An extended interview with sports journalist Kavitha Davidson
The soon-to-end year 2024 will be remembered as a milestone year for women's sports.
It's no secret that sports have great personal significance for the athletes that participate in them, and perhaps there is no greater example of this than the growth of women's sports. Women's games across the world are growing at unprecedented rates, giving girls across the country an opportunity to believe that they can do anything, just like their favorite players on the national and global stages.
Emmy-winning journalist Kavitha Davidson co-authored "Loving Sports When They Don't Love You Back" (2020). She often offers us expert analysis on the intersection of sports, race, and gender.
Davidson's experience includes roles at The Athletic, HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, ESPN, and Bloomberg. Her work has been featured in such publications at "Rolling Stone" and "The Guardian" and was noted in "Best American Sports Writing." She also hosts a female-led podcast, Sportly.
In a recent Zoom interview, the two of us discussed the present and future of women's sports.
MSR: Is the future of women's sports as bright as it seems these days based on its newfound popularity?
KD: The future is not just bright, it's just here. This isn't a moment, it's the movement. The WNBA, for example -- Caitlin Clark has been only good for this league. But this movement and this growth started well before her. If you just look back at the last two, three, four years of Finals ratings and overall league ratings, and attendance figures, and merch sales, it's all been leaning to this point, and Caitlin Clark came along at exactly the right time.
MSR: However, when it comes to women's sports, sports talk and sports media and social media have been basically reduced to blaming, shaming, and false fandom.
KD: All of social media is loud and divisive, and it's better for everyone's mental health to be less online in general, whether we're talking about women's sports or not. There are some real conversations that we can have in a hopefully nuanced way and not yelling at each other about the racial dynamics of why a lot of fans only started to pay attention to the W when a White player like Caitlin Clark [shows up]. I feel like anytime we have this conversation, we should reiterate that she is of a talent level that deserves as much accolades and hype as she's getting.
But the idea that there was no talent in the W before, or that there were no marketable stars before Caitlin Clark... I'm old enough to remember when Lisa Leslie and T-Spoon (Teresa Weatherspoon) had a shoe. But we can also be really honest about the fact that this league itself for a long time shied away from its gay fan base, and from acknowledging that so many of its players are not white and not straight. Now we're embracing those identities and those dynamics, and that's obviously lovely to see.
MSR: During the November election campaign, some politicians used the transgender issue as a scare tactic.
KD: This is a complicated issue. I have friends who are trans, but I also understand people across the country who don't know any trans people...and they might have questions, and it's OK to have questions, and they shouldn't be told that they're stupid or bigoted because they don't know everything here.
You know, less than 1% of athletes that we know of that are competing are trans athletes. It tends to be at a very low level in kids and youth sports. This really isn't that big a deal as I think people are making it out to be, that trans kids exist and they have a right to exist and they have a right to play sports.
What I find really galling about this is a lot of the people coming out against trans athletes and trans kids playing kids sports are doing it under the guise of protecting women's sports. And these are not people who have ever cared about women's sports until just now. So, I think it's really disingenuous when people try and use women's sports as a console to discriminate against trans kids.
MSR: This year we have seen meaningful investment in women's sports both from a financial standpoint and a media standpoint. The PWHL is in its second year and is already talking about expansion. The WNBA will add three new teams in the next three years. And the NWSL is talking expansion as well.
KD: The NWSL has been around for a while and has a real loyal fan base. If we look at the success of the W, which we know, the W's been around for [over] 25 years. So, let's not discredit that.
MSR: Please explain what you mean about "infrastructure things" when it pertains to women's sports.
KD: You now have ESPN finally putting [WNBA] games on during prime time and on actual ESPN and ABC channels, not ESPN News. You don't have to search for them. The exposure and the visibility of these games is what's going to help leagues like the NWSL and the PWHL grow.
I've been a sports business reporter for my whole career, for more than 10 years. I've been yelling about people leaving money on the table and how much growth potential, how much money there is to be made from women's sports, and they're only now paying attention to it, which I am glad to see.
But investment is still not where it needs to be. And sometimes that means investment is losing money for the first couple of years. It took 50 years for the NBA, for the NFL, and for Major League Baseball to reach profitability.
MSR: What does your crystal ball say about 2025 in regard to women's sports?
KD: I don't mean to get political, but if President-elect Trump does decide to get rid of the Department of Education as he has said that he might, what does that mean for Title IX? What does that mean for enforcement, because the Department of Education is in charge of enforcement of Title IX. That's something that I'll definitely be looking at for next year.
On the positive side of things, continued growth in the WNBA. [The players] just opted out of their CBA because they have this huge infusion of money from the new NBA and WNBA TV deals. But these negotiations are going to be contentious. Every labor negotiation is contentious, and just because they're women doesn't make that any different.
I think you'll finally start to see other leagues or other ways in which athletes and players can be compensated.
MSR: You wrote your excellent book four years ago. In your opinion, have things gotten better in its aftermath?
KD: I think everything always gets better. I think it's really easy to say that things are terrible. Now, in a lot of ways, things are bad, but I think if you're comparing them to 50 years ago, they're just objectively better. There are always going to be things that we need to fix, and there are always going to be ways in which sports don't love us back. It does mirror the country.
While that was the title and the premise of the book, the reason that we criticize things that we love this much is because we know how much good there can be in sports, and we just want them to get there.
MSR: I miss Real Sports [The HBO sports show that left the air last December after 29 seasons]. It was the last of such shows that did serious sports journalism and often featured women's sports. That is mainly absent today.
KD: I was on Real Sports, that was my last regular day-to-day grind job. I think it's a real loss for our industry that we don't have that kind of journalism around anymore in sports.