IT WOULD be naive to ignore the leagues’ financial interest in being as apolitical as possible. After all, their success will rise and fall on the work of the finance, marketing, and media wonks in the front offices, and not on the words of activists or academics. To this end, the leagues tend carefully to corporate structure and player salaries, and they set modest goals. Above all, they focus on their fans and the media coverage needed to reach them.

To be sure, the leagues’ target audience is not the male beer drinker in the bleachers at Fenway, but a whole new demographic that includes young girls, teenagers and their parents, and former athletes like myself who were weaned on the advances of Title IX. The buying power of these fans is best evidenced by the 80,000-seat stadiums that sold out across the country for the 1999 Women’s World Cup soccer finals and semi-finals, and by the fact that tickets for the women’s college basketball Final Four sell out nearly a year in advance. It’s no coincidence that, as more than one league official has observed, women make “80 percent of a household’s purchasing decisions.” To further appeal to these consumers, ticket prices are kept modest, with soccer averaging $11 per ticket and basketball averaging $15, as compared with the NBA’s $50. “It’s family entertainment within a family budget,” soccer-league CEO Allen says.

The women’s leagues also rely heavily on television contracts and sponsorship money — partly because the media have volunteered so little coverage. According to Women’s Professional Softball League chief executive John Carroll, female athletes and teams in recent years have garnered only eight percent of sports-page coverage. As Kane says, “It’s amazing what’s happened with women’s sports in the midst of a major media blackout.”

In fact, the lack of a television contract may well have been the death of the women’s American Basketball League. The ABL started one season ahead of the WNBA and even had more player and coach talent than its rival — thanks, no doubt, to the ABL’s salary average of $75,000, twice that of the WNBA. Yet the ABL had no television contract and was outspent 10 to one on marketing by the WNBA, which signed contracts with ESPN, NBC, and Lifetime before any coach, player, or staff member was signed.

Television is also, quite literally, the Women’s United Soccer Association’s raison d’ętre: the league’s $64 million initial investment came from Cox Communications, Comcast Corporation, the Discovery Network’s John Hendricks, AOL Time Warner, and Amos B. Hostetter Jr., former chair of Boston-based Continental Cablevision. WUSA games are seen weekly on TNT and CNNSI, plus local cable stations like AT&T 3 in Boston and the Madison Square Garden Network in New York.

The women’s soccer, basketball, softball, and football leagues have something else working in their favor: most are organized according to what’s known as a single-entity structure. The WUSA, for example, was developed with 20 former Olympians and World Cup team members, dubbed “founding players,” who were seeded throughout eight teams and offered equity in the league. (Kristine Lilly, Tracy Ducar, and Kate Sobrero are the Boston Breakers’ founding players.) And each 20-member WUSA team has an $800,000 salary cap. The single-entity structure “controls cash,” says Breakers general manager Joe Cummings. “No owner can come in and say, ‘I’m gonna pay so-and-so a lot more.’”

To their credit, the leagues are realistic about how long it might take to achieve stability. Although the sports media love to point out that the WNBA has yet to turn a profit, Hanson says, “We’ve added teams every year and doubled expenses since the time we started. We didn’t expect to be profitable by now.” And as softball CEO Carroll points out, it took the men’s NBA 28 years to average 10,000 fans per game. The WNBA is almost there at its fourth birthday.

Still, as the leagues cling to their profit-and-loss sheets, they generally ignore political questions sometimes raised by their own marketing decisions. But women’s professional sports leagues have the power to change the politics and perceptions of the female body dramatically. Cummings points out that although his team could not keep up with its men’s equivalent, the New England Revolution, the women’s game doesn’t appear markedly slower or less physical than the men’s. Women’s basketball, though lacking the flying, twisting dunks of the men’s game, is a more tactical team-based game, preferred by the likes of legendary UCLA coach John Wooden. Indeed, a growing fan base out there likes the women’s game — be it basketball or soccer — better than the men’s.

At the very least, the advent of the female team athlete in the past 10 years has already put out more images of strong, muscular women than ever before. And if the sight of soccer player Brandi Chastain — in her sports bra, hands clenched in exultation upon winning the 1999 World Cup — was controversial, how refreshing that her exhibitionism revealed rippling abs rather than silicone breasts. Soccer CEO Allen feels the image was “excited, thrilled, celebratory — perfect” and notes that tearing off one’s shirt is a European men’s soccer tradition — a point lost in much of the controversy following Chastain’s impulsive act.

Exposure to women’s professional sports could also change perceptions of motherhood. Usually, women have children after they stop playing sports, partly because team participation generally ends in college, and partly because pregnancy and motherhood are seen as incompatible with athletics. But numerous WNBA and WUSA players have children. Soccer player Carla Overbeck gave birth while a member of Team USA and emerged from the sidelines just seven weeks after delivering her son, Jackson. As other high-profile professional athletes return to play only a few months after giving birth, childbirth might come to be seen as a more natural event, not a catastrophic and incapacitating one. And who knows? A perception shift of that magnitude just might help improve women’s position in the workplace.

ONE SATURDAY in early April, I trekked to Hartford, Connecticut, to try out for the New England Storm, a team in the Women’s Professional Football League. I had signed up online a month before, for purposes of this story, and felt that familiar I-don’t-throw-like-a-girl confidence welling up in my chest. I can run pretty fast, I thought to myself. I am fit. I can catch things. My tryout became a running joke in my family. My father wanted to be my agent; my 94-year-old grandfather thought I’d be playing with men.

I was among 40 women, approximately, and we came in a surprisingly wide range of sizes, ages, professions, and home situations: I saw soccer and basketball players, students, professionals, mothers, middle-aged wives who threw perfect spirals while frumpy husbands stood on the sidelines, assessing. Football, it seems, is something many, many girls felt left out of, and the size and diversity of these tryouts — indeed, the very arrival of three small, hopeful football leagues — point to the enthusiasm for women’s professional sports.

But of course, my family’s amusement was probably typical of what the general public thinks of women playing football, let alone professional football. As we ran and jumped and caught things and fell down on the sunny Trinity College fields that day, and the male coach yelled things like “There’s no ‘I’ in team,” a few gawkers paused at the fences, puzzled, before moving on to the women’s lacrosse game (also a Title IX bonus) one field over, where college girls were running around in short kilts. Times may be changing, but change is neither certain nor quick.

Kathleen Hughes can be reached at khughes[a]phx.com.