The 2020-21 NCAA women’s basketball season is over, but one of the coaches in the Final Four wants the excitement to continue.
South Carolina coach Dawn Staley published an article with USA Today on Monday, the day after Stanford defeated Arizona to win the national championship. The game ended one of the most exciting tournaments in recent history and also one of the most successful. The ratings for women’s basketball were strong throughout the tournament, and engagement on social media was even stronger.
Now, Staley wants the NCAA to invest even more in women’s basketball, just as it invested in men’s basketball so many years ago:
This struggle and strength is what we need to develop our game. Do you know what else we need? Investment – from everyone. We need to think of women’s basketball as the stock market: it grows over time and you need to invest to see the return on your investment. And we will have declines as well as the stock market. But we are worth it. The NCAA men’s tournament is now a billion-dollar industry, but it didn’t start there. The men’s basketball leaders forgot the routine needed to get there. We are ready to grind. And if you invest in us, the return will be astronomical.
The 2020-21 postseason was notable for the inequalities between the male and female tournaments that surfaced, especially the comically ill-equipped weight rooms that triggered a storm on social media. NCAA President Mark Emmert has promised that the organization will perform better in the future.
Social media has become a major asset in the fight for more equitable resources for women’s basketball, but Staley said there is a need for more investment at the lower levels as well:
We need to help women and girls at all levels, not just in college and at the WNBA. I’m going to watch my godchildren play at the local AAU ball, they’re freshmen and eighth graders, and I see how people invest in them. Look at the money we invest in the boys, although most of them never professionalize. You have dads training, moms running around the gym, dads in love and yelling at officers, officers yelling back – imagine if we put that same investment, that same passion, in the girls. Now, I’m not saying that all the energy is positive, but at least it’s there, and we can put it in the right direction.
It is worth reading the entire article for an inspiring female college basketball script – and how difficult this struggle can be when preparing to play some of the greatest games of their lives.
Many others have at least noticed, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who has offered to take the women’s tournament out of the hands of the NCAA if he is not going to invest in it.
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