Why don’t we watch women?
Let’s talk about women’s sports.
Specifically, let’s talk about attendance.
I don’t want to generalize, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that women’s sports boast lower attendance numbers than their equivalent men’s sport.
Swimming, a sport no one really cares about to begin with, is no exception.
Last week at the Div. I NCAA Women’s Swimming and Diving Championship meet, the stands were mostly empty, as reported by swimswam.com.
I repeat, the stands were mostly empty to watch the best women swimmers in the country — some of them Olympians — compete at the highest level of college swimming.
What?
I would kill to watch the likes of Katie Ledecky, Simone Manuel and Kathleen Baker, all Olympic gold medalists, compete for their respective colleges.
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s natatorium can hold up to 4,700 spectators.
During the four-day, eight-session competition, a total of 10,031 tickets were sold. That’s an average of 1,254 tickets sold per session, which means just over one-fourth of the natatorium’s capacity was filled for each session.
Tickets are still on sale for the Div. I NCAA Men’s Swimming and Diving Championship meet, which will be held at the Indiana University Natatorium this week. A look at tickets sold for the men’s meet already shows tickets for each session are no where close to being sold out. However, tickets in the sections with the best views of the competition pool — sections 103, 104, 109, 110, 203, 204, 209 and 210 — are nearly sold out for every session.
But in the photos from the women’s meet, its clear that the best sections are no where near sold out.
It will be interesting to see how many more tickets total are sold for the men’s meet than the women’s meet.
As a former female athlete, it is discouraging to see these hardworking, talented, elite athletes not get the recognition they deserve just because of their gender.
