Jonathan Gruber-Benaich

I had a minor epiphany yesterday, sitting around with my softball team comprised of cis-het men. The group, which was about 50% strangers a month ago, fell comfortably into a conversation about the upcoming NBA finals without having ever talked basketball before. What I took for granted at the time was how many steps were skipped on the way from perfect strangers to debating the minutiae from a specific event two days prior. There was no “are you a fan…” “anybody following the…” or even “who saw that…” conversation required. One step removed from the mention of the city of Boston and it was immediately apparent that everyone in the group had seen the Celtics-Heat game days prior and had enough fandom to even have formed opinions on it. The event was ubiquitous. Barely knowing each other, and never having broached the subject before, the whole group immediately acknowledged a unanimous understanding of the topic. Among even casual western sports fans the NBA is ubiquitous. The games, the highlights, the transactions, the headlines, all of it. The WNBA, at least within my echo chamber, is not.

I had thought about this after listening to some mediocre audiobooks that touched on Metcalfe’s law of networks.To explain it poorly, it states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. The Wikipedia page on the topic uses the example that two telephones can make only one connection, five can make 10 connections, and twelve can make 66 connections. Stretching the definition, one could substitute having a telephone with “having a base understanding of the topic” and similarly find that as the number of people with that understanding grows, the opportunity for debating, posting, and otherwise engaging grows ^2.

NBA fandom is so ubiquitous that we could just assume other sports-inclined folks are part of our network who share a base of understanding. I thought about how watching live sports was just a tiny fraction of the fan experience compared to the conversation, media consumption, and other subliminal social bonding. It made me realize that even using a WNBA league pass subscription only accounted for that tiny fraction of that fandom if the sport wasn’t ubiquitous in my circles. It made me realize that growing my own interest in the WNBA is a much more uphill endeavour because it is so much less represented, its network so much smaller and further away from me. So step 1 has been a bit of a step back, but adding WNBA content to my social media followings and hopefully pushing some friends to join me on it should help.