WHEN I WAS nine years old, with my Little League baseball hat, short hair, and non-pierced ears, people often mistook me for a boy. Apart from being embarrassed by people’s embarrassment upon learning their mistake, I didn’t much care. In my third year of Little League, however, my name was misspelled on my jersey — “Hughs” instead of “Hughes” — and people teasingly called me “Hugs.” That I loathed.

The next year, when Coach read us a poem about nicknames and asked us to select one for the backs of our shirts, I was distraught. I wasn’t bold enough to select “Blazer” or “Hot Rod,” and I was unwilling to subject myself to the girly-sounding “Pinky,” “Buttercup,” or “Pie.” So in my distress, I requested that my name simply be misspelled again: “Hughs.” Sadly, when I got my shirt back, it said “Hugs.” This was all the more galling because, whether or not I’d deliberately set out to prove something that year, I’d eagerly accepted Coach’s offer to play catcher. This was a bigger deal than it sounds: one of our pitchers, after all, was Eric Montross, who would become the Celtics’ first draft pick in 1994 and is currently a Toronto Raptors center. By the fifth grade, he was nearly six feet tall and had an arm that knew torque better than accuracy.

Two more seasons passed before the boys were required to wear cups and my female friends started cheerleading — both portending the conclusion of my baseball career. Although I took pride in never “throwing like a girl,” or hitting and catching as such, I was a girl, and that’s what it came down to. Girls don’t play baseball, not seriously.

Most American women in their 20s or 30s today have similar recollections of being left on the sidelines. And apparently enough of us want to redress such memories that there’s an audience for women’s professional leagues. Since 1996, women’s professional basketball (WNBA), soccer (WUSA), and softball (WPSL) leagues have formed, along with three small semi-pro football leagues. Each plays to crowds of anywhere from a couple hundred to tens of thousands. This support represents a radical shift in our culture, and the leagues have capitalized on this sea change with clever slogans that emphasize the skill of their players. “We got next,” the WNBA proclaims. “Gimme the ball,” sings the National Women’s Football League.

But another, more concerted marketing effort promotes another set of qualities: the affability and attractiveness of league players. This approach stresses that women sports figures are good role models; in some cases, emphasis is placed on what good mothers they are. Not surprisingly, some critics say the emphasis on off-the-court identity is sexist or even homophobic. (No professional women’s league has yet touted the home life of one of its lesbian players, for instance.) In addition, the leagues studiously avoid reference to the women’s movement, to which they owe a large and obvious debt.

THERE’S NO question that the current success of women’s professional sports leagues like the WNBA and WUSA has come courtesy of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, signed by President Richard Nixon (see “Playing Fair,” News and Features, December 21, 2000). The act prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in educational institutions. Among other things, this means that schools, at all levels, must offer equal opportunity to female athletes. Women had excelled for decades in sports such as tennis, gymnastics, and ice skating, which are largely contingent on private instruction, but it took Title IX to give many of them a chance in team sports, which thrive in schools.

“It all started with Title IX,” says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the New York–based Women’s Sports Foundation. “Since the early ’90s, Title IX babies have been coming of age.” At the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, American women’s teams took home gold medals in basketball, hockey, and softball. Those gold medals, in turn, spurred investment in today’s leagues. Indeed, all of today’s successful professional leagues were formed after the 1996 Olympics.

Though Title IX may have laid the groundwork for today’s leagues, growing public dismay over men’s professional sports has also bolstered the women’s leagues. Since the advent of free agency, men’s pro teams have devolved into temporary groupings of hired guns, which doesn’t inspire fan loyalty. Besides, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to market the likes of Rae Carruth, who shot his pregnant girlfriend, or the coach-choking Latrell Sprewell, or even superstars like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, who engage in petty on-court squabbles. Then there are skyrocketing ticket prices, coupled with the could-happen-again-at-any-time baseball, basketball, and football strikes. If there was any doubt that the public was growing impatient with its bad-boy superstars, it was put to rest with the failure of the XFL, which suggested that sports and sportsmanship may be in greater demand than previously thought. “Society made a pretty good statement with the failure of the XFL,” notes Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. Apparently, most Americans don’t want to watch brutal men and nearly naked women on the gridiron.

Between the apparent lack of talented, affable male athletes and the coming of age of Title IX–generation female athletes who have those qualities in abundance, the arrival of the women’s leagues seems timely. Indeed, the 16-team Women’s National Basketball Association, a younger sibling to the NBA, blew away average first-season attendance projections of 4500 in 1997, with early crowds of 12,000 to 15,000 and an overall average of 8700. Last year, attendance was stable — an average 9100 fans per game, just above the 9000 target, according to WNBA chief operating officer Paula Hanson. When the Women’s United Soccer Association was launched on April 14, 2001, the Washington Freedom took on the Bay Area CyberRays before 35,000 fans at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. With eight teams in major cities across the country (including the Boston Breakers), and $64 million invested thus far (largely from the cable television industry), the WUSA could expand next year if the first season goes well and average attendance meets the goal of 7500.

Selling tickets, the leagues believe, requires fans to admire the players as role models as much as they admire the game the athletes play — and leagues market accordingly to a target audience of female former athletes and their families. It’s true that the leagues focus on the quality of sport and brag that they have the world’s best players; just consider all the attention given to soccer player Sun Yen of China and basketball star Margo Dydek of Poland. Yet when asked about the key to the soccer league’s success, Boston Breakers goalie Tracy Ducar says without hesitation, “Making connections with the local community.... Kids need to see us as attainable, reachable — they need to see that we’re just like them.”

One way to generate connections with fans is through elaborate “fan zones” on team Web sites, where mostly teenage fans post notes to each other. The players check in weekly, and some post essays and journal entries, too. Another way is through one-on-one contact. In 1997, Sports Illustrated pointed out the unusual accessibility of WNBA players during a New York Liberty fan-appreciation night. A young girl told Teresa Weatherspoon she was her hero, and Weatherspoon went into the stands to hug her. “Somehow, I don’t envision Patrick Ewing doing that,” a Madison Square Garden usher commented. Then again, the NBA doesn’t mandate such behavior in Ewing’s contract; the WNBA does. Two players must stay after every game to sign autographs.

“We are world-class soccer plus a whole lot more,” says Barbara Allen, CEO of the Women’s United Soccer Association. “Players are a great example of what we all want our kids to grow up having: believing in themselves, working hard, never giving up, staying focused but having fun, and feeling passionately about what they do.”

But the ways in which women’s leagues promote their agreeable, uncontroversial athletes rankles some fans. Take the WNBA’s infatuation with Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie, the league’s two most heavily promoted players (but by no means the two most talented). Swoopes is hailed as a great mother and player — in that order, more often than not — while Leslie is recognized as a fashion model. Then there are the background bios like this one tossed off a few Saturdays ago during a soccer game between the San Diego Spirit and the Atlanta Beat: TNT commentator Wendy Gebauer, watching Kim Pickup do a front flip while throwing the ball in bounds, remarked that Pickup was her high-school prom queen and noted, “That’s something that’s so great about this sport — how attractive these athletes are.” Of course, athletes are attractive because they’re healthy and agile, and there’s nothing offensive about being a prom queen. But Gebauer’s comment seems, well, very 1950s.

It could be argued that there’s nothing wrong with this kind of marketing — that promoting the appearance of the athletes does not diminish their athleticism. Critics, however, see the message as a form of not-so-subtle homophobia. Mary Jo Kane, director of the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center on Research for Girls and Women in Sport, notes that it’s perfectly appropriate to praise Swoopes and soccer star Julie Foudy for being good working mothers, or Kim Pickup for being a prom queen, as the case may be. “But ... the real subtext is, ‘Don’t worry, these female athletes are heterosexual, your daughters are safe,’” Kane says.