Quality of sports commentary matters - and American women's soccer

I tuned in a few months ago to Manchester City vs. Manchester United in the English women's soccer league.  And I got professional commentators, who understand the cadence of a football match.  

Yet, when I tune into the NWSL (the American women's soccer league), I hear one announcer who sounds like he was plucked from a midwestern fraternity house but has never listened to a soccer match before; and their partner, who prattles on about nothing while dramatic attacks or saves happen on the pitch.  

These commentators are doing their best.  I know they aren't paid well for their efforts. I am sympathetic to them.  It doesn't matter. I can't listen.  

For avoidance of doubt, my commentary complaint isn't about gender in the broadcast booth.  I've heard amazing female voices calling association football, both as analysts (as in that City-United game), and as play-by-play voices (as on some of the EFL Championship broadcasts, or as on the occasional NBC Premier League games).  Good broadcasting can come from people of any gender, any native accent.

Good broadcasting is also about intellectual depth.  Why is it that I, a physics teacher in Virginia, know more about the Portland Thorns players than the people who are paid to call their games?!?  It was a standing joke on Thorns twitter that it was time to drink when the commentator referred to Sophia Smith's or Olivia Moultrie's youth, or to Simone Charley's triple jump experience - because these sound bites seemed to be all the commentators knew about them.

I think there's a sense among powerful people that women's sport is meant only for ten-year-old girls and their families, and that media or sponsors are doing a mitzvah by even supporting the games at all.  I'll change this opinion when (a) the "She Believes Cup" competition is renamed to something less condescending, and (b) sponsors refer to the Super Bowl as the "Boys Can Do It Championship" or something similarly gross.

I'm a 48 year old man who teaches at a boys' boarding school.  I have no daughter.  My wife hates spectator sports.  And yet... I love women's soccer.  I love the players, their intelligence, their intensity, their authenticity.  The Rose City Riveters (the Portland supporter's group) are crazy, and are also positive and classy - they include none of the toxic masculinity that pervades football and basketball fandom in too many places.

I recognize that sport is narrative. It's live storytelling, very much like Dungeons and Dragons with different sorts of Dwarfs (Klingenberg) and Wizards (Dunn).  And even some Trolls and Goblins.

D&D played with a poor dungeon master sucks, even if that dungeon master is trying very hard.  Let's bring in the Arlo Whites, the Jim Proudfoots, the Richard Connellys, the whoever-these-folks-were-on-the-United-City game to call the NWSL.

Please.