BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Walking through the main entrance of Lehigh University’s Murray H. Goodman Stadium on Saturday, spectators looked down upon a pitted field. A collection of figures in the distance dashed toward goals on the gigantic patch, while the lush-green wooded hills of the Lehigh Valley soared above them in the background.
The setting was metaphorical in a way for the inaugural games of the United Women’s Lacrosse League, which promotes itself as the first professional women’s lacrosse league in the country. With four teams — the Baltimore Ride, the Boston Storm, the Long Island Sound and the Philadelphia Force — the UWLX is trying to carve its place on the landscape of American professional sports.
To start a women’s professional sports league in 2016 is a challenge. Recognition, profitability and long-term success have largely eluded such endeavors in the United States.
Led by Digit Murphy and Aronda Kirby, the co-founders, along with the assistance of Michele DeJuliis, a women’s lacrosse pioneer who is the league’s commissioner, the UWLX plans to employ a model it hopes will change the definition of success for professional female athletes.
Murphy coached college and professional women’s hockey for 28 years before starting the UWLX. She said that new women’s leagues were unfairly judged against the successes of men’s leagues, noting that almost a century separated their origins.
“I’m kind of calling it ‘Title IX 2.0,’” Murphy said. “If you start to work in this middle space, we will incrementally make it quicker if we don’t compare ourselves to the men. Let’s just build a sustainable model first. Sustainability is only between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. That’s doable.”
Missy Doherty, who coached Penn State in the N.C.A.A. women’s lacrosse Final Four on Friday and will lead the Force this season, said women’s lacrosse was inherently different from the men’s game. The women’s game has less physical contact and less protective equipment, and it often has faster play.
The UWLX has changed the rules to entice new fans, including a shot clock, 2-point goals and the canceling of stoppages on a whistle.
Katie Rowan, Liz Hogan and Michelle Tumolo, who played at Syracuse and became coaches after graduation, said the new rules were a factor in their joining the UWLX.
“They changed the rules for what people want to see,” Tumolo said.
For the opening doubleheader on Saturday, a majority of attendees were also on site for U.S. Lacrosse’s national tournament, which drew 65 teams and more than 1,000 players from around the country. The N.C.A.A. women’s lacrosse Final Four was also being held outside Philadelphia, about an hour away.
For its inaugural season, the UWLX has scheduled games with the assistance of U.S. Lacrosse, a strategic partner of the league, at sites of other well-attended tournaments throughout the summer.
“That to me is really an interesting twist and interesting to see if it’s going to work,” said Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.
At Lehigh, the public address announcer recited the score and time after goals. The announcer also periodically reminded the crowd of the different rules and added the slogan, “The fastest game on two feet just got faster.”
The league offers travel stipends but no salaries. But many players embraced the challenge of helping the sport grow.
“It’s going to take time,” said Katie Schwarzmann, a two-time winner of the Tewaaraton Award as college lacrosse’s top player. “We’re going to need to get a lot more fans to really gather around what we’re doing, but I think it’s a great start.”
Throughout the games, Murphy roamed the sideline, talking to players, coaches and referees, exchanging ideas on ways to improve the presentation.
Murphy said a major goal of the UWLX was not only to provide a platform for players after college but also to act as a feeder system to the national team and create flagship events. U.S. Lacrosse hopes the sport will be introduced at the 2024 Summer Olympics, according to Ann Carpenetti, the vice president for lacrosse operations.
“It’s really not necessarily about lacrosse,” Murphy said, “it’s about growing opportunities.”
Those opportunities include targeting youth players. Last year, Murphy and Kirby created the Play It Forward Sport Foundation, which has a mission of creating pay equality by fusing sports and community. The new league is imbued with that ethos.
The league has sponsorships from Acme markets, the New England Sports Village and STX, a major equipment supplier. Murphy said a goal was to work with large companies not only to contribute sponsorship dollars but also to make contributions from their nonprofit arms toward Play It Forward Sport, which can be used for community programming initiatives that employ UWLX athletes.
One of the first local groups the league contacted was from the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in Philadelphia. Jazmine Smith created a program, Eyekonz, as an outlet to introduce African-American girls to lacrosse. During halftime, the team played an exhibition match against a club from California and received equipment donations.
“It can open up the spectrum,” Smith said of the UWLX. “A player just asked me: ‘Jazmine, is this professional? This is what I want to do.’”
Hogan, who will travel almost every weekend from California to compete in the league, added: “The grass-roots effort is important. Not in my lifetime of playing am I really going to enjoy making money off of it. The real potential is opportunities for girls and to continue growing women’s sports.”
The players and coaches have overwhelmingly bought into Murphy’s philosophy, which she conjured toward the end of her stint as coach of the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
Women’s sports have evolved tremendously since the advent of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on gender and creates athletic opportunities for women. With enrollment figures increasing, a natural progression is more professional opportunities.
But women’s professional leagues still struggle to succeed, with sexism and a lack of sponsorship from corporate America two troubling factors.
The C.W.H.L. and the National Women’s Hockey League, which last year offered players a salary for the first time, have been unable to secure a full commitment from the N.H.L., whose revenue averaged $133 million per team for the 2014-15 season, according to Forbes. Instead, the women’s leagues settle for whatever symbolic gestures the league is willing to make.
The N.W.H.L., featuring top American Olympians, drew steady attendance, but it also fumbled an opportunity when a dispute with the C.W.H.L. overshadowed an exhibition game at the Winter Classic. Recently, the N.W.H.L. has been a target of legal issues, stemming from investment disagreements.
As the United States women’s national soccer team fights for pay equality, the National Women’s Soccer League battles for visibility, as does the W.N.B.A., in its 20th year.
Kane agreed with Murphy’s idea of clarifying how to gauge the success of women’s sports in America.
“Developing a new league in a niche sport, particularly in women’s sports, you have to have different criteria,” Kane said. “It’s an unfair and unrealistic comparison to compare what is essentially a tech start-up company to Apple. We would never do that. Instead of saying how does women’s lacrosse compare to men, I would want to compare women’s lacrosse to what was the interest five or 10 years ago.”
According to U.S. Lacrosse, the sport is the fastest-growing team sport at the high school level, with the number of girls’ programs rising 29.8 percent from 2010 to 2015. During that period, there was a 36.6 percent growth in N.C.A.A. women’s lacrosse programs.
Even with these figures, Murphy stressed that success could not be gauged in one year. She said she believed that if the UWLX became a profitable, long-lasting league, she most likely would not be around to see the mountaintop, but Murphy is at peace with that.
“When women start to galvanize, I think we can move mountains, but we have to be ready to give and give back,” Murphy said. “We’ll move it. That’s what we did in hockey. I always feel like I’m growing it and when it gets there, I’m not there.
“I was always a woman advocate masquerading as a coach. I was a coach — I’m a great coach — but I was a better women’s advocate, and that’s what I was put on the planet to do.”