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SlamJam and the
Future
by Mike Gorman
Produced for the Web by Carol Lee
The
small, low-ceilinged gym at P.S. 194 on 144th St. in Harlem
must have seemed an inauspicious place to institute what
would become in eight short years one of the nation's premier
girls' basketball leagues.
Undaunted,
Clyde Frazier Jr., a former Amateur Athletic Union basketball
coach (and no relation to former Knick great Walt "Clyde"
Frazier) pushed forward. Frazier realized the scant prospects
for young, inner-city girl basketball players to get exposure.
Private and Catholic school leagues, too, were getting little
outside attention. In 1994, the future of girls basketball
in New York City was Clyde Frazier Jr.
Today, the SlamJam Women’s
Basketball Classic attracts coaches from the NCAA’s
Division I to its headquarters at Riverbank State Park on
Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan as word of the quality
of the competitive, physical nature of the playing has spread.
As of last season, more than 270 former SlamJam players
compete or have competed in Division I college basketball.
The success of the WNBA
and the U.S. Soccer team’s defeat of China in the 1999
Women’s World Cup Finals have opened up myriad opportunities
for women athletes and, in turn, for the businesses that
have long profited from traditional men's sports. The vision
of people like Frazier has made those new opportunities
for women athletes even more abundant
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"Girls
playing basketball used to be just a passing fancy,
now girls play hard and they’re getting better
as the years progress."
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But there’s a downside, too. As cash, power, and prominence
become increasingly prevalent, some experts think women’s
sports may soon fall into the same win-at-all-cost mentality
of the men’s organizations.
Frazier, 41, describes SlamJam’s growth as a "quantum
leap" from those early days. Before SlamJam, girls
who had designs on colleges outside of the tri-state area
would have to travel to the campuses in order to be seen,
this involving time and money that few could spare.
SlamJam’s current operating budget of over $30,000
a year is a far cry from the $2,800 in city grants used
to start the league. With no sponsorships and only the sparse
city-funding allocated for non-profit foundations, the league
made do with little more than its limited resources and
Frazier’s energy and pushing -- until three years ago.
"I
just wouldn’t stop; I just kept nudging them,"
he laughs. Certainly not hurt by the advent of the WNBA,
Adidas signed on as a SlamJam sponsor. Old Navy and Magic
Johnson Theaters soon followed suit, creating what Frazier
hopes will be the basis for generating more and greater
corporate support.
Frazier sees the growth of SlamJam as a microcosm of the
recent growth of women’s sports in general.
"Women’s
sports still have a long way to go, though," admits
Frazier. "There are still many problematic aspects."
Nearly all of them, not surprisingly, still boil down to
money.
Players
warm up for 2001 SlamJam Tournament
Photo
by Mike Gorman |
Frazier
muses, "Just because someone is a celebrity, people
automatically assume that they have a lot of money, and
that just isn’t the case," he says, referring
to the average salary of $40,000 a year for WNBA players
-- a fraction of the sums their male counterparts command.
"Press
coverage of women’s soccer and basketball has increased
the possibilities for professional women athletes by leaps
and bounds," he says. However, he points out that the
quality of play and of players, which goes hand-in-hand
with increasing the market and fan-base, will undoubtedly
suffer if women have to continue to get off-season jobs
to make ends meet.
Before the WNBA, women who wanted to play basketball professionally
had little choice but to play in one of the European leagues.
Now, girls with hoop dreams have role models they can more
easily identify with. No more looking to Latrell Sprewell
or Shaquille O’Neal for inspiration with WNBA stars
like Theresa Witherspoon, Sheryl Swoopes, and Lisa Leslie
around.
A commonly held, albeit mistaken, belief is that women’s
sports organizations are vainly attempting in some way to
attract the loyal fans of the men’s franchises. Barbara
Jacobs, Women’s Sports Administrator for the Big East
Conference, disagrees.
"Just
look at the situation in Connecticut [with the University
of Connecticut Huskies], and it goes without saying.
You have two completely separate groups of people going
to men’s games and women’s games," she says.
While the Huskies fans who pack the women’s games are
invariably high-energy, high-spirited groups of families,
young girls, and older folks, the men’s games are almost
always made up of virtually all men, and are far less vivacious,
more of a "sit on their hands crowd," according
to Jacobs.
Christine Brooks, a marketing professor at the University
of Michigan, is the author of the book, "Sports Marketing:
Competitive Business Strategies for Sports." She attributes
UConn’s solid fan base to the team’s prolonged
success. (Since 1982, the Huskies have won 227 of 303 games,
nine of them championships.) She is reluctant to characterize
women’s fans as intrinsically more lively and team-spirited.
She does, however, believe that the markets for men’s
and women’s sports are entirely separate.
"The
fact that women's basketball draws families has to do with
the representational value of women's sports," she
says. "Marketers have discovered that women's sports
can connect with families because they represent possibilities
for women and that the women players are still, as she puts
it, "pure."
John Hunt, of the advertising agency BBDO, says that ESPN
and CBS televise WNBA games mainly "to stay in the
good graces of the NBA, which is the parent of the WNBA."
Hunt says that there is nothing either
network would like more than to gain NBA broadcast rights
the next time bidding occurs.
The NBA has apparently seen the future, and it looks like
big merchandising bucks from the women’s market. Women
are purchasing 74 percent of all NBA and NFL apparel, and
have been attending women's college basketball games in
record numbers.
For decades, women were left to organize and fund their
sports on
| "Right
now in the WNBA, for marketing reasons, there are more
men coaching. But I think down the road there are going
to be more women in those spots." |
their
own because they weren't considered commercially viable
in the conventional sports market. Without financial incentive
or much community support, women tended to play for personal
and emotional reward.
James Crone, a sociologist at Hanover College in Indiana,
published a review of studies about sports in general (not
just women's) in 1999 in the Journal of Sport Behavior.
He cited "money, power, and prestige" as catalysts
in a long list of problems associated with professional
men’s sports. Coaches becoming authoritarian toward
athletes, coaches cheating, athletes getting and playing
hurt, and the general treatment of athletes as a commodity
were among the most common offenses.
In 2001, he asserts that because women athletes are beginning
to be viewed as marketable, these misdeeds are likely to
make their way into the women’s arena. It may be difficult
for the best female athletes to avoid being led into that
way of doing things, since it is traditionally where the
power and money reside.
Joli
Sandoz, former NCAA
coach and editor of Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's
Sport, comments: "Whether or not one considers
this a detrimental process I think depends on one's point
of view. I loved sport for the opportunities to bond with
other women, to acquire and perform expertise, to gain the
respect of people I cared about, and to use my body in ways
that made it healthy and strong."
NEXT:
Women's sports soar,
but female coaches get a raw deal>>
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