA, professional female athletes do have a
growing selection of choices.
“We haven’t had the opportunities that the men’s sports have had and the time, the history, all
that,” Hatchell said. “We’ve had to play some catch up, but we’ve grown, we’ve got some good
things going.”
“Are we where we need to be yet? No, we’re not there yet, but we’ve made some progress.”
In the past two decades, along with the WNBA, has come the National Women’s Soccer League,
the National Pro Fastpitch softball league and the United Women’s Lacrosse League, which held
its inaugural season in 2016.
Jenny Levy, the University of North Carolina women’s lacrosse head coach, said playing in the
UWLL might not provide its athletes enough money to live on that salary, but it is a starting
place.
“There was definitely some criticism of how it was run and how it was done, and I told my alums
who were playing, ‘Look, you’re the pioneers,’” Levy said. “Women’s soccer, they’re on their
third professional league.”
“There’s always going to be an element of growth and some pain involved with growth.”
Men’s Major League Lacrosse was founded in 1999 and involves nine teams.
The women’s lacrosse league currently has four teams and has something in common with the
men’s league – low salaries. Figures from CNN Money show that the average salary for men in
Major League Lacrosse sits between $10,000 and $20,000.
“Our girls, they’re going to need to go get jobs, and if they want to keep playing they’re
obviously going to have to support themselves in a different way,” she said.
As for why men’s athletics typically get more support than women’s, Levy is unsure.
“I don’t know why that is, I think that has to do with culture,” Levy said. “But I knew where I
was in 1999 when women’s soccer beat China in the Rose Bowl in front of 90,000 people.”
“I think there’s been a great movement in the past 10, 15, 20 years where women are gaining
momentum and they certainly have a place in sport and they certainly have a place in all sorts of
leadership positions.”
Skipper said that ESPN doesn’t assume viewers of the company’s programming are disinterested
in women’s sports, but instead make the assumption that some people need persuading.
He believes that over time, those sports fans are being persuaded.
“We did more than 7,500 hours last year of live women’s sports and we’ll do more every year
because we believe in it,” Skipper said. “I think over time, as people know the athletes and
follow the game they’ll grow to appreciate the women’s game.”
Skipper mentioned tennis as a positive example.
“They have reached a place where at the major tournaments you have pay equity and on
television the women’s star players get just as much attention as the men, their ratings in many
cases are equal or greater,” he said.
Hatchell recommends fan education as one of the best solutions to lower attendance and revenue
in the women’s sports leagues as they continue to grow.
“When people come to the games, and they realize, well in my sport, what a great game it is and
how skilled the players are, the teamwork, I know a lot of men that would rather watch women’s
basketball,” Hatchell said. “But more than anything else, just educating the fans and making it a
social event; I think those are big things.”
Though Levy coaches a very different sport from Hatchell, who is a Naismith Memorial Hall of
Fame inductee, she echoes Hatchell’s sentiment in that she believes once fans get a look at the
game she loves, they’ll be sold.
“I’m biased, but I think if you come out and see my athletes play and how beautiful they are and
how talented they are, they’re awesome,” Levy said.
