WNBA game in Toronto an opportunity to move professional women’s sport forward

When the WNBA steps onto the hard court in Toronto on Saturday, it will be a first in Canada. The exhibition game between the Minnesota Lynx and the Chicago Sky will be the first WNBA game in history played on Canadian soil. The game will also feature another first in Canada: the introduction of “Ally Hoop,” a new Equal Pay mascot for women’s sport.

The mascot, created in partnership with Fast & Female — a charity aiming to keep young, Canadian self-identified girls in sport — aims to challenge inequality and the pay gaps women and girls face in sport.

Specifically, the mascot was created after it became public that “Rocky the Mountain Lion,” the mascot for the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, makes three times more than the highest paid player in the WNBA.

“It’s absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous to see something like that,” said Canadian women’s soccer national team member Janine Beckie, who is serving as a spokesperson for the campaign.

“It’s a little bit sickening to realize that’s reality. Not to take anything away from someone doing a job, obviously being a mascot is a job, but when you look at any sport and compare women’s athletes to their men’s counterparts, it’s the same job, it’s the same sport, the same ball, the same court, same amount of players, and to know a mascot makes more than the top player, the best player in the WNBA, it’s unbelievable to me.”

Beckie, who won gold with Canada at the Tokyo Olympic Games and bronze at Rio 2016, said it’s a difficult reality to accept, but that women have been conditioned to accept the current inequity in women’s sport as normal.

While Beckie believes the WNBA coming to Canada for the first time is an extraordinary step forward for women’s professional sport in Canada, she also sees it as an opportunity to move the conversation of equality and professional women’s sport forward.

“It’s fantastic that the WNBA is going to be bringing a game to Canada, I can’t wait for fans to be able to experience that,” she said.

“The campaign, it’s a great example of where we’re at with women’s sport and it’s a double-sided coin. It’s frustrating that we’re still having to plug campaigns like this, but it’s also a great example of how far women’s sport has come and the uptick of popularity it has had all over the world, especially in Canada right now.”

In the United States, professional women’s sports has grown exponentially in recent years, primarily through the WNBA, PHF and more recently the NWSL, where Beckie is signed with the Portland Thorns. In Canada, growth has lagged behind as there are currently no WNBA franchises in Canada, the PHF only recently added teams in Toronto and Montreal, and there is no professional women’s soccer league, although plans are now in place to launch a league through a group called Project 8.

Gabriela Estrada, the executive director of Fast & Female, hopes this campaign presents the issue of gender inequality in sport in a new way, that’s both visible and engaging.

“The campaign approach is a fun and unconventional way to call attention to a serious issue,” said Estrada. “A mascot’s role is to hype fans, so why not hype them up to be more engaged in pushing for pay equity?”

For Janine Beckie personally, she’s witnessed the fight for pay equality through her USA national team counterparts, through the development of Project 8 which has plans to soon establish Canada’s first professional women’s soccer league, and through the struggles of Canada’s national women’s hockey team for a professional league.

“It’s been a frustrating road, but it’s one I’m really proud to be a part of,” said Beckie. “We’re at the point in women’s sport where we’ve been conditioned to get what we can get, and be ok with it and just say thank you and move on and do our job. I don’t know when someone turned the light on and said, ‘no, you shouldn’t be ok with this, the gap is just too big.’”

According to Beckie, that light is now on, but women are also fighting a false narrative that fewer people are interested in women’s professional sports, and that there is not a market for these sports to grow.

“How do you expect women’s sport to grow and players to continue to get more salary and bring more awareness to the sport if there’s no money being pumped into it?” said Beckie. “You’ve got to be on TV, you’ve got to play in big stadiums, you’ve got to have visibility and advertising and marketing in order to put the sport in the position to actually make more revenue.”

With the WNBA showing interest in Canada, including their upcoming exhibition game, Project 8 pushing for a professional women’s soccer league, and the PHF continuing to eye deeper expansion into Canada and new campaigns including “Ally Hoop,” Beckie hopes investors will soon see that the growth is not only happening from an athlete and fan perspective, but also from a financial standpoint.

“There are people everywhere that want to see professional women’s sports in Canada,” said Beckie. “So for me it’s a little confusing that no one has stepped up and taken that opportunity because it’s a huge opportunity. Put desire and want to see it to the side, it’s an incredible investment opportunity as well, the stats are all around investing in women’s sport right now and you can see the upside to it.”