Looking Beyond Football At The Impact Of Women’s Sports

With football back in full swing and all attention focused on America’s unofficial national pastime, it can be hard to not lose sight of the important fact that there are thousands of other student athletes doing amazing feats in their own arenas. Fortunately, shining a light on these individuals was a major focus at the recent Sports Business Journal Game Changers Conference, hosted in New York City.

The panel at this year’s conference was entitled “Governing Bodies and College Leaders: Building a Blueprint to Promote and Grow Collegiate and Olympic Sports For Women,” and centered on how women’s athletics can continue to grow and gain national exposure. While female participation in college athletics has seen marked growth in recent decades, women’s sports still lag substantially behind their male counterparts. According to WomensSportsFoundation.org, a website founded by tennis great Billie Jean King, female athletes receive 63,000 fewer athletic opportunities at NCAA schools and receive $183 million less in NCAA athletic scholarships.



The common retort to this imbalance is that some programs are profitable and others are not, and since women’s sports are usually in the red, there should be fewer of them. Where this response fails, however, is when taken as a whole, both men’s and women’s sports usually result in financial losses for universities. According to Politifact.com, aside from basketball and football at a very small percentage of schools, all other sports, both men’s and women’s, lose money for FBS institutions. The notion that men’s sports make money and women’s sports lose it is not only an oversimplification, it is largely inaccurate.

This year’s Game Changers Conference sought to help ameliorate this imbalance and had a series of experts discussing ways in which to do so. One suggestion that would surely shake the established hierarchy of college athletics would be conference realignments that aren’t focused on football and basketball. The idea behind such a shift would be to make conferences more geographically based, allowing programs with smaller budgets (typically women’s programs) to travel much more affordably. Also discussed was the idea of redistributing revenue in a way that serves more participants and offers broader opportunities than what currently exist. UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham supported this sentiment, stating, “We have lost sight of our mission to provide broad-based opportunities and participation.”

Whether the discussions had at the recent Game Changers Conference will lead to significant change in the near future for female athletes certainly remains to be seen. What is significant now, though, is that these conversations are being had and that administrators and university officials are not content with the current status quo. Nor should they be. According to conference speaker and American Athletic Conference Senior Associate Commissioner Donna DeMarco, a staggering 90% of female high-level executives played college athletics. The idea that such a powerful developmental opportunity is as limited as it currently is should certainly incite effort to look beyond football.

 

Feature image via M. Arellano/Emerald