Women’s and Girls’ sports is an area of society where it’s a spectrum of importance, where people will protest for more women’s sports coverage and that people that refuse to watch them for being “not interesting.”  

In America, sports are a large part of our culture, an industry of billions of dollars, with millions of people tuning in to watch the NFL every weekend. As someone who has been around women’s sports now, as a broadcaster and reporter, I now have a better viewpoint as to why people think the way they do, and why both sides are right and wrong.  

The main issue with women’s sports in my experience is that they are compared to men’s sports, which most of the time have been more established in the culture. Women’s sports need to be treated like their own sports.  

We see with the WNBA; they try to be the NBA and it isn’t working for them. The WNBA is newer league who is completely subsidized by the NBA, they don’t bring in the money that the NBA does and yet they want the exact same kind of salaries, when the NBA must pay the WNBA to keep them in business, to average sports watchers, this is a huge turnoff.   

Another issue that makes women’s sports divisive, or what makes them underperform, is the desire and draw of sports to women themselves. Women in America don’t have the same view of sports that men do on average.  

Boys have sports more ingrained into their hobbies and personalities. People tend to look towards those that are like them, in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. because of the popularity difference between men’s sports and women’s sports, the culture around the sports and how other people view women’s sports.  

What needs to change the most is the change in culture. If women’s sports want to gain the appeal of the fans and increase their attendance, they need to look at what college schools are doing for their volleyball teams.  

In schools like Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, these schools welcome their program and built a culture around supporting their teams from the students and local communities. The women on a D1 athletic team will kick anyone’s butt, but they need the support around them.  

While it would be more expensive for the schools and leagues to create, the teams need to have support at least from the base level, so that they can get support from the local community, then the local communities. People like rooting for the local teams. There is no reason a women’s sports team can’t be one of the teams that people root for.