March Madness has come to an end with no shortage of upsets and game winners. For mens’, Villanova stomped on Michigan in the national championship winning by 17 points. This gave Villanova its second championship in three years. The Wildcats did it behind the 31 points from Donte DiVincenzo and Michigan only shooting 13 percent from behind the arc.
The Men’s NCAA tournament made March an exciting time for sports fans everywhere, but these fans are missing out on the other half of the madness: women’s basketball.
“The truth is that a large segment of the sports-consuming public doesn’t care about women’s sports,” Jason Lisk, the managing editor of The Big Lead wrote. “I would gladly write a women’s bracketology column like I do for the men’s tournament if I thought anyone would read it.”
The women’s final four was easily more exciting than the men’s, yet most coverage of the tournament was focused on the men’s side. Two overtimes, one game winning shot, and one overall number one seed losing their first game all season. With arguments of having all number one teams in the final four, some believed it would create boring games. This was proved wrong and those games will go down as the best college basketball final four for women.
The men’s final four consisted of a 12 point game with Loyola Chicago and Michigan, and the Kansas and Villanova game was a 16 point game.
“If you watched any of the Women’s Final Four, you saw rules of the game that Men’s college basketball should adopt,” NCAA analyst Jay Bilas commented. “Quarters, team foul reset, advance the ball in the last minute. The women’s game is better administered, and the men’s should follow suit.”
In the championship with Notre Dame playing Mississippi State, the game came down to the wire. The fighting Irish were trailing in the first half 30-17 but came back putting more pressure on the Bulldogs best players, Teaira McCowan and Victoria Vivians. McCowan brought a presence to the paint being a 6-7 center with a touch around the rim.
The MVP, Arike Ogunbowale, brought a new spark and excitement to the tournament. “Big time shot Arike! We are a UCONN women’s basketball family but we love seeing great players making great plays,” Kobe Bryant tweeted after Notre Dame took down the University of Connecticut. Ogunbowale hit a buzzer-beater to take down UCONN and then followed up and hit a game-winner to become national champions.
“The bottom line is you cannot, for a single second, argue that representation in reporting doesn’t matter. Or the way we talk about and cover women’s sports doesn’t affect public perception and interest,” Charlotte Wilder wrote in a section about sports coverage. “Of course it does. And it falls to everyone, including fathers of daughters, to do something about it.”
On average, each men’s game gets an audience around 5.6 million people and the women’s receives around 3.8 million people. There is a drastic gap between the two that needs to be changed. “This year has been a very exciting NCAA tournament for the women’s side with the two game winning shots,” Pleasant Valley senior Kira Arthofer commented.
Do most people tend to prefer men’s basketball because of the speed and strength of the players or simply because they can do things like throw down a dunk? Women’s games measure up to men’s when it comes to the speed of the game of the physicality. If people base what they watch because a man can dunk, then they are missing out on more than they will understand.
“Women’s basketball is growing in a positive direction each and every year. It’s not just one or two dominate teams, there are countless teams competing at a high level,” Pleasant Valley Girls basketball head coach Jennifer Goetz stated. “The quality of women’s college basketball is the best it has ever been. True basketball fans value and respect the women’s game. Hopefully some day the game of basketball won’t be ‘men’s basketball’ and ‘women’s basketball’ it will just be basketball.”
