Women sports fans are breaking free from the sidelines | Canada Voices

Amanda Ash of Edmonton grew up playing soccer, before her brother convinced her to try touch football about 15 years ago. “I remember the first time I played. I was like, wow, why hasn’t this been more available to women? This is so much fun.’”

Football is a big part of her life, as a player and a fan. Ash is director of the Edmonton Flag Football Association’s recently launched women’s league, has watched the CFL for years, watches the NFL three days a week and plays fantasy football. And on days where she feels “trodden upon” as a woman, she says playing football is something she can fall back on. “I know I can do exactly what a man can.”

She’s hardly alone in challenging stereotypes by being so passionately involved in a typically male-dominated space.

According to Statista, 24 per cent of women identify as keen fans of the NFL, and another 35 per cent are casual fans. Other surveys show that women comprise about 40 per cent of NBA fans, almost 39 per cent of MLB fans and almost 34 per cent of NHL fans.

A new study, released earlier this month, examined interest in 40 spectator sports across 30 countries, including Canada. It found that almost three in four women identify as avid fans of one or more sports. While interest in women’s sports competitions is up 10 per cent over the past three years, according to the study, women are also showing growing fandom for everything from Formula 1 motor racing to the NFL.

“The majority of women around the world see themselves as serious sports fans,” the study stated. “For a quarter of them, sports aren’t just entertainment; they’re a key part of who they are.”

That’s no surprise to Liz McGuire of Toronto, though stereotypes persist. She claims that her first-ever sentence as a child was “OK, Blue Jays, let’s play ball.” She frequently attended up to 45 games per year, but still often felt that as a woman she was “inherently an outsider.”

Baseball fans rarely get their own trading cards. In May 2024, McGuire did, and all it took was “almost dying at a game,” she says.

On May 17, she was hit in the head by a foul ball flying at 110 miles per hour, off the bat of the Jays’ Bo Bichette. With a fast-growing bump on her head and two black eyes, McGuire decided to post a selfie on X, tagging the Blue Jays.

Her social media post went viral, and within a few days McGuire received a set of 110 baseball cards from Topps, picturing the selfie. Everyone from the New York Times to Sports Illustrated sought her for interviews, and she was invited on sports podcasts to talk about the foul ball and the card.

“I never sat around dreaming that one day I could be on a baseball card,” McGuire says. When it came out, “Boys lost their brains, because they can imagine themselves on that field.”

Many fans have been hit by foul balls at games. She believes that the reason her accident got so much attention is because she is a woman. “There was actually room for me in a weird way,” she says. “The baseball community found me, and they kept inviting me back.”

Since receiving her card, McGuire has sold a few and is planning to donate the proceeds to concussion research. “I’m kind of bummed that it’s a grotesque injury on this baseball card, but having little girls see other girls on baseball cards matters.”

Fellow Jays fan Jackie Rosen-Chung found baseball and other sports a solace while growing up. She had a congenital heart defect that often kept her isolated. Sports offered her an escape to get away from thinking about being in the hospital, she says.

One time in 1993, she was able to meet the entire Blue Jays team, and got a signed hat from Joe Carter and a glove from Dave Stewart, her favourite players. Her childhood bedroom featured so many baseball souvenirs that her parents called it Cooperstown North, after the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Everybody said I had a shrine and should be charging admission,” Rosen-Chung. She showed her now-husband the display case on their sixth date. “That was the day we realized we were both the one.”

Following sports can be a big part of personal identity, but some women find men to be unreceptive to their fandom. Growing up in Brampton, Ont., Simone Brown watched a lot of basketball with her dad, both NBA and WNBA. Yet when she tried to talk to the boys about it in school, “It almost felt like they didn’t expect me to contribute. It’s really annoying that something that I love, I have a hard time sharing.”

Brown now attends Carleton University in Ottawa, where she’s a fan of the school’s basketball teams. She’s also looking to “expand her sports repertoire,” including getting into the NFL. “I told my whole house, Sunday is for God and football.”