Dawn Staley has built a career in basketball as good as any in the past few decades. She was twice the national player of the year in college, won two Olympic gold medals, had six All-Star seasons at the WNBA on her way to being voted one of the top 15 players in league history by fans and is on several runners in the fame.
After her playing career, she turned to coaching, dominating at Temple before taking over South Carolina and turning it into one of the best shows in the country and winning the national title in 2017.
When Dawn Staley speaks, people should listen.
And on the question of the NCAA’s unthinkable and petty treatment of female basketball teams and players this year … Dawn Staley has same spoken.
The paragraph that stays with me here – which gives me more certainty than I had before NCAA President Mark Emmert was supposed to drag on and disappear forever – is this:
What we now know is that the NCAA’s long-term messages about “unity” and “equality” were about convenience and a catchphrase for the moment created after the assassination of George Floyd.
She is absolutely right, of course. I have been writing about the NCAA hypocrisy for a long time, but I am even shocked by it. I didn’t think the organization would at least stop pretending that it cared about women’s football. The NCAA has always chased the money, but at least it knew that there was a scam to be maintained for the sake of public perception.
However, here we are. Hemal Jhaveri has compiled an exhaustive list of all the ways in which the NCAA has made it clear that it views basketball players as second-class citizens. Please read.
Let me intercept your bad logic before I even put it out there: nothing about the difference in revenue generated by these events justifies any of this. There is a lot of money available and creating equal opportunities for athletes is supposed to be one of the guiding principles of the NCAA. It is supposedly one of the reasons why players in the men’s tournament cannot be paid; this money supports other sports!
But it is clear that this is just a convenient justification. The truth is clear for all to see. The NCAA thinks female basketball players should be happy to have a tournament. That is the clear message here.
College athletes are waking up to the exploration inherent in this system, getting closer and closer to dramatic action. Meanwhile, the NCAA slowly performs all the various movements to give athletes the rights to their name, image and likeness. It also continues to make absurd arguments as the Supreme Court prepares to consider the issue of compensation for college athletes:
The NCAA’s brief response to the Supreme Court in Alston is infuriating. Arguing against increasing compensation for educational benefits for FB MBB athletes WBB bc fans may care less about college sports is quite a message.
Your role is to entertain the fans we value, more than you– Victoria Jackson (@HistoryRunner) March 19, 2021
Only an organization that fights imminent change that it is unable to prevent can struggle and fail as much as the NCAA in the past few days. It is a clear sign that college sports brokers are holding on and taking what they can while they can.
All the ways the NCAA failed with its Women’s March Madness teams