What a Shock, the NCAA is in Hot Water... Again

It has become a cliche at this point that the March Madness Tournament leads to a loss in productivity. According to John S Keirnan of WalletHub, there are, on average, $13.3 billion in losses due to unproductive workers during the tournament. However, the most inept workers this year are those affiliated with the NCAA, specifically, the people in charge of the women’s tournament. It all started with a social media post by Ali Kershner, the sports performance coach for Stanford, showing off the disparities between the two workout rooms, the men’s in Indiana and the women’s in San Antonio. As Emine Yücel described it in an article for NPR:

While the set-up for the men's teams included a number of power racks with Olympic bars and weights, the women were provided with a set of dumbbells and yoga mats for the three weeks they will be in the tournament bubble. The post created another sort of March Madness. (Yücel)

After more athletes posted videos to TikTok exposing the unacceptable inequality between the two tournaments, Lynn Holtzman, the NCAA vice president of women’s basketball, stated that the differences were due to limited space in San Antonio, a claim easily refuted by videos showing a vast open space where plenty of equipment could have been set up. There are many levels of sexism baked into the decision-making process here that are inexcusable, to say the least. This is far from the typical debate between male and female sports, though. There is indeed far less interest in women’s sports than men’s and that is a societal issue that will face a hard uphill battle to be fixed. Women’s sports don’t make enough money for the athletes to be paid equally, so the discussion needs to be about equitable pay at the professional level.

However, this is not the pros, this is college. College athletics are supposed to be nonprofit amateur sports which means this move is nothing but the NCAA saying that they care about men more than women. If they truly were a not-for-profit industry like they claim to be and were focused on the development of student-athletes, there would be equal attention paid to both. And while Title IX and other initiatives have helped close the gap, incidences like this show how far we really are from fixing the societal issue of gender equality, especially when it comes to sports.

The issue can be seen as an economic one as well. The women’s tournament does not generate close to as much as the men’s does. In fact, as Laine Higgins of the Wall Street Journal explains, “The women’s basketball tournament doesn’t turn a profit, nor does the NCAA factor its results into its annual financial distributions to schools as it does for the men.” The women are barely even an afterthought. Even though there is no profit for the tournament itself, when the women enter the news, others see an opportunity to capitalize. After the story exploded, Dick’s Sporting Goods gathered enough workout equipment to stock an entire gym and tweeted at the NCAA that they were ready to ship it out immediately and get a functional workout area up and running within hours. This is an excellent example of another corporation using a negative situation to make themselves look better. This was not a move made by Dick’s out of the goodness of their heart or because they truly support women’s athletics. It was a calculated move to get their name out in a positive way. The attention they gained from this publicity stunt would have cost far more than the weights they’re donating than if they tried to get the same amount of attention through traditional advertising. If Dick’s truly thought this was an issue and wanted to support the women’s tournament, they would have pitched the sponsorship/collaboration before the tournament even got started.