Women’s Fantasy Sport

Several of my brothers and their friends have been involved in a fantasy league for the past few years. In this particular league, they each select teams from various sports, professional and collegiate alike, and follow these teams throughout their many seasons. If their teams are successful, their points go up; if their teams are duds, their points go down. I understand the appeal of the league and its design. With most typical fantasy leagues, you spend many hours during a few months tracking your players and having a fairly consistent way to distract yourself from any number of life’s unpleasantries; it’s like a bountiful harvest of athletic mania. Then, the season ends and you’re left with nothing but the realization of just how many hours you spent with your fantasy, hours which you are now free to spend doing chores around the house, antiquing with your wife, and, possibly worst of all, working. Talk about a drought. At this point, the only thing that can get you through is your anticipation for your fantasy league to begin anew.

In contrast, with the league in which my brothers are involved, there is an almost constant supply of athletic stimuli. When one sport ends, another begins, and even better, sometimes sports overlap. On top of that, while we’re all dozing off during the late-summer lull when football hasn’t quite begun and baseball seems to stall out, their league capitalizes on the downtime, allowing them to focus on their draft for sports entertainment. Sure, their league doesn’t allow them the intensity of a traditional fantasy league, where you can adjust your roster, tweak your lineup, and constantly track the success of players on numerous teams. That said, it also doesn’t leave them with the crash that inevitably follows every sugar high. The schedule of this league is a lot like modern crop rotation, wherein a harvest is nearly always occurring.

My family was recently on a vacation together, and during this time, my brothers were in the middle of their draft. As I received numerous texts from out-of-state brothers telling me to nudge my in-state brothers to make their picks (how I received that blessed task, I haven’t a clue), I began to try and think of an activity that provides to women (primarily) what fantasy provides to men (primarily). To be clear, I wasn’t trying to think of a way that women could engage in an activity with a similar structure to fantasy sports leagues but geared toward their own interests, something akin to selecting their frontrunners for a season of The Bachelor. While I’m sure that many women would enjoy such an activity, (and some probably already do), that was not the focus of my musings. Instead, I was thinking about whether there is an activity that women already engage in that provides them with entertainment of a similar sort, specifically entertainment that comes from the fantasy that you are a part of the team somehow, that your choices influence the success or failure of the team, and entertainment that to some degree makes this fantasy a reality, where the team’s success becomes your success and the team’s failure becomes your failure. What do women seem to spend just as much time reading about, thinking about, and talking about as men and sports? What is women’s fantasy sports league?

As I thought it through, I began to realize that the closest equivalent has got to be celebrity gossip. It may not be as formalized as fantasy sports leagues, and it may have a more ongoing season than the typical sports season, but women draft the players they want for their team just like men, and women follow them with the same passion and zeal as men. Think about it. Most women can tell you their favorite celebrities, the celebrities they follow religiously, the celebrities they want to see succeed (careers, love lives, beauty). When Lady Gaga’s album goes platinum, her fans rejoice as if her success is their success. When Jennifer Aniston gets her heart broken, her fans feel outraged that someone could treat their friend that way. When douchey Jake Pavelka picks crappy Vienna Girardi, women are screaming at the television screen like they’re in The Price is Right audience. Topping the Billboard charts is like a regular season win. Getting an Oscar nod is like getting a post-season bid. Gaining weight is like going on the injured reserve list. And the converse could be said of a woman’s most hated celebrities. When they fail, equal rejoicing ensues. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag become the Oakland Raiders of the celebrity world, and when post-plastic surgery Heidi looks like a Barbie that got melted in an oven, women couldn’t be happier.

Now, I get that there are women who love fantasy sports leagues and would rather eat their own toenails than follow celebrity gossip, and that there are men whose idea of fantasy does not involve dozens of men crashing into one another and grunting. But, there’s a reason that 70% of People readers are women and 77% of Sports Illustrated readers are men, and it’s not because wives are buying People for their husbands, and vice versa. So, when you find yourself wondering why your husband is so upset that his fantasy team is flopping, or when you can’t believe that your wife actually enjoys watching TMZ, remember that you’re both just escaping from the doldrums of life by engaging in your own version of fantasy. And perhaps consider why your lives are so full of doldrums.

Editor’s Note: The league discussed in this article by St. Pauli Girl is called Buriller. It is the brainchild of the TC Huddle Founder and Editor in Chief. It is the greatest fantasy league ever created. It is the fantasy league of all fantasy leagues. If you’re lucky, Matthew Berry at ESPN will listen about the greatest fantasy league ever and you will soon be able to play online. Until that time, you can hope that the league is described in detail on this site. Or email us to find out.

Read more at TC Huddle