Let me know when NCAA goes beyond window dressing, gets serious about gender equity | Opinion

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MINNEAPOLIS – It’s not about better swag bags or more signs or even the Oreos in the lounges that each school now has. Just as it wasn’t really about the weight room last year.

It’s about the NCAA – and most of its member schools, quite frankly – not believing that women actually have worth. It is that mindset that needs changing, and it’s going to take a whole lot more than these easy, cosmetic fixes that the NCAA is puffing its chest out about as signs of progress.

“I call it hot dogs for the girls and steak for the boys,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said Thursday. “It will be a great time when you don't need Title IX. But unfortunately in our world, there's discrimination still against people, women, and we need to keep battling.”

The NCAA was shamed and scorned last year after Sedona Prince’s viral video comparing the puny rack of dumbbells that passed for a weight room at the women’s tournament with the spacious and fully stocked gym at the men’s event. An independent analysis by Kaplan, Hecker & Fink revealed that the problems went far deeper, and beyond the one event.

The NCAA simply didn’t see women athletes as the same as their male counterparts. Every slight and disparity stems from the fundamentally warped view that the men are “real” athletes while the women are playing just for funsies.

There wasn’t a separate TV contract for the women’s tournament because it never occurred to anyone that there might be a market for it. There wasn’t a way to sponsor the women’s tournament without also sponsoring the men’s because no one ever considered someone might want to do that. There wasn’t autonomy for the NCAA’s highest-ranking female administrator because no one saw it as problematic that she is subordinate to the head of men’s basketball.

A year later, not one of those things has changed. Worse, there are still glaring imbalances that the NCAA seems to be blithely ignoring.

On Friday, thousands of fans will pack the Superdome in New Orleans for the open practices of each of the teams in the men’s Final Four. The open practices at the NCAA women’s tournament are not until Saturday, the day before the championship game.

Which means two of the women’s teams will miss out on the experience all four men’s teams are getting.

The men also have five days between the last Elite Eight game and the Final Four, while the women get only three.

“We got home at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, and we left Tuesday to come out here. We practiced Wednesday, Thursday for the biggest game of the year,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “The swag bag and the weight room and all that other crap that we talked about last year, that doesn't help these kids get ready for Friday night's game.

“An extra three days would help. So we should be talking about that stuff.”

Yes, we should be. But if we did, it would force the NCAA to make substantive changes rather than the rearranging of deck chairs for which they’ve opted instead.

Oh, NCAA president Mark Emmert blamed it on contracts signed before his time and blathered on Wednesday about some of these things being up to member schools, including changing the revenue distribution to reflect performance, as the men do. But there was one comment from Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s vice president for women’s basketball, that I found telling.

It’s Holzman, by the way, who is still reporting to Dan Gavitt, the senior vice president of basketball whose responsibilities include overseeing “the day-to-day operations of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship … and (serving) as the staff’s day-to-day contact to the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee and the Men’s Basketball Oversight Committee.”

“As our championship has grown, it also was necessary to make sure that aspects of the championship related to direct operations within a venue such as this, at regional rounds and others, that we have experts in the field that were brought on board to help make sure that, again, as you conduct a large-scale event, that you have the right people at the table making sure that things are being executed,” Holzman said.

Somewhere in that word salad, it sounds as if Holzman was saying the women’s tournament has, until now, been run one step above a country jamboree and it’s going to take time to ramp it up so it can be the event it should be. Which shows how entrenched the indifference is.

“Hmm. No,” VanDerveer said last weekend, when asked if she’s seen “substantive changes” in this year’s tournament.

“I really think to really make changes, we have to have similar (revenue) unit structure,” VanDerveer added. “The bottom line is it's a television package and it's a unit structure. When that happens, then we'll know that it's serious.”

Until then, all of this is glorified window dressing. Nothing more.

Follow Paste BN Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.