I am not a celebrity, I am not a show. I am not unreachable
or untouchable. I am a promise you made to yourself when you were a
little girl, and I am coming true.
It’s almost amazing that I remember those words. They are from a
1996 Reebok ad that featured Rebecca Lobo and a simple phrase that
no female athlete could forget, because it’s something we
understood and a dream we all had–to become professional
athletes.
Great things have happened for women’s sports since 1996. The
U.S. Women’s National team won the Olympic gold medal for soccer in
1996 and won the Women’s World Cup in 1999. American women won the
gold medal in the 2002 Winter Olympics in ice hockey. Girls began
to outnumber boys in youth sports leagues. The WNBA was formed in
1996. In 2000 the WUSA was formed: the first professional women’s
soccer league in the world.
Certainly a far cry from when I was a girl. I grew up playing
soccer, common for kids now, but it was still relatively new in my
community at the time. In a good season, there were as many as four
girls on my team; in other years, I was the only one. I never
understood why, because I loved soccer. I remember my grandmother
telling me that soccer was for boys, not good little girls, and I
remember the fighter in me insisting she was wrong.
I’m proud that little girls today can go into a sporting goods
store and buy cleats made for their small feet and don’t have to
shop in the boys section,a luxury I didn’t enjoy, and that girls’
leagues were being formed across the country. Over the years, we
battled gender lines, and we were winning. We didn’t have to fight
to be equals anymore.
Or so I thought.
Tuesday, the WUSA announced that after three years of operation,
it was folding because the league was $16 million in the red.
Melodramatic as it may be, I felt like a small part of me died when
I heard the news that a league that gave little girls great soccer
and great women as role models was going under. I think the little
girl in me–the one who felt that she was, in some sisterly sense,
being given a chance to see a dream come true–is what died.
The WUSA was amazing. It was a professional sports league that,
aside from the WNBA, was relatively unparalleled. There were no
prima donnas, there were no “show me the money” egos and there were
no players who saw themselves in a class above the rest of us.
The league went under because of financial problems. It wasn’t
the fault of the franchise owners–they spent $100 million on the
league, and it certainly wasn’t the fault of top-name players who
took pay cuts to help keep the league going. To put it bluntly, too
few corporations wanted to back a women’s league.
On Tuesday, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said, “Although we are
saddened by today’s action, we believe the decision has no impact
on the future viability of the sport of soccer in the United
States.”
The way I see it, this will have a very negative impact on the
viability of the game. Women make up more than 50 percent of the
United States population and girls equal and sometimes outnumber
boys in youth soccer leagues. The folding of WUSA will teach these
girls a hard-knock lesson that will take years to forget: In this
country, some people still don’t think that girls can play as well
as boys.
The league needs large corporations to abandon the “boys-only”
mentality of athletic sponsorship and stop hiding behind the excuse
that they would lose money because of the small fan base or lack of
media time.
I hope a miracle graces the WUSA before it’s too late, before
little girls lose their idols and heroines. New York Power
midfielder Shannon Boxx said, “Having this league here is a dream
come true, and I just feel bad for all the little girls who had a
great dream of playing in the WUSA.”
It will be worse than bad. It will be a complete disgrace to
sports if girls can only have dreams that are unreachable and
untouchable instead of promises that come true.
