WNBA shoots for colleges' hoop magic
The NCAA's Women's Final Four college basketball championships swept into Boston this weekend, selling out the TD Banknorth Garden six months in advance, flooding downtown with 30,000 players and fans, and attracting national television attention. Before the hoopla has a chance to fade, another event critical to the development of women's sports also will take place downtown: the WNBA draft.
Women's National Basketball Association executives will gather at the convention center on the South Boston Waterfront to choose new players for their teams -- including many of the players who just concluded their college careers in the Final Four, such as consensus top draft pick Seimone Augustus of Louisiana State University. The first round of the draft will be televised on ESPN2.
Like the Final Four, the WNBA hopes its players will capture the imagination of basketball fans and perhaps become role models for the millions of female athletes who have come of age in an era of parity between men's and women's sports. The draft Wednesday marks the first time that women's professional basketball has held one in the same city as a women's Final Four.
But unlike women's college basketball, whose popularity has risen so much in recent years that the women's Final Four has posted 14 straight sellouts, women's professional basketball has struggled. Attendance at games is declining, while television ratings over the life of the league have been flat. The league, still losing money after 10 years, is supported by its powerful older brother, the NBA, which has invested heavily in its success.
WNBA executives say the league just needs more time to develop. They point to the history of the NBA, which took years to catch on. In the interim, however, they have a tough sales job ahead of them.
''The WNBA is not going anywhere," said Donna Orender, the league's president. ''We'll be around. We just signed our 14th franchise. We're the most successful women's sports league in the world."
The demographics appear to be on their side: More girls are involved in sports than ever before. In the decades since Title IX, the landmark gender-equity legislation, the number of girls playing high school sports has nearly doubled to 3 million, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Today, nearly as many girls play high school basketball as boys.
Though the participation rates favor an explosion of women's professional sports, the economics of forming a league remain daunting. Successful sports leagues make their money from several different sources: stadiums (including ticket sales, concessions, parking, and merchandise), corporate sponsorships, and the sale of the right to broadcast their games on radio and television stations. These last two, media contracts and sponsorships, can make or break the success of a league. The National Football League and auto racing have boomed in recent years in large part because of their lucrative television agreements: NASCAR, which governs stock-car racing, has a television deal worth about $560 million a year, or $4.5 billion.
High television viewership leads to robust corporate support for the leagues, because the companies want to reach as many viewers as possible, as well as associate their brands with the sport's success.
NASCAR, for example, has become so popular that several different financial services companies -- ranging from
Up-and-coming leagues, in contrast, find themselves on the outside of this virtuous cycle. They are not paid hefty fees for the right to broadcast their games and have to either write off television entirely or essentially buy airtime.
Without a good television contract, it becomes much tougher to ink big-money, national corporate sponsorships. Ticket sales bring in cash, but the day-to-day operations of a team -- everything from player and front-office salaries to travel -- are so expensive that often isn't enough.
Strictly speaking, the WNBA is fortunate to be alive at all. Of six women's professional sports leagues formed since 1996, only one, the WNBA, still exists, according to the trade publication Sports Business Journal. A women's soccer league, the Women's United Soccer Association -- which included a local team, the Boston Breakers -- burned through $100 million in three years before its founders shut the league down in 2003. Individual sports, such as women's golf and tennis, have done well, but the team sports -- women's football, softball, and volleyball -- all have failed.
''The United States wasn't ready for the WUSA," said Chip Tuttle, chief executive of the Lynnfield advertising firm Conover Tuttle Pace, who served as a consultant to the WUSA and the Breakers.
The WNBA, thanks to its support from the NBA, has had more breathing room to develop, making it the most likely to succeed. The NBA, which wants to be the global brand in basketball, is involved in everything from the ownership of WNBA teams to securing television contracts to shared staff and arenas.
There are some positive signs for the WNBA's future: Television ratings during the playoffs and championship were up sharply last year.
Women's professional sports, from the beginning, have tried to appeal to the girls and women who are participating in sports in record numbers. The now-defunct Boston Breakers brought players out to meet fans and even held a camp for youths on the Boston Common.
Even so, the team struggled to persuade many in its natural audience of soccer players to support the team, and -- as important -- watch games on television. Tuttle, a season ticket holder, remembers attending his daughters' soccer game soon after the league folded. Parents on the sidelines lamented the loss. But when he asked who among them had attended a game or tuned in on television, almost no one had.
''They thought it was a shame, but no one had gone out to support the product in the way that we hoped," he said. ''It just wasn't important enough to them."
Some sports specialists contend that the leagues face a more fundamental problem: Advertisers have many good ways to reach an audience of women, from commercials during ''Oprah" to the Lifetime cable channel, but sports remain the best way to reach men.
''In order for women's sports to succeed from the corporate standpoint, the game needs to attract a number of men," said Peter P. Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University. ''That's a desirable demographic group that corporate sponsors are looking to tap into."
Orender, the WNBA president, disputes that idea. She said the WNBA -- with women constituting about 75 percent of fans at games, as well as 50 percent of those watching at home -- can entice advertisers who want to tap into women's purchasing power.
''We do believe our strength is our appeal to women," she said.
Women's college basketball, meanwhile, is booming. The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates that in 1999, 6.4 million fans attended a Division 1 women's basketball game or tournament. Four years later, that number had increased to more than 7 million.
The women's Final Four television ratings have seesawed in recent years, but they still rank higher than the National Hockey League's regular season games, as well as many NBA games. About 3.8 million households watched the women's championship game in 2004, when the University of Connecticut played Tennessee, but that number fell to 2.4 million for the Baylor-Michigan State game last year.
But the professional game faces bigger hurdles than the college tournament.
The Final Four is a once-a-year event that draws on the allegiance of college fans, students, and alumni as well as the NCAA publicity machine, which has promoted it as a package with the Men's Final Four. Building a fan base for professional teams that have yet to develop strong local ties is an entirely different matter.
A close look at the Sun, the Connecticut WNBA team, shows both the enormous potential of the league and its drawbacks.
The team is owned by Mohegan Sun, the gaming and entertainment enterprise, and it is one of only a few WNBA teams not owned by an NBA franchise.
Its location could not be better: It is 30 miles from UConn, whose women's basketball program routinely ranks among the top in the nation and which consistently ranks among the top universities in attendance at women's games. Executives have seen firsthand that women's basketball has a natural audience. Those fans will need to be converted to the WNBA, but it's a start.
When Mohegan Sun landed the team three years ago, executives also were betting that it would be a draw to its casino, restaurants, and shopping, and vice versa.
''People said, 'UConn sells out every game,' " said Paul Munick, the Connecticut Sun's president. ''We never expected that to happen in the beginning, but the growth has been there for us."
Growth in attendance at games is one thing; watching on television is another. The team still makes little money from the sale of broadcast rights. With the expenses of player salaries, travel, and the front office, the Sun still loses money. Though executives say the ''intangibles" of owning a team -- such as local media coverage and more foot traffic -- make owning the Sun worth it, they still hope for a financial return.
''The goal is to make it a hard ticket to get," Munick said. ''That only fuels the fire for doing better with sponsorship and doing better with television and radio. All of a sudden it's, 'What do you mean there are no tickets for tonight?' At the rate we're going, I think we're going to get there."
Backers of women's professional sports comfort themselves with the idea that it's not the women who have made leagues fail, it's the business models.
Leagues such as the WUSA tried to get too big, too fast and set expectations for a return on owners' investment too high, they say.
The leagues that figure out how to make the business model work have a real shot at being successful, said Donna Lopiano, chief executive of the Women's Sports Foundation in East Meadow, N.Y.
She also said the leagues' biggest hurdle -- getting on television -- could be reduced in a few years with the rise of digital downloads and on-demand programming.
''What happens if the three million women's softball players in this country can download professional women's softball into their iPods?" she asked. ''What does that do?"
Sasha Talcott can be reached at stalcott@globe.com. 
