As a not so great feminist, I also think the topic is important to women and it has the potential to offer greater support for other women's topics on Wikipedia.  A quote from Mariah Burton Nelson's "The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football" helps explain this: 

:::"Sport is a women's issue because on okaying fields, male athletes learn to talk about and think about women's bodies with contempt.  It's a women's issue because male athletes have disproportionately high rates of sexual assault on women - including female athletes.  It's a women's issue because the media itself cheers for men's sports and rarely covers women's.  It's a women's issue because of the veiled threat, this is homage paid to bulky, brutal bodies." 

It words things harsher than I might like and make take things to a bit of an extreme but there you go.  (I think you could do a nice tie in with the feminist project, the women's history project, the LGBT project and a few others.  You could possibly tie in parts to the fashion projects.  I was watching some television somewhere two days ago and they were talking with a designer about designing footy jerseys and sport uniforms to better show off women's bodies, uniforms that are less asexual.  There is a fair amount of pictures of women's sport attire and commentary that goes along with it.)

I'd also guess, based on conversations with a male who is heavily involved with sport articles on Wikipedia, that most articles about women's sport and female athletes are written predominantly by men.  There does not appear to be a large buy in from women to work on this area.  I can think of at least two female sport contributors who have become disillusioned with Wikipedia because of harassment/sexism from male editors and lack of support from the community in updating women related articles for their sport, or even including women in articles where it makes sense to do so.  In existing female sport projects like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Football/Taskforce_on_women%27s_football, there doesn't appear to be that much female buy in.  On other projects like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Netball , things are pretty quiet.  The netball one feels a bit ironic as a few of these articles are vandalised on a weekly basis to mention how much an IP editor loves the sport. 

The project would help give recognition to female contributors by giving them a form of publishing credit.  It would provide women and girls with access to offline sources to learn more about the topic and to celebrate what women do.  It would be great to do a series of articles about women's sport in say Malawi or the Cook Islands or Samoa or the Northern Marianas… then publish these as books with ISBN numbers with a letter from the country's National Olympic Committee and put these books into local libraries.  We've got the resources to do most of this out of UCNISS and if we had support from WM-AU and Wikipedia editors, it becomes a lot easier.  Recognition can help people validate their hobbies and interests, give them a goal to work towards, can help get them ready to apply to graduate school by giving them access to these tools.  The project would provide recognition to women who might otherwise be unable to see the value of their contributions.

Beyond that, this project helps create a community.  You love sport but lack some of the sources?  Once we have our space established, we'll have a space where the larger community can come together, can work in the same space, can use our library, can talk to academics in this field, can be given a tour of Canberra to use other good resources available here like the National Sport Information Centre.  The city is also home to a number of national sport organisations.  A number of athletes train here at the Australian Institute of Sport.  There is a WNBL team.  If you're interested in this like women's sport fashions, we'll help you make those connections. People, contributors, researchers can be plugged in to this network to help do original research on a project like Wikiversity, to help write content publish to the publications we intend to publish.  We'll help create an offline and online community.

Sincerely,

Laura Hale

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twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com