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Message: [QUOTE="crewbear742, post: 2737461, member: 7435"] When you discuss the popularity of women's sports, you have to begin at the basics. And the most basic fact is this. Men drive sports consumption. So if you have set yourself to the task of creating a popular sport, you're going to have to produce a sport that men want to watch. You can't produce the sport that you think men should watch and then try to shape their behavior accordingly. These efforts will fail. The most basic problem for women's athletics is the perception of competitive inferiority. Women are not seen as peer athletes in most sports. Two years ago, the Australian Women's National Team - a team that would legitimately compete for the gold medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics - was defeated 7-0 in a warm-up game by a U15 boy's team. To put it bluntly, one of the best women's soccer teams in the world was crushed by a group of 14 year-old boys. There followed many rationalizations and excuses, but nothing could erase the revelation of that stark outcome - that professional women's sports exist at about the boy's early high school level. This is the perception that most men have about most women's sports. Their experience tells them it exists at competitive level far below the men's game. For good or ill, men judge women's sports by the standard of men's sports. This is a standard that women cannot hope to meet and so men tend to dismiss women's athletics outright. There are many people who think that a woman's sport should be evaluated on its own terms and that men should be retrained to adopt this new standard. This is why I stated above that you have to produce a sport that men want to watch and not the sport you think they should watch. The retraining effort will fail. There are some few sports where men and women compete openly against each other. Show jumping comes to mind. This sport does not emphasize masculine advantages but depends solely on the skill of the rider. Men and women compete openly against each other and no one thinks anything about it. Why? Because they are legitimate peer competitors. When a woman by virtue of biological disadvantage cannot be a peer competitor to a man at the same competitive level, then the vast majority of men will not take her seriously enough to pay money and spend time watching. This is why most women's sports will always be very niche sports. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach