If a picture is worth a thousand words, these two images spit 2,000 words of metaphorical fire and outrage.
One showed a gleaming weight room, stocked to the gills with an array of equipment that would have made any 24 Hour Fitness envious.
This was juxtaposed with another room, thousands of miles away and in another world, equipped with a small dumbbell rack and a few yoga mats.
The first, of course, was the facility available to basketball players competing in the men’s NCAA tournament in Indianapolis. The second was the ridiculously skimpy workout “material” reserved for the women’s NCAA tournament in San Antonio.
When these images appeared on social media, the cry was fast and furious. We rarely have the opportunity to see such a striking and indisputable example of inequality. It’s rare that the NCAA’s hypocrisy is so exposed for the world to see.
The NCAA initially said the women didn’t have a better weight room because there wasn’t enough space at the hotel — a ridiculous claim that came to light when forward Oregon’s Sedona Prince posted video of a sprawling adjacent ballroom. And empty.
NCAA President Mark Emmert later said it was never a weight room, but rather an exercise room to be used before practice – as if the fact that women were completely deprived of a real weight room was a sort of justification.
“Weight-gate,” as USA Today’s Christine Brennan dubbed it, quickly became the main talking point of the simultaneous tournaments, even as the culminating event of the college hoops season produced high-profile games of the two sides.
Rushed Apologies were made by NCAA executives, Emmert promised to investigate what went wrong, and the women like magic, they had their fully equipped weight roomovernight.
But the damage was done. Even more infuriating discrepancies between men and women soon emerged. Men used the most reliable PCR tests to detect COVID-19, while women used antigen tests. Anecdotally, men seemed to benefit from better food options and larger “goody bags.” The NCAA provided a photo set of all the men’s games, none of the women’s. The Wall Street Journal reported that the phrase “March Madness” had been reserved by the NCAA for the exclusive use of men.
Insignificant things? Try telling that to female participants who can’t help but get the message that they don’t matter as much as men. The NCAA had all kinds of excuses, like the difficulty of hosting the first tournaments at a single site. But ultimately, the inequity is inexcusable.
This allowed the world to see what many have been saying for years: that the NCAA does not value women’s sports as much as men’s sports, despite the presence of a law, Title IX, designed to impose fairness.
In a fully justified speech that should go straight to the Righteous Indignation Hall of Fame, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins wrote:
“I’m tired. Not from today or yesterday, but from 40 years. Forty years tired of writing the same damn story about the same NCAA shortchangers in suits who are as angry about female athletes as a equal amount of air in a tire if they thought it could be done at the expense of men. I’m fed up with scathing administrators with their multi-million dollar salaries and monstrous incomes who behave like female basketball players -ball. They should be grateful to have a uniform that isn’t funded by a bake sale.”
And don’t try to say that the income disparity between the men’s and women’s tournaments justifies unequal treatment. On the one hand, the NCAA is not meant to be a revenue-generating entity; in fact, it makes every effort to present itself as a non-profit company dedicated to promoting the sporting opportunities of its members. In this regard, he let his women down in the eyes of the whole world.
Beyond that, these disparities had nothing to do with money (the women’s tournament is also profitable); it had everything to do with what seemed like a willful indifference even pretending to care about equality. Anyone with the slightest sense of fairness could see this and be very disturbed.
Leading voices in women’s sports have issued scathing rebukes of the NCAA on social media. Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, the winningest coach in women’s basketball history, wrote: “Women’s athletes and coaches are tired of waiting, not just for a weight room upgrade, but also equity in all facets of life… With the obvious disparity between women and men. At tournaments, the message that is sent to our female athletes and to women around the world is that you are not valued at the same level as your male counterparts.
Washington State women’s coach Kamie Ethridge, who was in San Antonio prepare your team for a first-round game against South Florida, had a similar result. During his Zoom press conference on Saturday, Ethridge said: “What the disappointment is, it’s more of an afterthought. I think that’s the problem. If the weight room is so important to men and they have set it up so immaculately and so perfectly, why wouldn’t it be important to women? »
Ethridge said that in general, she had praise and gratitude for how the NCAA ran the tournament under unique circumstances. But the “little details” were disturbing.
“It’s: ‘No, we’re not going to give you that, and you shouldn’t ask for it.’ You should just be happy to have that,” she said. “I think that’s the difference: We’re not really going to think about you until then, and you should just be happy to be there.
“That’s the feeling you get if you’re us and you see the differences. The hardest thing for us as coaches is to look at your kids and say, “Yeah, you don’t deserve that.” They do it, not you. How do you communicate this to your players?
Of course, this is not the case. Because in a year where the fight for fairness has been a constant theme, women will not – and should not – accept such a notion.
This whole unseemly episode might, in fact, turn out to be a good thing — the galvanizing moment that forces (or shames) the NCAA to finally take equity issues seriously. That’s the conclusion of Georgia Tech women’s basketball coach Nell Fortner, who released a statement Tuesday that included this:
“To the NCAA: Thank you!
“Thank you for using your organization’s three biggest weeks of the year to lay out exactly what you think about women’s basketball – an afterthought.
“Thank you for showing the disparities between the men’s and women’s tournaments that are on full display in San Antonio, from COVID testing to lack of weight training facilities to playing fields that don’t tell anyone they’re about the NCAA Tournament and more. But these disparities are just a glimpse of larger, more pervasive problems in women’s sports and the NCAA. Shipping them into a few weight lockers, after the fact, doesn’t is not a solution. It’s a band-aid and an afterthought.
Fortner concluded: “For too long, women’s basketball has accepted an attitude and treatment from the NCAA that has been substandard in its championships. It’s time for this to stop. It’s time for women’s basketball to get the treatment it deserves.
“Thank you for the exhibition,
“Nell Fortner.”
Hopefully these two images will launch not only words, but also actions.
