Flexing Their Muscles for Charity

Female athletes and sports leagues use rising star power as a force for philanthropy

A year after defeating Bobby Riggs in the highly publicized 1973 “Battle of the Sexes”

tournament, tennis star Billie Jean King started her own charity, the Women’s Sports Foundation. She had two goals, she recalls: to give women and girls more sports and fitness opportunities, and to “create a culture” that emphasized the need for sports figures to give something back. “As a young person growing up in sports, and as a girl, I realized how invisible we were, how little attention, help, and focus we got,” she says.

Today, female athletes are fulfilling Ms. King’s dream.

Women now compete in professional basketball and soccer leagues. Prizes for women’s golf and tennis tournaments have soared, with the annual purse for women’s tennis reaching $50-million this year, compared with $250,000 20 years ago. Young girls — and boys — are wearing jerseys with the names and numbers of athletes like the basketball star Chamique Holdsclaw and the soccer champion Mia Hamm.

Such women, as well as many of their peers, are also becoming visible forces in philanthropy. At least 16 female athletes have created their own foundations or charities, and others have set up charitable funds at existing organizations.

“Female athletes have done more with less money than any group I have ever seen,” says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “You look at many male athletes who have terrific charities, but as a rule the group is much more agent-controlled and selfish in terms of time.” In contrast, she says, today’s young female athletes “constantly astound me” with their efforts to reach out.

Ms. Hamm, who plays professional soccer for the Washington Freedom, for example, has contributed personally to her own foundation, which gives away about $100,000 a year, and she has also persuaded corporations who have paid her to endorse their products, like Nike and Mattel, to make contributions to her foundation, which focuses on curing bone-marrow diseases and promoting girls’ opportunities in sports.

Among the other women who have become philanthropic heavyweights:

• Suzy Chaffee, a former world-champion skier best known as “Suzy Chapstick,” started the Native Voices Foundation, in Basalt, Colo., five years ago to improve relationships between American Indians and their neighbors.
• Andrea Jaeger, the former teenage tennis star, now devotes most of her time to running a charity she started to help sick children. In addition to the $1.4-million she donated from prize money she earned, Ms. Jaeger has raised $6-million from others to build a ranch for the charity’s camp in Aspen, Colo.
• Jackie Joyner-Kersee, an Olympic gold medalist in track and field, has raised $12-million to build a new recreation center in her childhood hometown, East St. Louis.
• Dawn Staley, a professional basketball player with the Charlotte Sting, raised $100,000 last year for her eponymous charity, which helps children in Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.
• Karrie Webb, a professional golfer, has adopted the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation as her primary cause in honor of her coach, a quadriplegic. Last year her celebrity golf tournament brought in $150,000 for the group.
• Kristi Yamaguchi, the Olympic gold medal ice skater, has created the Always Dream Foundation, which raises money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, in Dallas, as well as for charities that help needy children in California and Nevada, where Ms. Yamaguchi lives.

While such women have made a difference, in many cases female athletes often can do more for charities as fund raisers and spokeswomen than as donors since many still earn relatively modest salaries. The average player in the Women’s National Basketball Association, for example, earns $55,000 a year. Some athletes must recruit sponsors, hold down second jobs, or apply for grants to remain in professional sports.

But beyond dollars, observers say, female athletes have found alternative ways to give.

Women’s sports leagues have made philanthropy central to their identities. The WNBA, for example, actively encourages its players to see volunteer work as a part of their jobs. The league has also teamed up with Sears, Roebuck and Company for a three-year campaign that hopes to provide $1-million to an alliance of breast-cancer charities and promotes early detection of cancer by giving fans newsletters, magnets, beach balls, and other items bearing the campaign’s pink-basketball symbol and touting the benefits of regular medical screenings and monthly self-examinations.

Efforts to Encourage Giving

Recognizing that sports figures, both men and women, have growing potential to serve as donors, several nonprofit and for-profit organizations have started to concentrate on ways to prod athletes to become more philanthropic.

The three-year-old Sports Philanthropy Project, in Newton, Mass., helps teams and individual athletes professionalize their charity work, and it recently was awarded a $2.9-million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to expand its efforts. The Giving Back Fund, also in Boston, was established in 1997 to manage the charitable foundations of celebrities, athletes, and other people. Its clients include the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, who gives grants to charities that help people with visual impairments.

Financial-services companies like Merrill Lynch and State Street Global Advisors are also trying to capture the business of professional athletes by providing them with information on how to set up foundations and other charitable activities.

Hadley Morash, assistant director of the Sports Philanthropy Project, says female athletes will be in a position to be an even greater philanthropic force several years from now. “It takes a while to amass the money, and to think about how to use it intelligently,” says Ms. Morash, whose charity works with athletes and sports teams to help them plan out their charitable activities.

Adds Ms. Morash: “I have no doubt they will catch up to the men.”

Ms. King, who in 1999 started the Billie Jean King Foundation, which now has $1.2-million in assets, agrees. She has made it her personal mission to ensure that as female sports figures reach celebrity status, they realize that they have “an unbelievable chance to change the world in a really positive way.”

To help lay the groundwork, Ms. King says that she asks every female athlete she meets: “What kind of legacy do you want to leave for yourself?”