Schools hire retread coaches instead of searching out promising young talent, they give the women's team almost no recruiting budgets, and they refuse to publicize the teams so that the kids are playing in front of 350 family and friends every game.
There's a fundamental question that needs to be answered for women's basketball in this country. That question is, "can a larger market be created?"
Market creation in a mature economy is difficult, more difficult for entertainment, and yet more difficult for sports entertainment. Soccer is Exhibit 1. Tens of Millions of kids play soccer, but there has not been the kind of market creation that many had hoped for, which is too bad really. Great game. So why is that? Not sure. Too many other sports? Too many other Tech options? Do we have a short cultural attention span? If you've been breastfed 120 point NBA games and 50 point NFL games your whole life, do you develop sports fan ADD?
The WNB is moving in the right direction, but the question remains - how much market can be created?
We're living in a society where the heretofore unstoppable NFL showed a decrease in TV ratings - seemingly impossible for the franchise that has been held up by all as the exemplar on which to base your sport management. As TV's allure wanes, and young people are grown more attached to virtual reality than reality, the sale for women's hoops will likely not get easier.
That's the pros. For college, though, you must ask, if your point is valid, why aren't colleges willing to invest money in coaches and recruiting and advertising? Are they incompetent? Do they believe there will not be a ROI? Are they misogynistic?
If they invest the money, and the returns aren't there, then can they stop investing the money? How long? 5 years? 20 years? At some point of a failure to earn a ROI, then, by definition, the money being "invested" would not really be an investment, but would rather be something that "needs to be carried" in order to have a football program, as you put it - of course you'd probably agree there is value in college athletics beyond profitability, marketability, and audience size.
I imagine the truth is a mix of many things, with many regional variations. How many schools can run a profitable women's hoop team if all management was done properly? What do you think? 5? 50? I don't know the answer, and there is little useful information out there, particularly given funky accounting that is used by many colleges. I do know that the WBB UConn phenomenon seems to be a black swan event more than a pioneering event - Connecticut demographics, Geno, Lobo, double double championships. It seems unlikely that anything close and sustainable could be created elsewhere. Time will tell.
It would be good for WCBB to improve, expand, and become more profitable. I believe that the UConn women's team success has been incredibly beneficial to the University. I had somebody once ask, way back when, Yukon? In Canada? Really, that happened. By 2000 I'd more often get, "with the great woman's team?"
In a world with a pie that isn't growing as rapidly as in past decades and with the fight for the pieces ever more intense and with non-sports internet occupying a larger part of the pie every year, I'm just not feeling sanguine that the WBB market can be expanded.
