The public doesn’t
seem to care much for female team athletics. It’s proven.

From 1996 to 2002,
organizers launched five major pro women’s leagues in basketball, soccer,
softball, and volleyball, and only one — the Women’s National Basketball
Association — remains. The top NCAA men’s basketball programs draw more than
16,000 to their games, while the women average around 8,000.

What can we do? What
we usually do. Create a new law to fix the discrepancies.

I suggest tweaking
Title IX, which has succeeded in establishing US female athletics the last
three decades, but has been woeful in drawing Joe Six-Pack to its games. We
need to pass legislation stating that men’s and women’s attendance at like
sporting events must be equal or in favor of women.

For instance, if the
Syracuse women’s basketball team averages just 1,063 people, then the Syracuse
men, which drew 21,825 per game last year, should be allowed just 1,063 too.
That will send a message that we will no longer tolerate the public’s discriminatory
attendance practices, which are just downright disgusting.

Many have had other thoughts on how to increase interest in women’s team sports. FIFA
president Sepp Blatter suggested that women wear tighter shorts in soccer,
citing female volleyball uniforms as an example. That didn’t go over well
across the world. Many women, in fact, were ready to rip Sepp, well… a new
blatter.

But Blatter’s idea is
not without some grounding. Women’s tennis is among the world’s most popular
sports, and the women’s game is more fascinating than the men’s, partly because
they actually volley between serves. But women’s tennis also stimulates male
interest, I’m sorry to say, because it features some attractive women in short
skirts and tight tank tops, such as 17-year-old Wimbledon champion Maria
Sharapova and 23-year-old Anna Kournikova, both of them sex symbols.

Women’s tennis
captivates the public more than women’s team athletics because it allows
participants to maintain their femininity during play. By contrast, women’s
team sports are more physical and masculine in nature. And they struggle for
wider appeal. The reality is that women’s teams are typically considered minor
league compared to their male counterparts. And if there’s a choice, people
will likely watch the men instead of the women.

So females should
take advantage of what makes their team sports most different from male sports
— their femininity. There’s no shame in capitalizing on that. Women’s soccer
has already taken advantage, to a certain extent. If Landon Donovan kicked the
game-winning World Cup goal for the US men and tore off his shirt, it would be
no big deal. But when US player Brandi Chastain did it in 1999, her photo was
flashed across the world. And it made her an international celebrity. She also
brought gigantic attention to women’s soccer.

In the 1980s, when women really started making an impact in corporate workforces, the clothes
they wore were male-influenced and dreadful. Now, the corporate female couture
is more complementary to the female form (no, I’m not auditioning for Queer Eye). Take this one step farther,
into the realm of sport, and Blatter’s suggestion doesn’t seem so outlandish.

But it would seem to
discriminate against women and defy the equality provisions of Title IX,
unless, of course, men were forced to wear tight shorts as well, which I’m not
sure the American public would want to see. Then again, it’s debatable as to
just how much soccer the American public wants to see anyway.

On the other hand,
Americans love football. And it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that the players’
pants are tighter than Joan Rivers’ face. So maybe there is hope after all.
Seems to me tight pants could work wonders for men’s and women’s soccer.

This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2005.