This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Kelly Xiong. Find her on Instagram at @k.3lly. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
This past year or so has been the year for women—especially women’s sports. Collegiate women’s basketball has become extremely popular this past year. It is showing us how big and amazing women’s sports could become. We have seen a peek at what could happen if we show up and support women’s sports the way we do men’s.
We could credit much of this recent popularity within women’s sports—specifically basketball — to Caitlin Clark, former Iowa Hawkeyes, and now an Indiana Fever player. Not to mention, also the overall no. 1 pick in the WNBA draft. Caitlin Clark has had an impressive college basketball record. In her career, she has had 59 30-point games. This is the most by a D1 player in the past 25 seasons. She also had a 46% shooting percentage in her career and 45.5% this season. This means that is how often her shots go into the basket—and that is an impressive shooting percentage.
Clark is not alone in this recent hype for women’s basketball though. Players like Paige Bueckers from UConn, Cameron Brink from Stanford, and Angel Reese from LSU have all helped contribute to the hype of women’s basketball. These players have grabbed the attention of many, both men and women, to tune into women’s basketball. They’ve gathered a fairly big fanbase of women, many of whom have girl crushes on them. But who could blame them?
This year’s March Madness gave us a glimpse of how big women’s basketball can become. The Iowa v LSU game in the Elite Eight drew in an average of 12.3 million viewers — on a Monday night nonetheless. That became the most-viewed women’s college basketball game of all time. The game’s viewership count peaked at 16.1 million, becoming ESPN’s second-highest-viewed basketball game of any kind since 2012. To put into more perspective how big the game was, this is more viewership than all but one NBA finals game last season, it also tops every MLB and NHL game last season. The UConn v Iowa Final Four game made an even bigger splash. It averaged 14.2 million viewers, and peaking at 17 million, on ESPN, making it the most-viewed women’s basketball game ever. ESPN even stated that this game was one of the most viewed games in any sport besides college football and the NFL for the past few years. This was also their second-highest audience count for a non-football broadcast.
Paige Bueckers is another player who has been extremely hyped up recently — and for good reason. She plays for the UConn Huskies and she has many women, especially straight women, swooning for her. Aside from the social media hype, Paige is also extremely good at basketball. Her shooting percentage was 53% this season and also 53% overall in her career. She also plays for a school that is already one of the best for basketball so it’s no shocker that she’s gained extreme popularity. UConn is known as a basketball school, both the men’s and women’s teams are top-notch. In 2017, their women’s basketball team had a 111-game winning streak. It was unfortunately broken when they played Mississippi State in the Final Four March Madness game. This 111-win streak means that they had not lost a single game since 2014 — that’s three entire seasons worth of straight wins. And just this year, both teams made it to the Final Four, with UConn’s men’s basketball winning the championship back-to-back.
There are many ways on how to support women’s sports. One of them is tuning into the games. Whether you’re tuning into women’s sports because it’s piqued your interest or maybe you have a crush on one of the players, you’re contributing to the viewership. That viewership count can show how in demand the sport is and if the league can or should capitalize off it. Sports have always been associated with men and seen as a male interest. Thus, for the longest time, it’s only ever been marketed to men, leaving out all the women who could potentially be interested. But if we want to support female athletes, we can’t just leave all the responsibility up to the men. We as women also have to tune in. Support can also start at the community level, where helping school programs thrive through sports team fundraising efforts makes a real difference in young athletes’ opportunities and visibility.
In the last few years, especially this year, we’ve seen a rise in women athletes as role models for younger girls. This is exactly why women should also tune into sports, women’s sports to be specific as many of us probably already are fans of the NFL and college football. We didn’t all watch the Iowa-UConn game because we were comparing Caitlin and Paige to male basketball players. We watched them because they’re amazing all on their own and they made the game interesting and intense. We like these female athletes because they’re badasses on and off the court, not because they’re the “female version of Steph Curry” or whoever else they may get compared to. Young girls seeing them play and growing up with this kind of strong female influence and having someone to look up to is how we can support female athletes and grow women’s sports — which in turn, helps out the athletes. This is similar to the way boys looked up to and wanted to be Michael Jordan or Lebron James. Little girls now have their own versions of that. Just like how boys would buy jerseys with their favorite male athlete’s name on them, girls can do the same now. Athletes get a certain percentage of their jersey or merch sales. The exact percentage varies based on many factors but a portion of it does go to the athlete.
Another way how to support women’s sports and female athletes is to buy tickets to the games. If you thought watching these games on TV was fun, imagine how much more fun it’ll be in person, when you’re sitting only a few rows away from the players. In professional sports leagues, athletes receive around 50% of all revenue including TV licensing, ticket sales and merch. As mentioned previously, for the longest time, because sports were never really marketed toward women, we never gained interest. Most of us had no interest in sports, let alone women’s sports, which had less media coverage than men’s. But now times are changing. We are getting interested in women’s sports and we are showing up. I believe if we keep this up, we can really make change happen. We’re already seeing female athletes break records, imagine what more they could do with us tuning in to more games, showing up and buying their merch. Sports changing up their marketing strategies to include women now that they know there is a demand for women’s sports is huge and it could spark so much change to happen. We’re already starting to see a shift.
What are your thoughts on how to support women’s sports? Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.
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