WNBA should bring basket down, attendance up

In a few days, the WNBA will tip off its 19th season, but the women will most likely compete in half-empty arenas in games broadcast on ESPN2, and results will be relegated to the back of sports sections.

There is one easy way to inject excitement into the sport and to get these athletes more of the exposure they deserve.

Lower the rims.

The women who play college and professional basketball are amazing athletes — but they're also undeniably shorter than their male counterparts. Both in the pros and the college ranks, the men have about 7 inches on the women.

Currently, the women's game relies on jump shots, which translate to lower shooting percentages and a more workaday style. In a sense, women are deprived of the opportunity to fully express their raw athleticism.

Val Ackerman, a former president of USA Basketball, the sport's governing body, and the WNBA — and a three-time captain of her college squad before playing pro ball in Europe — is among those who have made the case for a lower rim.

She told me recently that bringing the hoop down from 10 feet, by at least half a foot, would mean fewer missed layups and a more fluid game.

She said her one regret as WNBA president was never experimenting with a lower rim. She imagined setting up shorter baskets and letting athletes go from there. "Take 10 players, run them over to Madison Square Garden, lock the doors and see what happens."

Surely lowering rims is worth a shot: NCAA men's Division I basketball games averaged 4,817 fans during the 2014 season; the women's games averaged 1,526 fans. The average NBA game attendance hovers around 17,500; WNBA attendance is around 7,000.

But tradition is hard to shake. When FIBA, the organization that defines the international rules of basketball, was contemplating shorter rims in the women's game a few years ago, Jim Tooley, the executive director of USA Basketball, waved the prospect off: "The game was invented this way, and now you're saying for them not to play it that way."

Yet it's not as if 10 feet is a sacred number. The rim was originally set at that height by architectural happenstance: In 1891, when James Naismith readied a YMCA gym in Springfield, Mass., for his new game of "basket ball," he instructed a janitor to nail two peach baskets to the lower rail of the gym balcony. That rail happened to be 10 feet off the ground.

Lowering the rims will lead to more of what is arguably the single most exciting maneuver in all sports: the dunk. The swaggering, swooping move, a staple of the men's game, is rare in women's basketball. When the 6-foot-8 center Brittney Griner dunked in the 2012 NCAA women's tournament, she became only the second woman to do so in the tourney's history.

When I watched Griner play in Waco, Texas, a couple of years ago, at the end of her college career — as I was working on a book that touched on gender and the dunk — spectators constantly urged her to jam the ball. A video posted online in March of the 6-foot, 11-year-old South Carolinian Ashlyn Watkins dunking on a 9-foot hoop went viral and was featured on ESPN's SportsCenter.

Geno Auriemma, the championship-winning women's basketball coach at the University of Connecticut (UConn), floated the idea of a lower rim a few years ago. "I'm trying to help those teams that can't figure out why they get only 200 people to watch them play every night," he said.

Some top female players have been less sure. Griner, for one, has said she sees no reason to change the height. But former UConn guard Caroline Doty told the Associated Press that she might like it. "I wouldn't be able to dunk, so it wouldn't benefit me," she said. "But it would be cool to throw alley-oops and stuff."

The prospect of a height-of-hoop change has never gotten much traction in either the WNBA or the college ranks: On the face of it, any change might feel like an insulting concession in a sport whose ethos, especially since the passage of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that lifted barriers to women playing school sports, has been to match the men.

But there's plenty of precedent for using different equipment based on gender: Women already play with a smaller basketball, and in volleyball, the women's net is roughly 8 inches shorter.

Of course, there would be some logistical hurdles involved with lowering some rims. High schools' hoops are often built into a gym's infrastructure. So high-schoolers could continue to play on the 10-foot rims; there won't be much dunking, but they can hone their jump shots and layups. Players in other sports already make similar adjustments; pro baseball players, for instance, are barred from using the aluminum bats they relied on through college.

Imagine a pivotal moment in a WNBA game on prime-time TV — a steal, a breakaway and, now, suddenly, as a full house stands in anticipation, a player rises to the hoop to triumphantly stuff the ball. What better way to breathe vibrant life into the WNBA's original slogan, the old playground hoops cry: "We got next"?

Asher Price is the author of "Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity" and a staff reporter for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman. He wrote this article for the New York Times.