Female sports

I got an interesting comment from Matt about the popularity of women's tennis in general compared to other women's professional sports. I'll focus my comments to US sports as I have no knowledge of how popular women's soccer is in Brazil or women's curling in Canada.

My research dug up the following women's professional sports:
Tennis
Golf
Softball
Football
Basketball (WNBA)
Boxing
Soccer (the WUSA apparently has plans to start again after disbanding)

There may be other professional leagues, but I didn't find any so even if they exist I doubt they are at a very high level.

Of these sports, I would presume that only tennis, golf, and maybe the WNBA could make a female athlete a "star". Now I don't have a well defined explanation for star, but lets just say that the women in the other sports are not getting endorsement deals and I cannot name any of them. I can name female soccer players, but thats just because I'll watch the US national team play.

I think its a safe statement that women's tennis is the biggest of these 3 based on the following criteria:

Money: The WBNA top salary is $100,000. In golf, 79 players have $100,000 so far this year with 5 over $1,000,000. In tennis, 114 women have earned $100,000 this year with 7 over $1,000,000. From these numbers tennis and golf are close.

Name recognition: I'm not a representative sample as I'm a very big tennis fan, but I'd imagine even the casual sports fan knew the Williams sisters and Sharapova and probably a couple of others like Henin or Hingis. For golf, Sorenstam is a big name, as is Michelle Wie, but I think it gets tough after that. If I tried hard enough I could come up with a few WNBA players, but I don't feel there is nearly as much name recognition. Of course, name recognition is very country dependent as the media focuses more on American athletes


So the question becomes why does tennis have the strongest women's sports program? Some possibilities:

1) Tradition: Women's tennis has been around longer than other sports and has gained a foot hold in the sports media.

2) Sex Appeal: Tennis players are more fit than golfers and more feminine (for lack of a better term) than many basketball players. I'm not sure how much of an effect this has but its certaintly something.

3) Similarities to men's game: In this regard, I think golf is more similar between the sexes, other than the distance they are hitting the ball. Tennis is somewhat similar between genders although the increases atheleticism in males has some effect on the playing styles.


Now if we compare the men's and women's version of any given game, tennis also has to be the closest in popularity. In fact, you could argue that at any given time women's tennis can be MORE popular than men's tennis, at least amongst people who consider themselves tennis fans. This depends of course on who the top players are, how deep the field is, blah blah blah.

So what does it all mean? I'm not sure, but the people at the WTA are definitely doing something right.