SAN DIEGO (AP) — At first glance, the scene on a recent Saturday night on the University of San Diego campus seemed to showcase all that is right about women’s professional sports.

In the stands of cozy Torero Stadium, little girls in soccer jerseys squealed in unison when their favorite San Diego Spirit players were introduced. On the field, two of the top teams in the WUSA were engaged in a lively contest.

Beneath the idyllic setting, though, all is not well in the WUSA, which was founded in the giddy euphoria of the 1999 women’s World Cup with Julie Foudy of the Spirit and 16 other U.S. team players holding a small equity stake.

Now in its third year, player salaries have been slashed, TV ratings are almost nonexistent and the league is having trouble finding fans who aren’t under 18 and play on a soccer team.

A quarter century after Title IX opened a new wave of college opportunities, the jury is still out on whether women’s pro teams can carve out more than the small niche they occupy in the multibillion-dollar sports business.

Women’s tennis and golf do well at times, although the LPGA Tour always suffers in comparison to the riches of the men’s tour. But women’s sports leagues are proving a hard sell, especially now, long after the excitement of the 1996 women’s basketball Olympic gold medal and the 1999 women’s World Cup soccer win before 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl.

The eight-team WUSA debuted in April 2001 with a Washington Freedom game that drew 34,148 fans, a number that has not been seen since. More troublesome for the league is that last year’s average attendance dropped to 6,957 from 8,116 the season before.

“We’re being very patient in how we manage our expectations of growth,” said WUSA president Lynn Morgan.

Women’s pro sports had an uphill battle from the beginning, forced to overcome cultural and gender obstacles to build leagues from scratch in an increasingly fragmented market.

They’ve had to do it with little in the way of TV revenues that are the backbone of major men’s sports, relying instead on sponsorships and attendance. And they’ve had to do it for the most part without men, who may be avid sports fans but not when it comes to watching women play them.

“Women’s professional sports are the new people on the block. They have to capture their audience,” said Neal Pilson, a TV sports consultant and former head of CBS Sports. “They don’t have the residual audience of men’s football, basketball and baseball. It’s a difficult environment out there.”

That was evident on the recent night here in San Diego, a soccer friendly town that would seem to be a natural for the WUSA. But only 4,911 fans showed up in the 7,000-seat stadium to watch, the smallest crowd in the three-year history of the team.

“We do great on families and young kids, but we have a hard time getting 30-year-old guys to come to games,” said Foudy, one of the league’s charter players.

The league’s own statistics bear that out. Seven of 10 fans at a WUSA game are female, and a whopping 89 percent of fans under the age of 18 at the stadium are girls.

Meanwhile, on the night of this particular game the men were just over the hill, part of a crowd of 31,375 that was watching the Padres play the Diamondbacks at the same time as the soccer game.

There, they could see millionaires play other millionaires. On the Spirit squad, lower tier players make as little as $30,000 for the season. Many felt lucky just to be playing for pay. The WUSA spent so much money its first year that it nearly shut down. It moved its headquarters from New York to the Atlanta office of sponsor Cox Communications and dug in for the long run, determined to run a leaner operation.

This year, Foudy and the other idols from the U.S. World Cup team in 1999 agreed to take a cut in pay to $60,000 from the previously agreed upon $93,000 to help the league survive.

“The economy isn’t helping us at all. You can feel it from the top down,” Foudy said.