WASHINGTON — Three congressional lawmakers sent a letter to NCAA President Mark Emmert Monday, lambasting him for failing to take meaningful action to ensure gender equality in college sports and suggesting his association violates Title IX .
Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) say the NCAA has made “insufficient progress” in addressing disparate treatment of male and female athletes. women a year after the The topic took center stage during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
In the six-page letter, members of the House of Representatives criticize Emmert for his failure to implement key recommendations of an external review triggered by the disparities revealed between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
“The shortcomings of last year’s women’s basketball tournament were well documented and widely covered,” the NCAA said in an emailed statement to SI on Tuesday. “While our work is not done, we are focused on the many improvements made since then that provide students across our leagues with a memorable experience to last a lifetime.” »
SI obtained a copy of the letter and several other documents, including internal emails from NCAA executives that reveal how the association handled the scrutiny of female athletes. turned to social media to point out differences between what male and female tournament participants received in terms of weight rooms, gifts and meals. The NCAA provided the emails after lawmakers requested them in July.
The emails describe correspondence from NCAA officials regarding requests from sponsors and non-sponsors to donate meals and gift cards to women’s basketball players at the San Antonio tournament. According to the emails, NCAA officials rejected some offers, including that of Chiney Ogwumike, a Los Angeles Sparks player and ESPN basketball analyst who chastised the NCAA last March over equality issues sexes.
Ogwumike offered to donate DoorDash gift cards to each of the 64 tournament teams, but the NCAA declined the offer because UberEats, a direct competitor to DoorDash, was a corporate sponsor of the NCAA.
The emails paint a frenzied picture within the association in the hours after the social media storm broke out and following the negative attention it generated. Sponsors contacted NCAA officials and were “really unhappy with the situation and wanted to help,” NCAA Director of Championship Engagement Ellen Lucey wrote in an email to colleagues on March 19 2021.
The NCAA initially refused all requests for donations until it finally accepted offers from corporate sponsors, such as Wendy’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and Pizza Hut, to provide food for female athletes in the same manner as these companies were feeding male players during their tournament in Indianapolis.
Capital One, a major sponsor of the NCAA, was particularly concerned. The company offered to help pay for food costs and wanted assurance from NCAA officials that the differences between the two events were resolved. In a phone call with Lucey, an anonymous Capital One executive asked him, “We’re not going to continue to see or hear about problems?”
“I told him, ‘No,’” Lucey wrote in an email to colleagues.
In response to the controversy, the NCAA conducted an internal review and hired a law firm to evaluate and produce a report on the organization’s policies and practices related to gender equity. Although the NCAA met some of the report’s recommendations, for example, the association has now referred to both tournaments as “March madnessUnlike the men’s event, the organization failed to implement several other recommendations, the lawmakers said in their letter.
The letter cites two specific examples:
(1) Emmert has made no progress toward changing the DI basketball leadership structure to ensure that women’s basketball leadership has the same level of seniority as men’s basketball leadership; and (2) the NCAA failed to create or commit to creating a Chief Business Officer role to “oversee the NCAA’s media partnership relationships with CBS/Turner and ESPN, the Corporate Partnership Program , as well as branding and marketing for all championships.
“While the NCAA has taken some short-term steps to avoid repeating the public relations disaster of last year’s March Madness championships, it has been particularly slow to commit to or implement recommendations that will ensure long-term structural changes to advance gender equity,” the letter read.
The letter does not request a response from the NCAA and does not request any more documents from the association. However, Congressional involvement in this issue should continue.
• Read it email pages NCAA executives here.
• Read it letter from legislators here.
More March Madness coverage:
• Expert Predictions on the Women’s March Madness
• Women’s NCAA Tournament Bracket Breakdown
• What we learned from the women’s conference tournaments
• 2021-22 SI Women’s All-Americans
