Hey, Frank Deford: What's That About Professional Women's Soccer?

This morning, NPR listeners heard Frank Deford’s take on why women’s sports get so little attention:

There aren’t that many women’s team sports. You look at the Women’s World Cup in soccer, it got tremendous coverage. Good grief, it really led coverage for a week or so. But once it was over, there was no carry over -- there was no women’s soccer league to go on and to pick up that attention.

Northwest soccer fans took to social media to point out that, um, what about Seattle Reign FC? A team that, by the way, will play Kansas City FC in the National Women’s Soccer League championship on Thursday.

It may have irked our listeners because, as one person said on Twitter, the overlap between NPR listeners and Portland soccer fans is roughly 100 percent.

NPR edited the Deford piece later in the morning and appended an online correction to the commentary.

Other comments by Deford -- that women need to play more team sports instead of individual sports and that women don't support women's sports -- also struck a nerve.

In June, 25.4 million fans watched the Women's World Cup final. That smashed a record for number of people watching ANY soccer game in the U.S.

In other words, we heard you:

Update: NPR issued a statement on Deford’s commentary:

NPR is committed to airing voices from all sides of every issue. That commitment continues. That said, we should have done a better job of making sure the facts were straight. Obviously, we shouldn’t have made the mistake about the women’s soccer league. We corrected it.