Unless we’re traveling, like we were this most recent season when Angel Reese and the Dream came to town and dropped a 40-piece on our heads, it’s hard to convince me to give up games featuring the league’s most exciting teams and stars. I acquiesced, under protest, to giving up an early-season Dallas Wings game.
I want to see the stars play!
Well, with one exception.
Like many of our season-ticket-holder friends, we have gladly and quickly put our Indiana Fever tickets on the market whenever they’ve come to town. It has nothing to do with the basketball or their players. The Fever and their high-octane offense are thrilling to watch. Hell, I was in the arena in Vegas last year for that overtime Game 5 semi-finals instant classic. There’s a financial component, sure. Those games tend to command a premium on the resale market, but the main reason is that when that team’s fans show up in any other WNBA arena across the country, the vibes are off.
Fever fans arrive with a brashness that doesn’t feel good-natured. They don’t enter an opposing team’s venue as guests interested in supporting their team and enjoying the game as a community. No, they show up like barbarians trying to overwhelm, conquer, and intimidate. As has become a common refrain on social media, it’s not all Fever fans, but it’s always a Fever fan.
They come with the same kind of energy I experience at Los Angeles Chargers games. At SoFi, I accept the norms of NFL fandom. The aggressiveness comes with the ticket.
That’s not the WNBA fan culture.
After their home loss in the second game of this year’s WNBA Finals, Golden State Valkyries fans in attendance stayed past regulation time shouting “G-S-V!” as their team walked off the court defeated and the Atlanta Dream celebrated. I had never seen anything quite like that, but it reflected how women’s sports fans operate. Those Bay Area fans have decided that their primary function is to lift up their team. Valkyries fans “pride themselves on making noise without making nonsense.”
For the Dream, the party atmosphere they developed in their tiny home arena expanded to fill State Farm Arena for game three, with a very Atlanta-specific Black energy that was as warm as it was a ruckus. It was a cookout and Dirty South concert, all in service of supporting their team and being entertained as a family. They even figured out how to deflate a bad actor’s antics by offering him service with a smile as he entered the arena.
So when someone says about Fever fans’ antics, “that’s just what sports fans do, get used to it,” I’m Becky Hammon:
No, we really don’t have to accept that behavior at all.
For long-time women’s sports fans, there’s an existing culture that doesn’t include the kinds of obnoxiousness that dominate those other spaces. As we open the tent and welcome this expanding fandom, we can maintain those sensibilities while making it more inclusive.
On a recent episode of The Grill Room podcast, Jason Wright of Ariel Investments’ Project Level says the research shows that this growth period in women’s sports is expanding rather than recycling the sports audience.
Our best estimates suggest that, across all women’s sports franchises, the overlap with their men’s counterpart season-ticket bases is very, very low. Low teens and below in the overlap. So this is a net-new fan who is now participating.
These “net-new fans” come in with little frame of reference for established men’s sports culture. In fact, they are likely engaging with women’s sports because it’s explicitly not that.
As Emily Tisch Sussman, co-owner of the NWSL’s Gotham FC, puts it, “Traditionally, we’ve had fandom built through generations, top down, the grandfather to the father, maybe to the daughters, maybe to the granddaughters. When we think about building fandom in the women’s space, we don’t have that.”
This means that women’s sports fans don’t have to replicate, emulate, mimic, or accept what men’s sports or their fans do. It’s critical that we establish new, wholly authentic ways of being sports fans that don’t center the kinds of things that are acceptable in those other leagues. We can’t let the worst tendencies of other professional sports fans become the norm where women play. The outcomes are already more dangerous when they do. Women athletes get seven times more violent threats per capita than men, and abuse aimed at women targets identity rather than performance.
It’s telling that, in the comments on this piece in The Athletic about the reckoning the Fever organization is going through this off-season, many Indiana fans try to reconcile their experience through the lens of how they participate as Pacers fans. The refrain seems to be, well, this is how we act for our NBA team; we’re just, perhaps, louder for Caitlin Clark and the Fever.
It misses the point entirely. Even if they share a state, an ownership group, and an arena, your WNBA team lives in a different house, and there are different rules.
So, take off your shoes, bring something nice for the host, and show us that you know how to act right.
