THE NCAA AND MEN AND WOMEN
[Stanford 54-Arizona 53 — NCAA Div. I Women’s Final, April 4, 2021;
Baylor 86-Gonzaga 70 — NCAA Div. I Men’s Final, April 5, 2001.]
What exactly is wrong with the NCAA?
Well, how much time do you have?
Speaking of time, never mind TikTok.
The actual clock is ticking for the NCAA and the way it conducts its business.
For real.
Almost nobody likes the NCAA.
Plenty of folks love college sports, just as plenty of folks love the NFL, the NBA, MLB, MLS or the NHL.
But the perception of the NCAA is steeped and deeply mired in the negative.
When the governing body that oversees America’s college athletic contests isn’t working to prevent athletes from being paid, it’s conspiring to perpetuate the notion that women’s sports be treated as something less than men’s sports.
This is not the exclusive by-product of willful neglect, which would be bad enough.
Rather, it is the result of deliberate choices by the NCAA and its member schools, who shield each other from accountability.
Perhaps we’d be best advised to start at the top with NCAA President, Mark Emmert.
Emmert, 68, has been leading the NCAA since 2010, the organization’s fifth CEO.
Before that, he was at Montana State, the University of Connecticut and LSU in Provost and Chancellor positions.
Then it was on to the University of Washington, his alma mater, as President from 2004-’10, before moving to the NCAA.
Snappy resume, but ripples of difficulty at each stop, loosely linked to him — if not on his watch, then with his knowledge.
Lack of institutional control; mismanagement; academic fraud.
Generally, he skated, absolved of any wrongdoing and smelling like a rose, always exhibiting a keen facility to backpedal, offering flimsy — think cheesecloth — meaningless dialogue.
As an example, Emmert has vowed to get to the bottom of the glaring disparities between the NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments and their respective nationwide programs, which he has called, “inexcusable.”
The problem is, he has long acknowledged and rationalized the chasm, growing it, in the name of the almighty dollar, and leaning into gender discrimination all along the way.
What Emmert failed to admit is that the NCAA’s high-profile failures around the 2021 Women’s Basketball Tournament simply expose how little the bosses cared about it, relative to their unabashed love for — and promotion of — the Men’s extravaganza.
Take for example, the women’s weight room fiasco.
Under fire for stark differences in amenities between the men’s and women’s tournaments, the NCAA scrambled to unveil an upgraded weight room for players participating in the women’s college tourney in San Antonio.
The controversy erupted after a coach from Stanford — crowned the women’s champion on April 4, courtesy of a thrilling one-point victory over Arizona, 54–53 — and Sedona Prince, a University of Oregon redshirt sophomore forward with nearly 700,000 TikTok followers — posted photos on social media contrasting the men’s and women’s weight room setups in Indianapolis and San Antonio respectively.
Doing his signature dosey doe, Emmert remarked, “I want to be really clear. This is not something that should have happened and, should we ever conduct a tournament like this again, [in a bubble] will ever happen again.”
What if post-pandemic, things go back to how they were?
More of the same.
Count on it.
Status quo.
WEAK.
The NCAA’s vice president of women’s basketball, Lynn Holzman, acknowledged sheepishly in a press briefing that the organization “fell short.”
Fanning the flames, she added that the NCAA had originally intended for the women to gain access to a full weight room once their teams reached the third round of the tournament; the men’s teams have access during the entirety of their tournament runs.
EVEN WORSE!!!
So much for the weight room thing.
How about food?
For women, uninspiring box meals; for men, a buffet featuring steak fillets and lobster mac ’n cheese.
Mementos?
Swag bags for women, a third the size of the men’s.
Leave it to UConn women’s coach Geno Auriemma to deliver the coup de grace, when he told reporters that the school’s men’s team was being tested daily with highly accurate PCR coronavirus tests, while his team was receiving antigen tests, known to be less accurate.
The NCAA later confirmed that the two tournaments were indeed using different testing methods.
At least the NCAA and its brass are consistent.
This is how they treat women’s basketball every other day of the year too.
Former longtime Notre Dame women’s coach Muffet McGraw was resigned, but is still mad as a wet hen.
That “there’s a huge disparity between men’s and women’s sports is hardly breaking news,” she said.
“The NCAA had an opportunity to highlight how sport can be a place where we don’t just talk about equality we put it on display. To say they dropped the ball would be the understatement of the century.”
WHEW!
And it may go beyond money, if that’s possible.
Ask Dawn Staley, the legendary South Carolina women’s head coach.
She pointed out that even the NCAA’s trademarked “March Madness” branding is reserved explicitly for the male half of the sport.
The organization’s @marchmadness Twitter bio describes itself as “the official NCAA March Madness destination for all things Division I NCAA Men’s Basketball.”
Noted Staley, “The tagline leaves no run for misinterpretation. Those words mean one thing — March Madness is ONLY about men’s basketball.”
She implored the NCAA leadership to “reevaluate the value they place on women.”
AMEN.
Humiliating, shameful and just, plain wrong.
Discriminatory.
The NCAA advertises itself as an organization that exists to organize college sports for the benefit of the athletes playing the games.
But not all athletes.
The story has been hiding in plain sight for years.
And as Big East Conference Commissioner Val Ackerman, a veteran of the basketball wars in many capacities for more than thirty years, says about the NCAA failing to get women’s basketball right, by practicing — not simply espousing — equality,
“I think this is an awakening that probably needed to happen. I think it will jump start more change.
[There is a real] need to do more and do better and do it fast.”
From her mouth to the NCAA’s ears.
Truer words have ne’er been spoken.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in April 2021.]
