Women Athletes Should Never Have To Apologize For Being Competitive

When Alexa Coubal was in eighth grade, a volleyball teammate told her to quit, because she was “too competitive.” Her immediate reaction: “Why are we playing if we don’t want to win?” It’s a memory that’s followed her throughout her sports career, from competing as a track star at Notre Dame, to working for the Los Angeles Rams, to now, at 27 years old, coaching high school girls’ basketball while also playing basketball for a junior college in Thousand Oaks, CA. 

And yet, the chiding she received all those years ago seems to be a common refrain directed at women athletes. Kayla Lorentz, a 38-year-old who plays recreational volleyball, grew up participating in sports. But whenever her team lost, she’d react poorly — she’d pout, she’d stew on the loss, she’d be frustrated with herself and the team — and she was also admonished for being “too competitive.” 

“There’s this idea of the female apologetic in sports — that women have to compensate with their femininity for their participation in sports, because historically, it’s been coded as masculine. Fundamentally, sport as we know it [in the UK] was a way of training army officers and keeping the poor in line,” says Bethan Taylor-Swaine, a feminist sports sociologist and PhD candidate at the University of London who’s involved in ultrarunning. “So, when women ‘disrupt’ that space, we’re essentially expressing male dominance, and the way we get around it is by going, ‘Look, I’m no threat; I’m just grateful to be here.’”  

But while that terribly outdated, massively contrite mindset exists today, it’s also rapidly becoming a thing of the past. A research report, “Reframe the Game,” conducted by R29 Intelligence to understand the recent shift within the world of sports, found that “competition” is the number-one word that defines sports for women in 2024. 65% of those polled said a sport constitutes “physical activity involving competition and rules,” and 67% say their favorite types of athletes “embody the competitive spirit.” 

You don’t need to be wholly immersed — or even remotely interested — in sports to know there’s an unprecedented movement underfoot: the championing of high-performing, record-breaking female athletes who are finally getting the coverage and the recognition they deserve. There’s Caitlin Clark, who’s hailed as one of the greatest collegiate basketball players of all time, and whose performance in the NCAA championships helped push women’s basketball to the forefront of mainstream consciousness, drawing 19 million viewers and becoming the most-viewed basketball game of the last five years. There’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the Olympic gold medal runner and hurdler, who continuously surpasses her personal bests and setting world records. There’s Simone Biles, who with 37 gold medals (a combined total of Olympic and World Championship wins), is the most decorated gymnast — and surely one of the most widely recognized Olympians — ever.

One thing they all have in common (aside from athletic superiority): an unrelenting, unapologetic drive to win. 

Let’s be clear: Such drive isn’t a novel concept, but the normalization of women competing as fiercely in sports as men do, along with the widespread acceptance of their hyper-competitive attitudes most certainly are. “Women have always been competitive. If you look at people like Billie Jean King or the Williams sisters — they’re wildly competitive. But I think women are now exposed to female athletes who talk about competition, and therefore, it becomes okay for them to talk about competition as well,” Taylor-Swaine says. “It probably ties into this post-industrial, post-feminist narrative, which is shaped by masculine sporting values — the idea that anybody can do it, and it buys into the idea of self-empowerment, self-improvement, and independence. There's also this added layer that in order to prove their worth, women have to be exceptional to be accepted. They can’t just be good, they have to be exceptional.” 

Of course, all professional athletes are inherently competitive — they must be in order to win — but it’s important to look at why women in particular feel the need to go above and beyond. So many of those reasons — to be taken seriously, to prove their worth — are still very much rooted in the context of men, and on a broader scale, the patriarchal society that we live in. A beloved NBA or MLB team, for example, could maintain a decades-long losing streak and still retain die-hard fans, public interest, live TV coverage, sponsorships, and eight-figure salaries. But for women athletes, there’s more at stake. Without winning, everything inextricably linked to that — the hype, the lucrative deals, the premium coverage — could just up and vanish. 

Coubal compares female athletes to artists, like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, who have to constantly reinvent themselves and experiment with new genres and concepts in order to stay relevant. “What man is doing that? People will talk about quarterbacks from 30 years ago, and they’re still relevant,” she says. “But it’s different with women — there’s a pressure to keep being a great athlete, to prove that it wasn’t a fluke, to keep bettering yourself.”

But against the odds, we’ve seen an uptick in women performing at the highest level, making sports as a whole a lot more competitive. Coubal points to Olympic trials for the 2024 USA Basketball women’s team as an example. “[Making the team] was really cutthroat this year — everyone’s just gotten better,” she says. “And you have to be at the very top if you want the coverage and the brand deals.” 

And coverage is already changing — something Coubal noticed when WNBA basketball player Marina Mabrey was traded from Chicago to Connecticut this July. “SportsCenter made a post about it, but two or three years ago, they wouldn’t have bothered. Meanwhile, when a male athlete gets traded, everyone knows about it. We need to give women the opportunity to cover women’s sports instead of asking men who don’t care. We need sports journalists to see them as athletes first, not women first,” she says. “I’ve also seen people betting on WNBA players on FanDuel and DraftKings, and again, that wasn’t a thing a couple years ago." In fact, according to a FanDuel spokesperson, the WNBA bet count for the first half of this season was up 341% year-over-year, and opening night of the 2024 WNBA season saw a 230% increase in bet count compared with the year before. 

Social media has certainly played a role in the changing narratives, propping up female athletes where traditional sports journalism falls short. In fact, Christine Burke, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and runner products at New York Road Runners, says social media has been one of the two driving forces behind the change in professional sports for women. 

“Women have shown a real willingness to share both their professional running lives and their personal lives — and fans have gotten to know those athletes on a personal level, from knowing who their partner is to what their postpartum return-to-sports journey has been like. It humanizes them,” says Burke, who has been with NYRR, the non-profit running organization that has been a leader in elevating women, for nearly a decade. “We know a lot of women professional runners by their first names — Shalane [Flanagan] and Des [Linden] and Deena [Kastor] and Hellen [Obiri] — whereas male professional runners are still really known by their last names, and you don't really know their stories in the same way.” 

The second major driving force: money. Even with the surge of interest in women’s sports, there’s still a staggering pay gap, with women athletes not making anywhere near what male athletes do (for the 2023/24 season, NBA players earned an average salary of over $12 million, while WNBA players received an average annual pay of $116,000). Burke emphasizes that there needs to be continued financial investment in women’s sports. One of her responsibilities at NYRR — and a core pillar of the business — is overseeing sponsorships, and she’s seen more brand interest in women’s sports (and not from a charity standpoint). She says Mastercard, for example, sponsors the New York Mini 10K, the world’s original women-only road race. The TCS New York City Marathon was also the first marathon to offer equal prize money between men and women. 

“Once we, as a society, stop thinking of women's sports as charity, things will change — and it has gotten better,” Coubal says. “There are some WNBA owners, like Mark Davis who owns the Las Vegas Aces, who treat players like high-class athletes. [Davis] built his team a brand new facility, pays their coach really well, and gives them the resources they need. And then you have other owners who are like, ‘You should just be grateful.’” 

The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris presents an opportunity for serious progress — with women athletes embraced for their competitive natures and celebrated for their incredible feats of athleticism. It’s the first time in history that the Games will see an equal number of men and women competing. And hopefully, it’ll be a watershed moment for gender equality in sports and that momentum will continue long after the Games’ closing ceremonies, from greater investment in women athletes to the hiring of more women coaches.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a really great athlete who wasn't cutthroat and competitive,” Coubal says. “We need to start respecting women’s sports as sports. They’re athletes, so let them be athletes, and let them play hard. The biggest thing is to treat each game as a game — and not just a ‘women’s game.’”