The Minnesota Lynx, Minnesota’s WNBA team, won their third Championship on October 14, 2015. It seems the Lynx are the only Minnesota team that is consistently on the top.
However, the attendance at the Lynx games are much lower than the Timberwolves, who lost 66 of their 82 games last season compared to the Lynx who went 22:12 in 2015.
Attendance at Lynx regular season games ranged from 6,500 to 7,500 this year according to Micaela Erickson an Account Representative for the Minnesota Lynx. During the Timberwolves 2015 season, the average attendance was 14,528, double the Lynx.
“I believe that supporting women’s sports provides both my son and my daughter important messages about equality. It helps provide my daughter with female role models in sports, but also a view that the world isn’t split into things that men can do and women can do,” Lynx member Michael Fix said.
Women’s professional sports is a world that is still growing. The Lynx first played in the 1999 season. There are currently 12 teams in the WNBA and 30 in the NBA. But yet WBNA games still have little time on air or coverage of any kind.
According to The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation in 2013 only seven percent of sports coverage was coverage of women’s sports. That means 93 percent of the sports covered by the media was strictly male focused.
“Boys grow up watching television, bombarded by heroic and confident images of themselves playing sports and being revered for their accomplishments. They know they are expected to play sports and are encouraged to do so by everyone around them. Girls do not receive these messages,” Donna A. Lopiano, Ph.D, said in Media Coverage of Women’s Sports Is Important.
To understand why female sports aren’t as popular we have to look at the history of sports. The first professional, high school, and college teams were all for males. Women didn’t get their foot in the door completely until Title IX. Still, women today do receive some coverage.
An argument brought up in a Boston Globe article is that females only received media attention for outstanding work in men’s sports. An example of this is Mo’Ne Davis, the female little league pitcher who threw a 70 mph fastball.
At Orono, sports are generally equal in terms of gender. Typically you will find more people attending boy’s sports than girl’s but the girls soccer team has begun the process to change that, at least for their games. They have started a mentor program with the younger girls teams in the community, providing young girls with great role models at practices and games. In turn the young girls come to watch the “big girls” play.
“For the last few years we have been doing a mentor program with the younger girls,” head Orono girls coach Erin Murray, said, “They are going to their practices and those girls are coming to our locker room and seeing what we go through in a day and seeing our practices.”
Girls are in need of role models who are valued by the media and covered solely for being successful athletes.
