50 Years Of Investment Are Paying Off For NCAA Women’s Basketball

The 2023 women’s March Madness tournament set records for attendance and tv viewership. According to Forbes contributor Brad Adgate, one of the biggest tournament upsets was the growth of viewership for the women’s tournament and the decline in viewership of the men’s. The women’s championship game doubled last year’s audience, while the men’s game set a record low.

The women’s final game featured two of the top players in the country in LSU’s Angel Reese and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark. There were two veteran women coaches. LSU’s Kim Mulkey was in only her second year at the helm of a program that won nine games in the season before she arrived, although she had already won national titles at Baylor. Lisa Bluder has been coach at Iowa since 2000 and has led the Hawkeyes to two consecutive Big Ten tournament titles.

The final itself was a display of powerful, talented women playing amazing basketball. Shots fell from three feet outside the arc. Forwards muscled in to score under the basket. LSU went up by 21 point, and Iowa battled back. Reese and Clark got into early foul trouble and ended up on the bench for significant minutes. The subs, especially those off the LSU bench, made the most of their minutes, playing like stars themselves.

In earlier games, Clark had taunted and trash-talked, including a dismissive wave to a Louisville shooter and a “You can’t see me” motion. In the final, Reese eventually followed Clark around the court briefly making the same motion and pointing to her finger which would soon wear a championship ring.

Network commentators and social media posters went wild, many using derogatory and racially coded language about Reese and others defending the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player. Whether or not one supports trash talk and taunting, people were talking—on TV, on Twitter, at home, and in the workplace about college women’s basketball. And Angel Reese’s NIL (name, image, and likeness) value shot up, according to Forbes.

Women’s basketball had finally arrived. On the men’s side, UConn won its fifth title, but it was the women’s tournament people were talking about.

How did we get here?

For those who’ve tuned in late to women’s basketball, it’s been a long haul that started with feminist activism in the early 1970s to create equity in education for girls and women.

Bernice Sandler, who championed Title IX with Congress, told me years ago that the people working on the legislation hadn’t really considered sports. They thought women might get a few more events at field day. The text of Title IX reads, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

We celebrated Title IX’s 50th anniversary last year, and in 50 years that single piece of legislation has revolutionized women’s sports.

Before Title IX, schools invested very little money, time, or effort into girls’ and women’s sports. Based on assumptions about women’s bodies and physical abilities, the men who ran sports at most institutions didn’t consider women to be real athletes and didn’t expect that people wanted to watch women compete. In many instances, people didn’t even want women to compete.

Title IX, however, required schools to transform their investments in girls’ and women’s sports. No longer could universities expend only two percent of the athletic budget on women. Rather, schools had to create slots for women to play that were proportional to their enrollment in the school and fund them equitably.

Many people argued that girls and women didn’t want to play sports. Not surprisingly, girls and women proved them wrong. In the early 1970s, fewer than 30,000 women competed in college sports. Now more than 200,000 participate. Schools also had to invest equitably in scholarships, coaches, facilities, equipment, trainers, transportation, uniforms, food, and other opportunities.

The NCAA formed in the early 1900s, but it concerned itself only with men’s sports. In 1971, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was founded to govern women’s sports. The AIAW focused more on education and academic progress than winning at all costs, even as it offered women opportunities for athletic competition.

With the passage of Title IX, the NCAA felt its dominance threatened, and a struggle with the AIAW ensued. The NCAA decided to offer competing championship tournaments for women that included paid expenses, financial aid for athletes, and television coverage. The AIAW didn’t have the resources to compete and so closed shop in 1982. The first NCAA women’s basketball championship tournament took place that year.

When institutions didn’t meet Title IX’s requirements, the legislation also gave athletes a tool to force compliance. At my own institution, the 1979 softball team used Title IX to prevent the university from dropping softball only a year after the team had finished fourth in the national tournament. Last season’s team, coached by softball Olympic gold medalist Laura Berg, finished ranked number eight nationally.

As the women’s movement began to have impact on society and in sport, gender norms for women athletes started to expand. While society still valued traditional femininity, the expectation that women have small, thin bodies started to give way to possibilities for strong, muscular, big, and fast bodies. Access to trainers, nutritionists, and workout facilities let women athletes take advantage of this societal shift.

Fans also started to notice. While women’s basketball had an audience in the 1970s and 80s, the sport started to attract significantly more national interest with Coach Pat Summitt’s success at Tennessee and the Lady Vols’ rivalry with UConn in the late 90s and early 2000s.

For a while in the 2010’s UConn seemed invincible. Then new generations of women who had experienced the benefits of Title IX for their entire lives started to play college ball in significant numbers. Suddenly, other national contenders became part of the conversation—South Carolina, Baylor, Stanford, Notre Dame, Mississippi State, Louisville, and now Iowa and LSU. Even my own Oregon State Beavers went to the Final Four in 2016, losing to UConn in the semifinal game.

These successes were buoyed by women’s success in other athletic arenas. The US Women’s National soccer team became beloved and more popular than the men’s team with its World Cup victories. The USWNT’s struggle for pay equity also garnered national attention and created awareness of gender discrimination in sports.

The Olympics showcased dominant US women’s basketball and softball teams as well. The WNBA offered a way for top college players to continue professionally. Venus Williams continued Billie Jean King’s fight for pay equity in tennis, and Serena Williams showed just how powerful and successful women athletes can be.

Sports fans began to see the entertainment value of women’s sports. NIL has also provided a way for fans to interact more directly with athletes, and more and more women athletes are drawing followings on social media. Reese’s Instagram and Tik Tok accounts exploded with new followers after the tournament.

Because women’s basketball has been undervalued, it is part of a larger media package that includes most other college sports championships and is held exclusively by ESPN. After this year’s success, however, the president of the NCAA has hinted that women’s basketball may be separated from the current media package when the association’s contract with ESPN expires in 2024.

Without Title IX, I doubt any of this would have happened. Women might still be hoping for a few more games on field day. Now, instead, NCAA women’s basketball is a shining example of the success women can have when they are given the opportunity. Many of us fans are already anticipating next season, and I sure hope Iowa and LSU are making plans to play again. That would be good for sports, good for entertainment, and good for business.