With the recent signings of Jason Collins and Michael Sam to the NBA and NFL, respectively, there’s been a major surge of support for LGBT athletes in the world of professional sports. And even though there’s a growing diversity when it comes to the athletes, no major sports league has ever made a marketing effort to woo more LGBT fans to their games — until now.
According to the Associated Press, via Huffington Post, the WNBA recently launched a new campaign specifically targeting LGBT fans, making them the first professional league in American history to market themselves to aspiring LGBT athletes.
Ever since the WNBA’s inception, it’s been no secret that many of its players are lesbian or bisexual. Now, the league is openly acknowledging that fact. Besides launching a website on Wednesday, the new LGBT-friendly campaign will include having teams participate in local pride festivals and parades, working with advocacy groups to raise awareness of inclusion through grass-roots events and advertising with lesbian media.
The WNBA will also have a nationally televised pride game between Tulsa and Chicago on Sunday, June 22. All 12 teams will also have some sort of pride initiative over the course of the season.
“For us it’s a celebration of diversity and inclusion and recognition of an audience that has been with us very passionately,” said Laurel Richie, the WNBA’s president.
“We embrace all our fans and it’s a group that we know has been very, very supportive. I won’t characterize it as ‘why did it take so long?’ For me it’s been we’ve been doing a lot of terrific initiatives. The piece that’s different this year is unifying it,” Richie said.
When the league first began in 1997, WNBA officials believed that fans of the league would just be carryovers from the NBA. However, after the league commissioned a study in 2012 of its fan base, they found that 25 percent of lesbians watch WNBA games on TV while 21 percent have attended a game.
“We guessed very wrong on that,” said Rick Welts, who is the president and COO of the Golden State Warriors and became the highest-ranking executive in men’s sports to publicly acknowledge he’s gay in 2011. “Maybe we should have known better. I think from its outset, the WNBA attracted a fan with different interests than our profile of an NBA fan.
“I remember sitting in a few meetings where we had really interesting thoughtful discussions of: ‘Should we be proactive marketing to the LGBT community? What does that say if we do?’ We certainly didn’t want to position the league of being exclusionary to anyone. What were we saying if we did it more proactively? Society and sports culture is very different today than it was back then. Teams were trying to figure out the right thing to do.”
And for the WNBA’s latest superstar, openly lesbian player Brittney Griner, the campaign is certainly the right thing to do.
“We’ll pave the way and show its fine and there’s nothing wrong with it. More sports need to do it. It’s 2014, it’s about time,” said Griner.
And we couldn’t agree more. Though, considering the new wave of LGBT support in the pro sports world, we have a strong feeling that other leagues will begin to include the LGBT community in the marketing plans at some point in the near future as well. –nicholas robinson
