Somehow Never Enough: Girls sports teams are less recognized than boys teams, causing female athletes to feel unappreciated and pressure to perform

After halftime at the girls basketball game against Lawrence High School, East’s “crowd” consists of a handful of admiring middle schoolers and parents rushing from work to make it in time to catch the 5:30 p.m. game all in the parent and family section — the student section was almost completely empty. The Lancers were down 27-11.

Then third quarter ends. East is down 40-33 with an empty student section. As the game slips away, the girls resort to building off of each other’s energy to hype the team up. 

They’re used to not typically having a student section to help with that, anyway. Within the last minutes of the game, the girls pushed each other to take more shots and defend from Lawrence’s drives. With six minutes left in the game, the girls are up 43-41, five junior boys — the first actual students in the student section — trickle in and sit down on the bleachers in the untaken front row.

The stands begin to fill with students dressed in per-theme flannels hoping to save themselves a good spot to watch the boys basketball game starting afterwards at 7:30.

Bolstered by their growing fan base, the girls went on a 10-1 run and ended up winning 64-63.

“Even though [girls basketball] didn’t really have that different of a record in the end [from the boys this year], it’s just kind of disheartening,” varsity basketball player and senior Tess Roman said. “I’m not saying as an excuse or anything, but I do feel like our girls teams, especially with basketball, play better when we have a crowd behind us, especially more at home.”

Girls sports receive the same amount of funding from the district as their male counterpart team and the girl athletes report matching the effort of the boys when practicing and playing. However, the girls teams receive visibly less acknowledgement and recognition than the boys, in both the crowd sizes and promotion on school social media accounts.

In an Instagram poll of 346 students, 88% said they attended a boys basketball game this past season, while only 51% of 337 students went to a girls game. In a survey asking East students the reason for this disparity, the two most frequent answers were that the boys team was simply “better” or that there was less advertising for girls games than boys. This lack of attention comes from inadequate promotion and prejudices that the girls’ games aren’t as good as the boys’ and can cause girl athletes to feel added pressure and like their efforts don’t matter.

The game played on the court or the field is influenced by the crowd size as it determines the energy of their cheering, according to yell leader and senior Finn Sullivan. Sullivan tried to lead cheers at as many games as possible for both boys and girls basketball, but he’s noticed how the crowd sizes affect the cheering styles.

“If you go to basketball games, obviously, there’s a lot more people at the boys games and it’s a little more rowdy, because you [always] have the Pep Execs,” Sullivan said. “But really, at the girls games, there’s just not too many people there, so you can’t really do chants or anything like that, so it’s just kind of yelling. Which is still fun, it’s just a different type of crowd.”

Beyond the boys’ team’s standings in their seasons, another reasoning from the survey for why people didn’t go to the girls games is that boys are physically “better,” making for more entertaining games. According to “Sports Illustrated” senior writer David Epstein, due to testosterone, men are generally heavier and taller than women, which can lead to higher athletic performance.

Though there are athletic disparities between boys and girls, Associate Principal Dr. Susan Leonard believes that watching games should be about supporting your classmates and school rather than which game will be more fast-paced.

“As someone who really loves basketball, I think sometimes girls are more fun to watch because there’s a lot of strategy involved,” Leonard said. “They aren’t just gonna power through the lane and dunk on someone for example, they’re gonna have to really match up and think about, ‘Okay, so that player is really good so how are we gonna play defense on her.’ You can find that really fun, but a lot of people don’t know a lot about basketball. They just see the power.”

Varsity tennis player and junior Bryson Langford agrees with Leonard, finding that even if the players’ speed and actions don’t look exactly the same, it’s still the same sport — it can be enjoyed no matter the athlete’s gender.

“With high school and professional athletes, a lot of people watch only men’s sports because it’s more interesting, fascinating, but it’s the same thing for the girls,” Langford said. “Maybe they work on different techniques or slight differences in how they play a certain sport, but it’s the same basic game, and I think that if you enjoy a sport, you should be able to enjoy both the female and male teams.”

Heated rivalries or not, girls games have never gotten as much recognition as boys teams in Langford’s opinion, and not just at the high school level either.

In 2019, it was recorded that 92% of sports broadcasting done by TV news and SportsCenter covered men’s sports, according to a study done by professors of Sociology and Gender Research Cheryl Cooky, LaToya D. Council, Maria A. Mears and Michael A. Messner. Meanwhile, women’s sports only aired a mere 5.6% of the time.

“It just goes back to [the fact] that it’s hard for a group of teenage boys to take girls sports as seriously,” Feminist Club leader varsity basketball player senior Ella Heide said. “The school as a whole, in general, they just don’t — and like the world, the country, in general — no one really takes girls sports as seriously as they do guys.”

On top of biological differences, girls sports viewership also varies depending on the success of their season. Sullivan and Langford find that the boys’ turnout for their top sports of football and basketball isn’t as affected by how well they play, while the girls’ crowd heavily relies on how many games they’ve won.

“For girls sports, it’s one thing to be an athlete, and then to have all this extra pressure on trying to perform just to receive the same amount of attention as guys,” Langford said.

Heide believes that the disparity in this attention on boys sports compared to girls sports is also caused by the lack of promotion through social media and announcements of the girls games.

“I think the issue is, and one of the main differences is, everyone knows about our big boys rivalries,” Pep Exec and senior Maeve McGrath said. ”South has a huge rivalry and Rockhurst has a huge rivalry, so people get really excited for those games. Of course there are [girls] rivalries, but name a girls rivalry that we have, no one really knows about them.”

Despite the lack of natural hype around the girls team without intense rivalries, McGrath thinks a solution could be including the girls in the promotion of boys games and having a student section theme for both games to encourage the same energy at both.

Heide thinks that, although it was an issue at the beginning of the season, Pep Club and other promotion platforms did a much better job at including in the girl’s game times for the later games and hopes that next year’s Pep Execs continue to do so.

One of the most frequent ways athletes — high school, collegiate and professional — garner more attention is through self-promotion to advertise times and locations of games.

When it comes to students promoting their games over the years, Leonard has noticed how the guys are more eager to advertise on social media and verbally, while the girls don’t speak up about it as much. Leonard noticed that she has to ask girls about upcoming games more often than boys who are generally quicker to bring it up.

“Women are just not going to be comfortable saying, ‘Oh, look at me,’ and I don’t know that I want to change that about women,” Leonard said. “I think that that’s what makes us great; a strength with a lot of humility too. So I don’t want to change who we are, but I think we could bring each other up.”

Not only should girl athletes promote each other, but varsity soccer player and senior Maggie Nottberg feels that the boys should also put effort into promoting the girls teams as well rather than just their own.  

“I think it’s just more kind of like a guy community type deal, which is not a downside,” Nottberg said. “It’s great to hype your friends up and hype people you know up, but I think it also needs to be a priority to hype your girlfriends up and everything and have your friends do it. We’re a community at East, and I think it’s important to cheer on everyone because everyone is working just as hard.”

Even with factors of promotion and gender stigmas playing into their turnout, Leonard challenges students to consider why they go to the games.

“I think we need to remind people or ask them a question: Who are you cheering for and why?” Leonard said. “Is it really for your entertainment value? Are you cheering for the Lancers because you love your friends, love your school and it’s a good way to spend your Friday? And I think most people would answer that it’s the latter, that we want to be good friends and we want to celebrate our friends doing things that they love.”