Drawing corporate and other financial support for women’s sports remains a challenge in today’s marketplace despite the positive storylines seen for female athletes in the last year, said panelists during the opening session of today’s SportsBusiness Daily/Journal Game Changers conference at the N.Y. Marriott Marquis. “Women’s sports are playing catch-up, and people playing catch-up are behind with decision-makers because of an emphasis on quarterly returns,” said Octagon Founder & President Phil de Picciotto. The panel was titled, “The State of Women’s Sports: A Big Picture Look at Today’s Properties and Insights for the Future.” de Picciotto said decision-makers faced with such challenges will gravitate toward more-established investments than many women’s sports platforms provide. “It will save their jobs, subject them to less criticism, and they can probably move the dial faster,” he said. Financial pressure points can be seen particularly with college and Olympic sports, the panelists said. “For most athletic departments, there is a huge bit of attention given to a limited number of sports,” said NCAA President Mark Emmert. “When budget cuts occur in any organizational body, they tend to go to the place where there’s the least resistance. They tend to be Olympic sports, whether that’s men’s or women’s sports.” Emmert noted the decision to cut, and later reinstate, football at UAB compared to a decision made when he was president at the Univ. of Washington to cut swimming programs for both men and women. Financial pressure will only continue as the movement continues toward schools covering the full cost of attendance for their athletes, he said. “We have this interesting juxtaposition between the popularity of viewing women’s college sports … and, on the horizon, a variety of really thorny problems,” he said. USOC CEO Scott Blackmun said those type of decisions will have an effect on his organization. He said 65% of the U.S. athletes from the '12 London Games trained at colleges. “It will have an impact on the Olympic teams,” he said. “Nobody is talking about that we should cut our philosophy or art departments. We need to shift the dialogue away from revenue and ‘Are these sports sustainable?’ to, ‘Do they make the campus better? Do they make the individual better?’”
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Richie says WNBA's pitches in the past were
"too much as a cause" |
BUSINESS REALITIES EXIST: The panelists acknowledge that business realities exist. Pitches to investors have to balance both financial and non-financial considerations. “I’m not running a charity here,” said WNBA President Laurel Richie. “I’m running a league, and running a business.” Richie said that, in the past, the league’s pitch to potential partners might have positioned spending on the WNBA as “too much as a cause.” “We are fundamentally a sports and entertainment vehicle,” she said. “We cannot lose site of that. That’s where our sustainable growth comes from.” NWSL Commissioner Jeff Plush said his league, coming off the Women’s World Cup, saw a 30% increase in attendance this year and had 18 sellouts in the season’s second half, compared to none in the first half. He added that the league is preparing for the start of its fourth season in January, where no prior women’s soccer league went beyond its third year. “We think the bump will last for a long time,” he said.
Quick Hits:
* Blackmun, on how on-field success affects business: “When we have these stories in Olympic sports, it really helps us solidify our message with our sponsors.”
* Richie, noting societal conversations on race, gender and sexual orientation: “I look at the conversations happening in this country ... as being more authentic than they’ve ever been. The country is catching up to where the WNBA has been for the last 19 years.”
* de Picciotto, noting three challenges for women’s sports, of a shorter history for their leagues, fewer participation opportunities, and less money invested: “The gap is narrowing in all of those areas.”
* Plush, on building from the Women’s World Cup: “We need to change our mindset, change our expectations -- that this is the new normal.”
* Richie, on building support in team markets: “There is no single model. Every single market is different. We have to tailor our business plans to what is unique about each individual market.”
* Emmert, on getting more female coaches: “We need to encourage women to get into youth sports. That becomes the natural feeding ground into high school and college sports.”
* Blackmun, on his breakthrough targets to watch for the '16 Rio Games: Katie Ledecky and Allyson Felix.
* Blackmun, on the LA 2024 effort following the earlier Boston bid push: “They’ve given us a second chance.”
