(In)visible Heroines
The fairytales of women’s professional sports are being rewritten by social media, visible heroines have the potential to change how this chapter ends.
In professional sporting kingdoms, erected over a century ago, a handful of professional male athletes do something unexpected. They pull on bright orange and blue hoodies, screen printed with an amorphous athlete–distinguishable by buns, hips and ponytails–to be photographed in their castles. Fortunately, these knights in shining (under)armour are no longer the heroes of this story. Instead, they are Trojan horses, acting as catalysts to shine light on the female athlete heroines lingering in the shadows of the male dominated landscape of professional sports.
These single moments of major visibility–that catalyze a WNBA or PWHPA search–lead to a series of moments of micro-visibility as social media follows take the story from there. And it is here, within this land of social media storytelling, that the biggest opportunity and challenge for the future of women’s professional sports lies.
The Prologue: Seeing the W’s
Professional sports have always been an amphitheatre for real-life fairytales. A paper trail of archetypal stories litter the headlines of the sports section–the quest, conquering the monster, rags to riches triumphs–and all too often in the professional women’s sports arena–the tragedy. The collapse of a league, the lack of investors or viewership, and the right-on-cue crocodile tears from those at the helm of men’s professional sports empires. For decades these are the happily-never-after fairytales that aspiring female athletes grew up reading.
With the three-quarter century head start of mens pro-leagues, boys have always had the luxury of turning on the TV and seeing people that look like them compete. The dangers of the lack of visible female role models are well known in the world of women’s sports. The oft tweeted tagline ‘if you can see it, you can be it’ serves as both inspiration and warning to future generations.
But wins are occurring. And as pioneers fight for big W’s quite literally– PWHPA, NWHL, NWSL, WNBA, espnW–more organic w’s are happening at the small scale. One of those lowercase w’s is that girls now follow their favourite female athletes on social media, and it’s not just them. For the first time, we live in a world where visibility of female athletes is trending.
What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that future female draft picks no longer subscribe to the mythologies of masculinity that entrenched certain categories of competition just a decade ago. The next generation of hockey players doesn’t needlessly fret whether mascara and blush can be part of their game day routine.
The Rising Action: Social Media & Micro-Visibility
By making the once invisible visible, social media acts as the most important channel for growth of women’s professional sports. This visibility works bottom up to empower the next generation of players and top down to enable a new form of investment in the women’s game. It does this by transferring narratives once solely owned by traditional media, locked behind paywalls or clandestine corporations, into the hands of the female athlete. It disrupts the barriers to media entry that were once too high a fortress to penetrate.
At the bottom, social media platforms have the power to grant the aspiring athlete access to her heroines in daily, micro-visible moments. Rather than suffer in the frustration of piecemeal WNBA coverage, the next Sabrina Ionescu can scroll through the real Sabrina Ionescu’s Instagram feed and watch her stories daily. Rather than wait every 4 years for Olympic coverage, or drive 4 hours at 4 am for a once in a lifetime hockey camp with Hayley Wickenheiser (thanks mom), she can join Natalie Spooner’s Instagram Live and interact. Heroines have never been more visible, and like-able.
At the top, corporations also like what they can now see and as the individual athlete influencer score climbs so do the sponsorships. With many women’s professional leagues running lean on volunteers or lacking resources to fully capture business cases for investment (namely revenue, attendance/ viewership) properly, social media enables sponsors to more easily track the impressions of their investment dollars. Shares, likes and clicks offer new data to refute the commonly cited fake news “no one cares about women’s sports.” Trolls have never been more silence-able.
These micro-visible moments are like water droplets, when combined they can flood the market. And while we’re still waiting for the damns to break we can bathe in some of this success. What’s becoming increasingly obvious is that future female draft picks no longer subscribe to the mythologies of masculinity that entrenched certain categories of competition just a decade ago. The next generation of hockey players doesn’t needlessly fret whether mascara and blush can be part of their game day routine. Whether they must forgo their desire for what they’ve decided is their femininity to look like what society has told them is a hockey player.
But there is always a plot twist.
The Foreshadowing: Juicy Apple May Contain Invisible Poison
For all of its #GrowtheGame good, social media will almost invisibly keep true one common theme of storylines past. With so much organic marketing potential riding squarely on the shoulders of the individual athlete, we will continue to ask professional female athletes (as we always have) to be more than just one thing. This chapter will ask that they be professional-grade athletes AND influencers. That they act as both the product AND the marketer of that product. The tale of two jobs continues.
This second job feels noble for these heroines and we must hope that they continue to embrace the opportunity to own the narrative. The juiciness of having a voice when you were kept quiet for so long won’t be lost on them. But this marketing game isn’t the one our current heroines were raised-in or male sports brands were birthed in, so we’re all still learning the rules.
And on days when the fairytale magic flickers, female professional athletes will realize they are responsible for the growth of +3 brands; their own, their sponsor(s), and their leagues. The future of not just their athletic careers but entire leagues will beg that they perform both in the sporting and instagram arena. They will need to share more of their lives and disrupt more of their focus on their sport.
And as society navigates this new plot, we must be cautious that this bifurcated athlete/influencer identity doesn’t detract from where we must subscribe female athletes value– as athletes. That we don’t tip the scales in favour of their stats off the playing field, and that we continue to hold their performance on the ice/field/court in higher regard and market this.
That we do our best to invest in their *insert brand here* ambassador potential with the respect we give male athletes, even as we ask them to perform twice as often for half as much. That we don’t create a visage of professional treatment in-front of the camera without professional treatment behind the camera.
That in a world where the negative health impacts of social media are skewed in favour of women, we especially care for the mental health of these athletes on equal footing with their physical health. That while we ask them to not let the next generation down, we don’t let them down.
And of equal importance we must ensure that we don’t accidentally tell the wrong fairytale to young girls again. That we find a way to write an ending where girls can dream of being just (as if it’s easy) one thing, a professional athlete, and be paid for it.
Sydney Kidd is a member of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) and a full-time management consultant in Toronto, Ontario. Formerly, she played professional hockey with the Toronto Furies of the CWHL and the New York Riveters of the NWHL. She won a national championship with Western University in 2015. Sydney grew up playing hockey in her hometown of Sundridge, Ontario. The opinions expressed here are her own.