If a women's professional soccer league folds in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
In the case of the WUSA's announcement that it would immediately suspend operations Monday, it should. Especially here in Charlottesville, the sound of another disappointment in women's pro sports should reverberate deeply. After all, women's soccer was already making noise in town. Virginia women's soccer smashed ranked teams Santa Clara and USC on its way to winning the Virginia Soccer Classic last week.
That high-pitched squeal you heard in the air Saturday was not a test of the city's hurricane alert system, but rather the excitement of young fans watching the U.S. women's national team. The American women are using Klöckner stadium as a practice site for the FIFA Women's World Cup. What an awful sound to punctuate the cheers of women's soccer fans: The dull thud of American women's professional soccer, dead at the age of three.
Economically, the reasons for the league's demise are clear: The already-small corporate sponsorship of the WUSA waned with the poor economy, until the league was faced with a $20 million budget shortfall that it could not overcome in the foreseeable future.
Although WUSA average attendance figures were down to 6,550 from the 8,116 mark set in the league's first year, WUSA founder John Hendricks emphasized in the Washington Post that "it's important for our fans to know that this is not in any way from a shortage of fan support. We could not meet the funding requirements of our business plan without greater corporate support."
Hendricks explained that corporate interest remained low despite the upcoming Cup, and in fairness to the league's players and coaches not involved in the FIFA competition, the decision had to be announced immediately. The timing of the announcement has been criticized by many, including former Virginia men's soccer coach Bruce Arena, as unfortunate: Now, women's soccer will bring its flagship tournament to United States not with a bang, but a whimper.
Is that whimper the noise being made across all women's professional sports? With the WUSA joining the ABL in the hall of women's-leagues-that-never-made-it, while the WNBA cuts teams and moves others into casinos, the feasibility of successful women's professional leagues has to come into question. Has the right business plan for a women's league simply not been found yet? How much responsibility, if any, should fall on the shoulders of the men's professional leagues to create space for women to compete? Or, the question that no female sportswriter or athlete ever wants to take seriously, are women's sports so inferior to men's in speed, style and scoring that they will never have the chance to compete with the big boys?
My English major leaves me ill-prepared to talk business plans, and I doubt I would be able to justify to myself, much less anyone else, that the men's leagues should be obligated to create competition for themselves. But to the final question, whether women's sports will ever be as stimulating to spectators and attractive to sponsors as men's, I preach patience. Too much about women's sports has changed in my short lifetime for me to believe that change won't come.
Look at it this way: when I started playing sports on a community soccer team in first grade, the only female athlete I remember being of any note was Mary Lou Retton. She was an amateur, in the Olympics, and she was in a very girly sport
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