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Why hasn't the NBA tried to make the league more female-friendly? The Laker Girls may be friendly females, but that ain't the same, now is it? (source: Yardbarker.com)

Across ESPN’s TrueHoop and a few other sites, there has been a back-and-forth about female basketball fans that I find fascinating.  The initial highly intelligent post on Hardwood Paroxysm was written by Sarah Tolcser, co-author of HornetsHype, and who’s Twitter nom de plume is ticktock6 (yes, that was just my shameless excuse to write “nom de plume” and attempt to sound smart-like).  Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation has gotten caught up in whether the current usage of cheerleaders is an evil, sexist thing, but I find that to be limiting.  The question of how (and perhaps even “whether”) to appeal to female NBA fans is a much larger, more intriguing question to me.

Tolcser cites a stat that 40% of NBA fans are female, a number which shocked me.  I mean I’d always thought instead of the slogan “Where amazing happens” that the league could’ve always used “Where sausage fest happens.”  After all, most sports reporters and writers (and by writers I mean even going all the way down to the people who choose to write comments on blogs like this) tend to be people of the testicular-persuasion.  And honestly, I tend to view males as more the type to get obsessive when they follow ANYTHING, be it sports, Lord Of The Rings, indie-rock bands, whatever.  That’s not to say that there aren’t hard-core female indie-rock followers, but when I picture the over-the-top fan who brags that he only listens to vinyl and has a collection of 6,000 vintage small-label original recordings, I can only see that dork being a guy. (more…)