N.C.A.A. Tournament Live: Stanford Edges Arizona for Title
This year’s N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament has been a weekslong display of athletic intrigue and talent — and a showcase of the indignities, like a flimsily stocked workout area publicized online by the Oregon forward Sedona Prince, that players and coaches say prove that their sport is still seen and treated as second-class.
“It was so blatant, and it pulled back the curtain and it allowed people to say, ‘This is a systemic problem,” said Cori Close, the coach at U.C.L.A.
“People who were intimately involved in college athletics were not shocked, but they were deeply disappointed,” said Heather Lyke, the athletic director at Pittsburgh and a member of one of the N.C.A.A.’s most influential management groups. “They’re thankful that the discrepancies were captured and displayed and that people reacted the way they did, which was appalled or outraged or frustrated. People didn’t dismiss it.”
That is partly because women’s basketball is a powerful force in American athletics, especially compared with what it once was. These days, the sport’s luminaries can be household names, its games collectively draw millions of fans in person and on television, and the inequities that emerged from San Antonio drew swift attention online and in Congress. But a sport that has spent years contemplating ways to break through — and how much it should stand as a brand of its own — is finding it difficult to outrun a history of sexism, infighting and media rights deals that overwhelmingly tilt eyeballs and money toward men’s basketball.
The debacle in San Antonio cast a harsh light toward the N.C.A.A., which was already under severe strain because of the coronavirus pandemic and a crush of public and political pressure to change longstanding rules that would allow players to profit off their fame and benefit in some way from the ballooning financial might of college sports. Now the association is facing doubts over the depth of its commitment to one of its marquee offerings.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/04/sports/stanford-arizona/