The deciding Game Three of the WNBA Finals is tonight in Detroit, as the Shock host the LA Sparks. As always, be sure to consult Ted and Sara at Women's Hoops, who are also featuring a number of links on the collapse of the WUSA. ESPN.com's Darren Rovell takes a closer look at the folding of the league from the business side of the ledger.
At USA Today, McPaper is all over the story, with Beau Dure, Vicki Michaelis and Kelli Whiteside all taking a crack. If there's a common thread running through the stories, it's a mixture of sadness, disbelief and even denial.
For the sadness, read George Vescey in the New York Times. For the denial, read Thomas Heath's piece in the Washington Post, headlined, "Women's Soccer Enters New Phase," something that seems to suggest the league is entering Menopause instead of experiencing a premature death.
In the San Jose Mercury News, one women's sports advocate is still puzzled as to what went wrong:
"I think it's a very sad day for women's sports," said Anne Cribbs, a San Jose Sports Authority member who also co-founded the women's American Basketball League, which folded in 1998. "I've thought a lot about this after my ABL adventure, and it's really a puzzlement why the Title IX babies don't translate into more women in the stands or more women making a purchasing decision."
From where I stand, most days it looks to me as if those Title IX babies are more interested in participating in sports, than just watching them (most days I can count 5 or 6 women jogging for every man I might see). Meanwhile, America is choked to the gills with men who spend their weekends glued to the couch watching every sport known to man (and include me among the guilty much of the time), yet most of them would die gasping for breath if asked to run a simple out pattern during a touch football game.
I have to wonder out loud if some people are expecting the wrong things out of Title IX in the first place -- like say Mark Bradley at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
The WUSA's founders -- Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain and the other celebrated 1999 World Cup winners -- made $60,000 this season, down from $85,000 in Year 2. The league didn't price itself out of the marketplace; the marketplace simply declined to embrace the league. This is America, the land of opportunity for just about everyone but female soccer players.
Title IX was passed to guarantee women equal access to educational resources at all levels, athletics only being a part of the deal. On that account, proponents can point to the explosive growth of women's sports at both the secondary and collegiate level, as well as the fact that women now comprise better than 50 percent of the student body in most colleges and universities.
It didn't include the right to compete for a job as a professional athlete (and don't cry for Hamm and Chastain, something tells me they'll be just fine), but considering the sorry state of male educational achievement overall, you'd have to say that women are making out pretty well with that tradeoff.
POSTSCRIPT: One other point about Hamm and Chastain: the WUSA was one of the first sports leagues to offer its players equity in the enterprise. So while they, and many others, took pay cuts, their compensation packages were most likely heavily leveraged with equity incentives -- not much unlike the millions of dot commers who took lower salaries in the hopes that the startup they signed on with would blossom with a big IPO.
Funny, but I don't see anybody crying for them.
I find it mind boggling that any fledging sport league that can burn through a $100 million war chest in just three years. What did they do with that money? Somebody somewhere made a good point of saying that all of the major pro leagues took years to develop strong fan bases and many decades before players even made decent wages. Now I am not saying that women’s professional soccer players should be low paid, but if your business plan doesn’t take into account the fact that its going to struggle with revenues for many, many years and prepares accordingly, then its not going to go far–apparently just three years.