Hate for the WNBA and Other Emerging Leagues Makes No Sense

Note: This was originally published on my new Medium blog which can be found here. I will be sharing stories from here on Medium as well as writing other articles, not limited to just sports, that will be exclusive to Medium. Link to the original article can be found here.

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Fans are never satisfied with the breakdown of sports media coverage. People will complain about LeBron James and Zion Williamson being shoved in their faces, but whenever outlets feature less popular or emerging sports, their tune changes to some variant of “who cares?” or “stick to real sports.”

I’ve always found this apparent hypocrisy to be an interesting consequence of the social media age, where everyone feels emboldened to share their opinions concerning just about anything. In actuality, it’s probably not as much hypocrisy as it is a combination of different groups of people reacting to different articles and our online tendency to spin things in negative ways.

What this does prove is that people have different tastes, which by itself should demonstrate that we should have coverage of a wide variety of sports and athletes. Yet, the dissatisfaction continues.

I understand it can sometimes feel annoying to be bombarded with irrelevant details of LeBron’s offseason actions, but I’ve never quite gotten why some like to hate on less popular sports and their athletes.

Perhaps no league has had to deal with more of this behavior than the WNBA, which is routinely mocked for its low attendance numbers (although they outpace the NBA at the same point in its history) and “boring” product, among other things. When the league’s low salaries are brought up, haters become economists, citing how low demand suggests the players don’t deserve better compensation.

I’ve written in much greater detail about the WNBA’s past, present, and future, but I’ll summarize my main thoughts here and invite you to read more if you’re interested.

• The WNBA is far from an uninteresting league. It’s main problems stem from its relative infancy as a league and a lack of visibility in terms of media coverage and the marketing of its star players.
• Opportunity for growth exists and is aided by a summer regular season where there is little competition with other domestic sports.
• No one is expecting salaries to equal that of the NBA, but the players should make more, and foreign leagues prove that they can.

The State of the WNBA, Lessons from the NBA, and Next Steps for Growth

Ignoring the sexist undertones specific to many anti-WNBA arguments, the suggestion that less popular leagues don’t deserve coverage or higher player salaries is borderline offensive and straight-up anti-progress. Under this line of thinking, nothing should be any more popular than it currently is, leading to perfect maintenance of the status quo.

But, of course, nothing starts out popular. Growth takes time, and just because something is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, or that we don’t have an obligation to try. The only way we improve as a society is through continuing to strive for improvement towards ideals.

Should female basketball players have the same opportunity to play professionally in the United States as males and capitalize financially during their limited time as an athlete? Of course. And the same goes for participants in the next big sport we haven’t heard of yet.

Additionally, in 2019, with the entire world at our fingertips, finding content for your favorite sport shouldn’t be an issue. I would be somewhat more sympathetic to those who complain about less-popular sports if there were fewer mediums to access information.

In the past, people got their news primarily from newspapers. If you were a fan of basketball in its earliest years, but the local paper only focused on baseball and boxing, you would be understandably frustrated. But now, as long as you have an internet connection, accessibility is not an issue. You have the freedom to choose which websites to follow and authors to read. If you don’t like a source, go somewhere else.

Lastly, if you’re a sports fan, you should want the sports industry to grow. Emerging sports can introduce innovative ideas and add more energy and resources to the industry. And just think, if no one else cared about the sports you follow, they would cease to exist. So why attack other sports? It only looks bad on sports fans as a whole.

There isn’t anyone forcing you to love every sport. If something’s boring, don’t watch it, just like you don’t watch 99% of the things on television. Sport exclusivity — the idea that some sports are worthy of being covered while others aren’t — is a foolish and self-centered opinion. Continue to like what you like and scroll through the rest.