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The last few years have seen an explosion in viewership for women’s sports. This has been great for athletes who have long toiled in near-obscurity and are finally receiving the recognition and (slowly) the compensation they deserve. However, with that increased visibility come serious risks for the athletes.
As the audience for women’s sports has grown, it has happened across gender lines, and in the last six months alone, a large number of female athletes have reported being stalked by male fans. Men have been arrested for stalking Caitlin Clark of the WNBA and Paige Bueckers, a star basketball player for the University of Connecticut. Olympic track and field athlete Gabby Thomas and tennis pro Coco Gauff have said they’re being stalked by a group of men, and tennis player Emma Raducanu had to stop a match in Dubai after spotting a stalker in the stands. While female celebrities have always had to account for the possibility of being stalked, the spike in athletes experiencing the same thing has been sharp and glaring.
Women athletes are, in many ways, uniquely suited to being on the receiving end of parasocial relationships with fans. Because women’s sports have historically had a far smaller audience, the athletes have been much more accessible—whether chatting with their followers on social media or taking photos and chatting after a game. This has created a level of familiarity with the athletes that is harder to achieve with players in men’s sports.
The closeness that fans feel toward women athletes can quickly turn troublesome. Last season, a man showed up at the hotel where the WNBA’s Chicago Sky were staying to threaten Chennedy Carter and Angel Reese over in-game behavior that he didn’t like. The WNBA’s DiJonai Carrington received racist death threats over her on-court rivalry with Clark, and WNBA player Breanna Stewart and her wife, Marta Xargay Casademont, have received homophobic death threats to their personal email accounts. In 2023, Louisiana State University gymnast Olivia Dunne was mobbed by a throng of male fans chanting, “We want Livvy” at the exit of an arena.
And while physical stalking is at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to obsessive fan behavior, it’s not the only disturbing way that fans engage with their favorite athletes. Especially among Gen Z fans, TikTok and Tumblr have become flooded with fan accounts and fan edits of popular college basketball players or WNBA stars. The attention can be especially intense from queer fans, who tend to see greater LGBTQ+ representation in women’s sports than in broader popular culture.
“When you’re in a minority community and the representation always feels inadequate, whoever arises either as openly queer or is attributed that identity by fans, those people become disproportionately important to queer fandoms,” explains Eve Ng, an associate professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio University. “Certain fandoms around these queer imagined relationships have an intensity and obsessiveness that often exceeds straight ‘shippers.’”
For collegiate athletes, there’s another layer as well. Other students at their school are likely to see them as peers; maybe they have a class together or share a dorm. There is the potential to run into them on campus or at an off-campus party—and it’s fairly easy to find out their class schedule, room location, or travel itinerary. The level at which stans track the activities of these players sometimes includes following the families and friends of athletes on social media to scour their accounts for photos, getting their license plate numbers, or asking students on campus to report on any interactions or sightings they may have.
Paige Bueckers and WNBA player Kate Martin are two examples of athletes that young people have latched onto and elevated as objects of fixation. Throngs of college-aged women have been showing up to Bueckers’s games and crowding the hallways outside the locker room, trying to get a glimpse of her. Bueckers was asked about the crowds after a recent game, and while she said she’s grateful for the support, she chalked the number of people following her around up to “the new generation of social media [where] everybody knows your location at all times, they know your bus routes, or where you’re staying in hotels.”
The members of the media around Bueckers laughed at this, but for a young woman who had to deal with a stalker, the situation wasn’t especially funny.
But disengaging from social media isn’t really an option, either, especially in an era when college athletes earn money by treating themselves like a brand—a right referred to as NIL (name, image, likeness). With professional salaries still relatively low, no wages (yet) for collegiate athletes, and a massive gendered wage gap (not a single woman was on Forbes’s list of the 50 highest-paid athletes in 2024), women athletes need to build platforms in order to be financially successful. According to a 2024 survey from Parity Now, 78% of pro women athletes report making $50,000 or less from their sport; brand sponsorships can help fill that gap.
“With legalized sports wagering, the economics of NIL, and the extraordinary salaries associated with collegiate and professional athletics, athletes cannot afford not to publicize themselves and promote fan identification,” says Brian H. Spitzberg, Senate Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication at San Diego State University. “And, given historical disparities between female and male financial compensation, female athletes see social media, brand affiliation, and other fan-based market promotions as essential to their success. Unfortunately, such promotion of fan bases comes with the cost of increasing the risks of fan obsessions.”
This is the challenging position that female athletes find themselves in—damned if they do, damned if they don’t. The question then becomes whether the programs and leagues around these women are prepared to keep them safe in this new era of hyper-visible women’s sports. So far, the answer seems to be no.