NCAA Basketball: Stanford Cardinals won the 2021 NCAA women’s championship 54 – 53 over Arizona.
By Chris Martinez, Layout Assistant
After Sedona Price of the Oregon women’s basketball team tweeted out this video of a TikTok she had made showing the equipment offered to the teams and players at the women’s NCAA tournament, it sparked outrage and criticism over how women’s basketball is looked at by the NCAA.
Following the video being posted to social media, another women’s basketball star added to the issue. Sabrina Ionescu of the New York Liberty tweeted out a photo comparing the men’s NCAA tournament’s weight room to the women. To many, this was an eye-opener to just how unfair the two tournaments were to their players.
In wake of these photos surfacing and creating an uproar in both professional basketball leagues NBA and WNBA, as well as at the collegiate level. NCAA vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt apologized to the women’s NCAA tournament teams for giving them a subpar weight facility. In an interview with ESPN, Gavitt said,
“I apologize to women’s basketball student-athletes, to the coaches, to the women’s basketball committee for dropping the ball, frankly, on the weight-room issue in San Antonio. We’ll get it fixed as soon as possible.”
In the wake of Gavitt’s statement, the NCAA took action into adding more and heavier weights, benches, bikes and rowing machines, offering the athletes and teams more than a simple weight set and a massage table.
This is not the first time the NCAA has downplayed the women’s NCAA tournament. Another incident was the budget differences where the men’s tournament is budgeted for $28 million while the women’s tournament is only budgeted for $14.5 million.
These amounts are drastically different due to the revenue they generate where the men make $864.6 million and the women lose the NCAA $2.8 million. The men’s tournament in turn makes the women’s tournament possible to be held.
Even though the men’s tournament supplies the funds necessary for the women to hold a tournament, that does not mean the women should have less adequate facilities and equipment given to them. The more other athletes and professionals speak up for their athletic counterparts, the more awareness and equality they would bring to a sport that has always been cast a shadow over.
