Evan Cohen, who hosts a sports radio show for ESPN760, swaggered into my intro to media studies class as a guest speaker a few weeks a ago. Cohen filled our eager heads with hope that we too are capable of holding an important job in the sports world, yet it was slightly disappointing when he brushed over my question about why sports writers don’t cover more female sports in the U.S. His response was, “We have our target audience we have an obligation to cover. Women aren’t a big audience, and unfortunately that’s the way it is…”æ

This surprised me for a number of reasons. First, Evan Cohen (after doing some research with our sports writer, for, I admit, my sheer ignorance) covered the 2005 women’s basketball season, donates his time to cover both the men’s and women’s sports and is one of the few radio sports hosts that has women callers. He’s not alone. UP sports writer David DiPino said he’d love to put a female athletic team on the cover of the UP and has done extensive coverage of female athletics, but there’s only so much he can do since the editors make the final decision.

So perhaps the audience Cohen reaches is simply more familiar with men’s sports than women’s so he’s trying to please them. After all, this is nothing new. When I was growing up, my high school paper covered the football team religiously, even when other sports teams went further statewide than the football team. It was just typical to ignore other fall sports, especially if our football team was doing well.æ

Take FAU for example. It’s hard to have equal coverage when football takes an overwhelming amount of space in the sports section. Katherine Bartnik, a junior on the tennis team, can relate. “The last time the girls tennis team was interviewed was two years ago,” Bartnik says. “The football team is always being covered and people [are] encouraged to come out. That never happens with us.”æ

The thing is, women have never been given the opportunity to have the same market as men. So, if we did get as much coverage and sponsors as men, who knows which teams would have the biggest audience? I mean, I refuse to believe just because men give us excuses like; “we’re not a target audience,” doesn’t make it true.

It is as if having someone with a vagina play basketball makes the sport less exciting. Must women have something dangling between their legs in order for them to be considered sports-worthy? Isn’t a man playing basketball just as exciting as a woman doing it? Aren’t sports all about the game, strategies, players and teams?æ

So you’re sitting there thinking, “Pff, what’s this girl talking about? There are lots of female sports stars!” You know what I say to that, women can’t just be sports stars; they must be sex symbols as well. Name any famous female sports star that gets a lot of coverage – they not only must be good, they must be sexy. Gabrielle Reese. The Williams sisters. Or hey, take Anna Kournikova. She never won a tournament but look how much attention she got for her looks. For men, it’s just a bonus to be good looking. For women, it’s a must.æ

I wish there were more sportscasters, radio hosts and writers like Cohen and DiPino. These men are trying to fight the good fight but they can only go so far. It takes your voice to change things. Things like writing to the newspaper asking for a female sports cover or writing to companies to have equal sponsorship and encouragement for their male and female teams.

My one suggestion for Cohen – and a tame one at that, at least for me – is instead of saying something like, “there’s not much of a market,” maybe he should say something like, “there’s not a big audience yet, but hopefully one day there will be.”æ