A Fan's Note: Women's College Basketball's Moment Has Arrived.
Overlooked and underfunded for years, the women's game is enjoying record TV ratings, growing attendance and fan interest. What took so long?
Columbia vs. Princeton, Feb. 4, 2023, Columbia women’s team’s first ever sell-out crowd
It is Saturday afternoon, April 1st, and I am sitting on a hard plastic bench in the sixth row of storied Phog Allen Fieldhouse at the University of Kansas. Packed inside the arena are more than 11,000 fans clapping, cheering and chanting in unison, "Rock Chalk, Jayhawks." I have no idea what Rock Chalk means. The Jayhawks are what the Kansas sports teams are called and, on this day, it is the Jayhawks women's basketball team that is about to play the Columbia Lions in the championship game of the Women's National Invitational Tournament. I am there to root for Columbia.
Crowd at WNIT final at University of Kansas, April 1, 2023. Attendance was 11,701
A little more than one year ago, I had never been to a college or professional women's basketball game. It never would have occurred to me. If someone had suggested going -- and no one ever did -- I would not have been interested. Today, I am a fanatic. This year, I have season tickets to the Columbia women's team. I missed only one home game and went to a few road games. I wear the same Columbia hoodie to every game out of superstition. When they win, I go home happy. When they lose, I despair. At the games, I shout encouragement. I bark loudly when my team scores. I rage loudly when the referees get a call wrong. On occasion, I see fellow fans sneaking curious looks at me. This guy takes it seriously! And I do.
I discovered women's basketball by accident. I live near Columbia and have taught part-time at the Graduate School of Journalism, which I went to long ago. A few years ago, mostly out of curiosity and convenience, I started going to see the men's basketball team.
One day, late last season, the men's and women's teams played a doubleheader. I stayed to watch the women and was surprised. They were exciting and athletic and very good. I started going to their games and stopped going to the men's games. The women had a terrific season, finishing the regular season 22-6 [the Columbia men went 4-22], advancing to the WNIT. In the third round, they beat Boston College in a thriller and hundreds of fans in tiny Levien Gymnasium poured out of the stands. They went on to lose to Seton Hall in the quarterfinals. By then, I had become a fan.
Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, credit: Harvard Athletic Dept.
Columbia was my introduction to women's basketball. My education -- about the history and evolution of women's basketball, and about the obstacles and indignities they had to endure and overcome to grow the game -- only began after last season when I wrote a profile of Kathy-Delaney Smith, the Harvard women's basketball coach who had just retired.
Growing up in the 1960s in the Boston suburb of Newton, Delaney-Smith was a natural athlete. She was an excellent swimmer and enjoyed playing basketball.
"We lived across the street from basketball hoops," she told me. "So I would just go out and shoot baskets. Honestly, I think I attracted boys that way. They would come and shoot with me."
She became very good at shooting hoops. She played high school basketball and was the first girl in Massachusetts to score more than 1,000 points. But when Delaney-Smith went to Bridgewater State College, she stopped playing basketball. The school did not have a competitive women's basketball team. In fact, the only women's sports team it had was synchronized swimming. So, she became a synchronized swimmer.
After college, she got a job as the swimming coach at a local high school. One day, the principal asked if she would coach the girl's basketball team. She said yes. Their first year, they went 0-11. Two years later, they were undefeated.
But Delaney-Smith was not happy. The girls' team that she coached was treated separate from and unequal to the boys' team.
"There was no salary, no staff, no uniforms, no gym time," she said. "We were like second-class citizens in a public high school. I'm like, this isn't right. I thought that was awful."
Delaney-Smith complained. It went nowhere. She then filed a series of lawsuits against her own school, invoking Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 which included a section -- 37 words -- that would be the catalyst for changing -- beginning to, anyway -- how colleges treat and fund women's sports: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
It ultimately went to arbitration.
"We got everything. It all worked perfectly," she said, "Everyone told me when I did that at the high school level, that that was going to end, that I was never going to get another (coaching) job."
In 1982, she was hired to be the women's basketball coach at Harvard. She held that position for the next 40 years.
Kathy Delaney-Smith, 2022
The NCAA Men's basketball tournament -- March Madness -- is obviously a big deal, one of the biggest in all of sports. It is immensely popular and enormously lucrative. For many years, the NCAA Women's tournament was neither. Undeniably, there has been progress under Title IX. It is credited with increasing funding for women's college sports and leading to more girls and women playing organized sports in high school and college.
Kellogg Community College women’s team 20-17-18, credit: Kellogg Community College
In 1972, 294,000 girls took part in sports in high school (compared to 3.66 million boys, according to figures cited by the NCAA.) In 2019, more than 3.4 million high school girls played sports (and 4.5 million boys). In 1972, women's college sports received 2% of colleges' athletic budgets, the NCAA said. Last year, they got "40% or less."
But nearly 50 years after Title IX, there remained glaring disparities and inequities between men's and women's sports at the college level. One of the most egregious was how the NCAA treated its postseason tournaments. The men's tournament got tens of millions of dollars more than the women's. The women's tournament couldn't even use the March Madness brand, seemingly out of fear of diluting it.
During the 2021 post-season tournament, a woman named Sedona Prince, who played basketball for the University of Oregon, did something that sent shock waves through the college basketball world. She tweeted.
What Prince tweeted was a video showing the differences between the gym facilities and other amenities at the NCAA women's tournament that year compared to those at the men's tournament. The men's gym in Indiana had a fully equipped weight room. The women, playing in San Antonio, had a gym with one dumbbell set and a few yoga mats. The men had better food, lounges, even better "swag bags."
"If you don't see the problem, you're part of it," Prince said on the video.
It was the tweet heard round the sports world.
"I think there was what I would call a reckoning overall," says Jenn Hatfield, who covers Ivy League women’s basketball for the website, The Next.
Under pressure, the NCAA hired an outside law firm to examine the differences between the men's and women's basketball tournaments. The report was scathing, finding gaping differences in funding, promotion, marketing and attention.
It spotlighted that the men's tournament had an $8.8 billion eight-year TV deal. In contrast, the women's basketball TV contract was lumped in with 28 other sports for an average annual payment of $34 million. The report concluded that the women's basketball contract alone would likely fetch between $81 million and $112 million a year.
"I think it's undervalued and underappreciated -- all women's sports, including basketball," says Hatfield.
In response, the NCAA made changes, including enlarging the women's tournament to be the same number of teams as the men's (68), requiring comparable facilities, food and lounges at tournaments sites, enhancing cross-promotion and marketing of the events. and even "allowing" the women's tournament to piggyback on the March Madness brand.
Weaver College women’s basketball team, 1920. Credit: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center
This past season, something happened. There was a surge in interest in women's college basketball. It was seen in increased attendance at many schools during the regular season (Columbia's women's team averaged more than 1,300 people per home game and had two sell-outs, the first ever. The men drew a little over 1,000 per home game) and record TV ratings for the NCAA women's tournament. University of Iowa star Caitlin Clark's dazzling 41-point outburst in Iowa's upset of defending champion and undefeated South Carolina this past Friday catapulted her to national stardom.
"This isn't just a moment," Cheryl Cooky, a Purdue University professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, was quoted in the New York Times. "It's more than that. It's the cumulative effect of a decades-long struggle for equality and recognition."
Hatfield says, "The women's side of the game is growing quickly and if we just unleash it from the forces that are holding it back, it's going to keep growing."
In its Title IX 50th anniversary report last year, The State of Women in College Sports, the NCAA said, "This report shows that while some progress has been made, there remains much work to be done."
University of Kansas players celebrate winning 2023 WNIT
In the WNIT final that I went to, Kansas ended up beating the Columbia Lions 66-59. It was a crushing defeat for the team and its fans despite this being their best season ever. Kansas players and fans, rightfully, exulted as time expired. The Lions could only stand aside and watch.
The WNIT is an oddity. Unlike the men's National Invitational Tournament, which is run by the NCAA, the WNIT has been operated by a private company called Triple Crown Sports ever since they bought the rights to the tournament in 1994. The teams that play in the NIT have all their expenses covered by the NCAA. The WNIT teams have to pay a fee to participate and a supplement if they bid to host a round and are chosen.
Kevin Lytle, a sports reporter with The Coloradoan newspaper, said the Colorado State University had to pony up at least $20,000 for the women's team to play in this year's WNIT. They lost in the first round.
Since 2011, the CSU Rams women's teams have played in four WNIT's. The Rams' men's teams have been in six NIT's during the same period. The women's teams had pay to play. The men’s team paid nothing and all of their expenses -- travel, food, lodging -- were covered by the NCAA.
There remains much work to do.
Love this story, Ron. It motivated me to read today’s New York Times about Louisiana state coach, Kim Mulkey, and to learn about Angel Reese and the way she spoke up.
Thank you for the highlights.
It’s great that you go to the games and wear your sweatshirt to support the team.
This warms my heart. I have to admit I’ve only been to one women’s basketball game — the LA Sparks, about 15 years ago. I managed courtside seats (not far from where Jack Nicholson would watch the Lakers… that tells you how much cheaper the seats were for Sparks games). That night, Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena, oy), had a much smaller crowd, but it was like being with family. I saw so many fathers in the stands with their daughters. Maybe some of those daughters went on to play college ball. I’m glad to see that 15 years later, all kinds of fans — like you — are turning out. Time for me to look into more Sparks tickets…