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Message: [QUOTE="Ozimoto, post: 3709703, member: 6677"] There are also stats showing that the popularity of other sports for young girls is increasing. Girls' youth soccer is more popular than basketball. Volleyball, for instance, is attracting high school athletes away from basketball. There still may be more basketball players than volleyball players currently, but the gap is closing. Yes, there seem to be more talented basketball players than there were twenty years ago, but as a percentage of female athletes taken as a whole, basketball's portion of the pie is shrinking. Since I am at work I won't have time to dig up a whole lot of statistics, but there is this link from the Coach and A.D. web site. [URL unfurl="true"]https://coachad.com/news/track-volleyball-popular-sports-among-u-s-high-school-girls/[/URL] For fans of women's sports in the US, I think a lot of the demographics for fans of a given sport reflects the sport or sports that their kids play. There [I]may[/I] be something to the perception of an athlete's appearance and orientation affecting the popularity of a particular sport, especially among old farts like us. I remember one mom asking my wife if she was comfortable with my daughter playing travel softball because of the "kind of girls (lesbians) that played the sport." No, we didn't and she never had any issues with any of the girls on her teams at all. There was some drama with a few girls in high school (she went to a high school for the arts) but that had nothing to do with athletics. However, I think our society in general is becoming a lot more tolerant about such things. I know my kids are. "Our" generation won't be around that much longer so I think the idea that the WNBA is not as popular because of society's perception of their athletes will become a non-issue. If professional women's basketball is to survive in the future, they will have to put a good, watchable product on the floor. That's why people tune in to the games. [B]They have to figure out how to make more women want to watch sports, which has always been, and will continue to be, the biggest challenge the WNBA has.[/B] [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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