What an exciting time to be a girl athlete! When I was a girl, growing up in New York City, Billie Jean King was blazing a new trail for women in tennis, but other than swimming and gymnastics, there were virtually no team sports for girls that made it past middle school. There was nothing remotely near the powerhouse team on display last weekend at the Women’s World Cup championship match between the U.S.A. and Japan.
If you didn’t see this game live, it’s worth watching the highlights — it was that good. I watched with a group of teenage boys, many of them soccer players themselves, all of them enthusiastically cheering for the sheer brilliance of these players. The fact that they were female players was beside the point — this was world-class soccer, period, not just world class women’s soccer.
Indeed, out-going U.S. team captain Abby Wambach has scored more international goals than any other soccer player in history, male or female.
For the legions of girls who enthusiastically play soccer at the middle and high school levels, having role models like Wambach and the rest of the U.S. Women’s World Cup champions has to be a tremendous boost. What should come next is more money and attention for women’s team sports at the college level, and then in the professional leagues.
Professional sports may be about athleticism and prowess, but let’s face it, it’s also, about money. The news media showers attention on the male sports leagues because that’s where they think the viewers are, so that’s where they predict the advertisers will follow.
I hope that the packed house of fans for the Women’s World Cup in Vancouver got the attention of some of the sports media executives who make decisions about what to cover, and how.
According to The New York Times, the Vancouver final game was watched “by 25.4 million viewers on Fox — a record for any soccer game, men’s or women’s, shown on English-language television in this country.” There were also more than a million views on Telemundo, the Spanish-language station, make the total viewing public greater than “the record 26.5 million combined viewers that saw Germany beat Argentina in last year’s men’s World Cup final on ABC and Spanish-language Univision.”
That kind of interest has got to make advertisers perk up their ears and reach for their wallets. It also shows that as was the case in my neighbor’s living room, we are all just as excited to cheer for fantastic women athletes as we are for the men’s teams.
I was disappointed in the very low-energy announcing that accompanied the U.S.-Japan World Cup match; with just one announcer it was difficult to get much information about the plays as they happened, and in the aftermath of the incredible 5 – 2 win, there wasn’t the usual parade of exultant experts analyzing the game as I’ve come to expect from watching the men’s World Cup games.
It was also disappointing to see the team slipping and sliding on artificial turf during the game, knowing that extraordinary care is taken to make sure that the men’s World Cup games are played on real grass, as the players much prefer.
The amazing women athletes who make it to the World Cup matches deserve the best FIFA has to offer. And we owe it to all our young women athletes to give them an equal playing field, right from the start in schools, and then all the way to the top.
I hope that for future generations, the notion that women’s sports could be taken less seriously than men’s sports will seem as quaint and antiquated as the idea — not ancient history, even in the United States — that the only education girls needed was “home economics.”
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
