Can the Bay area support a WNBA team?
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posted by Women's Sports Blog An irreverent look at the news, issues, and personalities of women's sports from a feminist perspective. |
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As a native of a basketball-mad area that can barely keep its WNBA franchise afloat, and a Bay Area women's sports fan for the past six years, I was worried when I heard the Monarchs were coming. Granted, anything's better than Sac-town (thanks, Maloof brothers, for your belief in women!), but there are a lot of questions still to be answered. Oracle is far too big for a WNBA franchise, so where does the team go? If San Francisco, will the East Bay fans come, and vice versa? If down on the Peninsula, where they can draw in the Stanford faithful, will the city fans make the trek? Sure, the Bay Area has a thriving women's basketball culture, but it has an even more entrenched soccer culture, and FC Gold Pride is struggling mightily. That team is proof that a strong bastion of college support is not the same as a pro fan base. It's also being made to pay out the nose for the prime stadium location in Santa Clara (thanks for the solidarity, Broncos!) and rumors continue that it may move to the East Bay, because there's nothing Bay Area fans like more than commuting to games. Based on my observations, I think the team has failed to pull in the key Hispanic demographic that has helped men's soccer survive here. Marketing has been fairly poor. A WNBA franchise needs to seriously step it up to compete, and with league-wide instability it's unclear whether that will happen.
View Original Post at ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports
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- Filed Under:
- Basketball, Sports, SportsPLUS, OpEd, WNBA, Business
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Q McCall
But for some reason, I naively maintain hope that somehow this will be different when my hometown gets a WNBA team and that a WNBA team will market as well as the MLS' Seattle Sounders did.
Don't crush my dream! ;)