When Alexa Coubal was in eighth grade, a volleyball teammate told her to quit because she was “too competitive.” Her immediate reaction: “Why do we play if we don’t want to win?” It’s a memory that has followed her throughout her athletic career, from competing as a track star at Notre Dame, working for the Los Angeles Rams, to now, at 27, coaching high school girls basketball while also playing youth basketball college in Thousand Oaks, CA.
And yet, the acclaim she received all those years ago seems to be a common refrain directed at female athletes. Kayla Lorentz, a 38-year-old who plays recreational volleyball, grew up participating in sports. But whenever her team lost, she reacted badly – sulking, lashing out, frustrated with herself and the team – and was also warned for being “too competitive”.
“There’s this idea of a female apologetic in sport – that women have to compensate with their femininity for participating in sport because historically, it’s been coded as masculine. Basically, sports as we know it [in the UK] it was a way of training army officers and keeping the poor in linesays Bethan Taylor-Swaine, a feminist sport sociologist and PhD candidate at the University of London who studies ultrarunning. “So when women ‘disrupt’ this space, we’re essentially expressing male dominance, and the way we overcome it is to say, ‘Look, I’m not a threat. I’m just grateful to be here.”
But while this horribly outdated, massively demeaning mindset exists today, it’s also quickly becoming a thing of the past. A research report, ‘Reframe the Game’, conducted by R29 Intelligence to understand the recent change in the world of sports, found that ‘competition’ is the number one word defining sports for women in 2024. The 65 % of respondents said a sport is a “physical activity that involves competition and rules” and 67% say their favorite types of athletes “embodies the competitive spirit.”
You don’t have to be completely immersed in — or even remotely interested in — sports to know that there’s an unprecedented movement beneath your feet: advocating for high-performing, record-breaking female athletes who are finally gaining coverage and recognition which they deserve. There’s Caitlin Clark, who has been hailed as one of the greatest collegiate basketball players of all time and whose performance in the NCAA championships helped propel women’s basketball into the mainstream consciousness, drawing 19 million viewers and becoming the most watched basketball game of the last five years. There’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the Olympic gold-medal runner and hurdler who constantly breaks personal bests and sets world records. There’s Simone Biles, who with 37 gold medals (Olympic and World Championship wins combined), is the most decorated athlete – and certainly one of the most widely recognized Olympians – of all time.
One thing they all have in common (besides athletic superiority): a relentless, unforgiving drive to win.
Let’s be clear: This push isn’t a new idea, but the normalization of women competing as hard in sports as men, along with the widespread acceptance of their hyper-competitive attitudes certainly is. “Women have always been competitive. If you look at people like Billie Jean King or the Williams sisters – they’re extremely competitive. But I think women are now exposed to female athletes who talk about competition, and therefore, it’s okay for them to talk about competition as well,” says Taylor-Swaine. “It probably has to do with this post-industrial, post-feminist narrative, which is shaped by male sporting values – the idea that anyone can do it, and it entails the idea of self-empowerment, self-improvement and independence. There is also this added layer that in order to prove their worth, women must be exceptional in order to be accepted. They can’t just be good, they have to be exceptional.”
Of course, all professional athletes are inherently competitive — they have to be to win — but it’s important to look at why women feel the need to go above and beyond. So many of these reasons – which need to be taken seriously, to prove their worth – are still very much rooted in the context of men and on a larger scale, the patriarchal society in which we live. A favorite NBA or MLB team, for example, could go on a decades-long losing streak and yet maintain die-hard fans, public interest, live TV coverage, sponsorships and eight-figure salaries. But for female athletes, more is at stake. Without winning, everything that goes hand in hand with it – the hype, the lucrative deals, the premium coverage – could simply grow and disappear.
Coubal compares female athletes to artists such as Taylor Swift and Beyonce, who must constantly reinvent themselves and experiment with new genres and concepts to stay relevant. “What man does this? People will talk about quarterbacks 30 years ago, and they’re still relevant,” he says. “But it’s different with women – there’s pressure to keep being a great athlete, to prove it wasn’t a fluke, to keep improving.”
However, against the odds, we have seen an increase in women’s performance at the highest level, making sport as a whole much more competitive. Coubal points to the Olympic trials for the 2024 USA women’s basketball team as an example.[Making the team] it’s been really awful this year — everyone’s gotten better,” he says. “And you I have be on top if you want brand coverage and deals.”
And the coverage is already changing — something Coubal noticed when WNBA basketball player Marina Mabrey was traded from Chicago to Connecticut this July. “SportsCenter did a post about it, but two or three years ago, they wouldn’t bother. Meanwhile, when a male athlete is traded, everyone knows it. We need to give women a chance to cover women’s sports instead of asking men who don’t care. We need sports journalists to see them as athletes first, not as women,” she says. “I have seen too people who bet on WNBA players on FanDuel and DraftKings, again, that wasn’t a thing two years ago.” In fact, according to a FanDuel spokesperson, the number of WNBA bets for the first half of this season increased 341% year-over-year, and the opening night of the 2024 WNBA season saw a 230% year-over-year increase in bets. before.
Social media has certainly played a role in the changing narratives, supporting female athletes where traditional sports journalism falls short. In fact, Christine Burke, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and runner products at New York Road Runnerssays social media has been one of two driving forces behind change in professional sports for women.
“The women have shown a real willingness to share both their professional running lives and their personal lives – and fans have gotten to know these athletes on a personal level, from knowing who their partner is to what their journey has been like after childbirth for the return to sports. like. It humanizes them,” says Burke, who has worked with NYRR, the nonprofit leader in uplifting women, for nearly a decade. “We know a lot of female professional runners by their first names — Shalane [Flanagan] and Des [Linden] and Dina [Kastor] and Greece [Obiri] — whereas male professional runners are still really known by their last names, and you don’t really know their stories in the same way.”
The second major driving force: money. Even with the surge of interest in women’s sports, there is still a staggering pay gap, with female athletes making no more than male athletes (for the 2023/24 season, NBA players earned an average salary of more than $12 million, while WNBA players received an average annual salary of $116,000). Burke stresses that financial investment in women’s sports must continue. One of her responsibilities at NYRR – and a mainstay of the business – is overseeing sponsorships, and she has seen more interest in women’s sports (and not from a philanthropic perspective). She says Mastercard, for example, sponsors the New York Mini 10K, the world’s original women-only road race. The TCS New York City Marathon was also the first marathon to offer equal prize money between men and women.
“Once we, as a society, stop thinking of women’s sport as charity, things will change — and he’s got it got better,” says Coubal. “There are some WNBA owners, like Mark Davis who owns the Las Vegas Aces, who treat players like high-class athletes. [Davis] he built his team a brand new facility, pays their coach very well and gives them the resources they need. And then you have other owners who say, “You should just be grateful.”
The 2024 Olympics in Paris present an opportunity for serious progress — with female athletes embraced for their competitive nature and celebrated for their incredible athletic achievements. It is the first time in history that the Games will be held see an equal number of men and women competing. And we hope it will be a watershed moment for gender equality in sport, and that momentum will continue long after the closing ceremonies of the Games, from greater investment in female athletes to hiring more female coaches.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a truly great athlete who wasn’t aggressive and competitive,” says Coubal. “We need to start respecting women’s sport as a sport. They’re athletes, so let them be athletes and play hard. The biggest thing is to treat every game as a game — and not just a “girl’s game.”
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