In my first-ever fantasy football draft, I questionably spent my first three picks on quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts.
It came as a surprise to my friends and family that I joined a fantasy football league this past fall. I have zero football knowledge and no previous interest in sports. As a 22-year-old Chinese-Canadian woman, I’ve never felt expected to care about sports, but playing fantasy helped me finally understand the pastime’s appeal.
The number of women playing fantasy sports has increased 16 per cent since 2019. The global fantasy sports market is currently valued at over $28 billion and is expected to grow to over $40 billion in the next four years — with women being the fastest-growing demographic for the industry.
I’d been turned off from professional sports because I perceived them as hyper-masculine and unwelcoming to outsiders, especially football. The majority of people I knew growing up who played and followed sports were boys. They were loud and talked about players and statistical averages that I didn’t know or understand — it was intimidating to someone like me, who was physically small and unathletic.
Not only did playing sports seem off the table but watching them didn’t seem like a worthwhile pastime either.
My parents are immigrants from China, where watching sports isn’t as popular as it is in Canada, and we never had sports channels playing on our TV. My friends were mostly other Asian girls, and we preferred to spend our free time watching K-pop music videos — where we saw ourselves represented on screen — over "Hockey Night in Canada."
So, when I joined my student newspaper’s fantasy football league in September, it was solely to boost team morale. But since joining, fantasy football has become not just one of my favourite pastimes, but my doorway into the world of sports that I’d always felt excluded from.
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Fantasy sports was an accessible gateway because I didn’t need to know all the rules of the sport to play — all I needed was simple math. Participants select a team of players through a draft, and then those players’ real-life performances over the season are reflected in fantasy points.
I don’t need to know how many receiving yards Travis Kelce has in the last five years to be good at fantasy football — I just need to know how many fantasy points he’s projected to score this week compared to other players, and then decide whether or not I want him in my lineup.
The fantasy app projected me to come in eighth — dead last — in our league on draft day. As the weeks went on, I became more invested: I enjoyed reading different weekly projections and analyses to try and improve my odds and started weighing my trade options using online trade value calculators.
I even traded away two of the three quarterbacks I originally drafted, after several people explained to me why it doesn’t make sense to have three quarterbacks in a one-quarterback league. After climbing up the projected rankings in the second half of the season, I eventually won my newspaper’s league. I’ve also joined a fantasy hockey and basketball league.
Since playing fantasy sports, I’ve also discovered that the spectator sports community — people who regularly watch and follow professional sports — is not the exclusive “boys club” I once believed it to be. It’s more about enthusiasm than knowing every statistical average, and most fans are willing to engage in that enthusiasm with anyone who shows an interest.
I’m the only woman on staff in the sports section of our newspaper, and the social aspects of being in the league — sending memes on Instagram or arguing loudly in the newsroom whether a certain trade was fair to both parties — make me feel welcomed and encouraged.
My fantasy football experience has brought me entertainment and community, and I hope those benefits can feel open to everyone.
