Women in Pro Sports

Professional sports are a form of entertainment that is accepted all throughout the world. A professional sport simply means that the participants are getting paid for engaging in a specific activity. It is because the participants are getting paid that pro sports are considered businesses. In order to run a successful business one must be able to sell a product or a service. Because of this I believe that pro women sports may never achieve the success that their male counterparts have achieved.

While amateur sports can be entertaining simply because of the competition between two entities, watching the pro’s, achieves a level of entertainment that is unmatched. The draw in going to a professional sporting event is in the word “professional.” Watching a pro athlete means watching someone that has proven to be the best at the sport they are playing. Athletes perform at a skill level that is unimaginable by most people. People pay for this experience. The experiences of watching someone do something that they would probably not be able to do within their own lifetime. Can women out perform men in physical activities? absolutely, but if the best males and the best females are put up against each other, basic human anatomy says, the males will out perform the females. According to the European Journal of Applied Physiology , males have larger, leaner, and stronger muscles. All of these attributes are essential to being the best. Simply put, female athletes are physically unable to perform at the same level of their male counterparts. They may be good; in fact there are several sports where women fair very well in. Sports like figure skating, volleyball, and gymnastics but in our main steam sports they have been viewed, as “good for a woman”. This inability to spark interest in the male dominated main stream sports may be the reason for the lack of fan support that has plagued women pro sports.

Over the years there have been several attempts at a pro division in several different sports for women, most with epic failure. The America Basketball League actually had potential and was considers by most, better than its rival, the Women National Basketball Association. Unfortunately it didn’t have the financial backing that the WNBA did, the ABL failed after just 2 seasons. The WNBA at 12 years has been the most successful attempt at a pro women sport to date, but is it really achieving success? The WNBA is losing a reported 12 million a season and has recently changed its business plan in the past year, transferring most of its expenses from the league to individual owners, to include player salaries and operating expenses. This concept alone is a recipe for failure. Why would an entrepreneur invest in a new team knowing that there would be no support from the league in