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Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 It's not unfinished business any longer. South Carolina has captured its second national championship.
Speaker 1 00:00:09 That's the sound of March madness, the South Carolina game Cox beat the university of Connecticut Huskies in this year's NCAA tournament. There's is the first official women's March madness win
Speaker 0 00:00:21 Tears of triumph in 2022.
Speaker 1 00:00:25 So, okay. For those who didn't know, 2022 is the first year that both the men's and women's NCAA tournaments received March madness. Branding with the branding comes glory, fame and equity more on that later as a woman interested in sports, this too was my first year of paying any attention to March madness. I like basketball, but March madness in the past just didn't interest me, but the tournaments captured the public's attention in a new way. Last year,
Speaker 2 00:00:55 I got something to show y'all. So for the NCAA, March madness, the biggest tournament in college basketball
Speaker 1 00:01:00 For women on March 18th, 2021 Sedona prince posted a video on TikTok. Prince is a for, for the university of Oregon's women's basketball team. They were in San Antonio for the NCAA tournament. When prince noticed something not quite right,
Speaker 2 00:01:15 This is our weight room. Let me show you all the men's weight room.
Speaker 1 00:01:18 Prince shows a small tower of dumbbells at the women's facilities. Then she shows the men's large, fully equipped weight room.
Speaker 2 00:01:25 Now in pictures of our weight room got released versus the men's. The NCAA came out with a statement saying that it wasn't money. It was space. That was a problem. Let me show y'all something else. Here's our practice court, right? And then here's that weight room. And then here's all this extra space. If you already of about this problem, then you're a part of it.
Speaker 1 00:01:44 Princess video went viral, but the weight room was just part of it. More and more inequities began showing up on social media. The women received worse food gifts, even COVID testing access than the men. The New York times wrote this year. Quote, the NCAA has treated the women's game as an afterthought and it's participants as second class citizens compared with the men, The NCAA commissioned an external report to investigate gender inequity. The Kaplan report, as it was called, found that the NCAA indeed prioritized the men's tournament over the women's. That was the root problem. The Kaplan report also found that the NCAA was limiting the growth of women's basketball. They were undervaluing women's games. The report estimated that the women's tournament could have a market value of up to 112 million by 2025. And they prescribed changes in marketing scheduling. And more. Now this is all old news, which why I wanted to take a look at this year's women's tournament. Sure. Things changed. But I wanted to know if fans thought things seemed better. This was, if you didn't know, the first year that women received the March madness branding for their tournament, really, um, that's Steven Wilke, a sophomore studying violin, performance, economics and Spanish. He watched many of the men's games and some of the women's games this year when asked about the changes he says, he thinks they've been effective.
Speaker 3 00:03:13 This was the first year actually made a bracket for the women's tournaments because the main reason for that is because in high school I would make 25 men's brackets. And so I was just sick of makings, but I've used the same app. I, I don't remember if it was like this last year, but now it's, it's really quite easy to switch between the men's and the women's kind of like bracket maker on the app, finding all the information about the games and the scores and when they are and all that stuff.
Speaker 1 00:03:43 Aside from bracket making Wilke also said that it was easier to find stats about the women's games on social media this year, people
Speaker 3 00:03:50 On Twitter generally support women's and you know, kind of alternative, uh, just all the different sports. And if something is going on that people are talking about, you know, it'll show up on
Speaker 1 00:04:02 Twitter. I asked Wilkey the big general question. Why do you think people prioritize the men's games over the women's games? Wilkey thinks it's complicated, but it has some to do with upsets
Speaker 3 00:04:12 Kind of this stereotype that a lot of people have is that, uh, the women's tournament for March Menist is a lot more, not straight for forward, but in a sense they're less upsets. You can expect, like at least two or three, one seats to get to the final four, just because they're so consistently good
Speaker 1 00:04:29 Meaning a solid run from a solid team is less interesting to watch than a crazy upset or a Cinderella story. Makes sense. Wilkie also talked about scheduling, being a potential issue.
Speaker 3 00:04:40 I wonder if it's such a bad thing to have men's and women's game happening at the same time. If people are in the mood to kind of like watch basketball and they can just kind of channel flip between the men and women's, then that might have a positive effect on viewership. That's something that I'd be interested in seeing,
Speaker 4 00:04:57 Like I thought both tournaments were kind of equally interesting to us here, just cuz like I guess maybe some people found the men's a little underwhelming other than like the St Peter's run. And then the women's was more like shocking in terms of what Creighton was able to do.
Speaker 1 00:05:12 That's our Mon Johnny, a sophomore studying social policy and American studies. He followed the men's tournament closely and watched a fair amount of the women's games. Uh, Johnny shared some of Wiki's thoughts on why the tournament is under prioritized.
Speaker 4 00:05:26 I don't think that there's a good explanation for it. I think it's like it has to do with companies trying to like conform to demand and the demand is so much higher for one than the other. And that's just like unfortunate. I think like it is just people being a little bit like sex and just caring more about like men or like male athletes and men's games. But at the same time, it is the like coverage of like, oh, the upsets are happening here.
Speaker 1 00:05:52 Uh, Johnny also talked about the women's brackets being more top heavy with less upsets. He thinks increased coverage could help with viewership, but it'll take a while to get lots of people to
Speaker 4 00:06:02 Care. What makes sports fun is having friends to talk to about it. If there's more coverage than obviously like people might be more interested. That's like how people know the names of Caitlin Clark and Paige Beckers and Ali, Boston, whoever else. But then at the same time, I don't know if that's ever gonna happen.
Speaker 1 00:06:19 I approached Wilkie and a Johnny for interviews since they were the only two people I knew who expressed an interest in women's basketball. I badly wanted to interview a female sports fan for this story. I reached out to the sports desk at the daily Northwestern, N w N R sports. I sent messages in the Willard group chat and the end higher Northwestern class of 2024 group chat. I even reached out to individual people. No one got back to me. Now that could mean that people didn't see the message or they did see, but didn't wanna talk or they just forgot to respond. But I find it a little shocking that I couldn't scrounge up one female basketball fan to about March madness. Maybe that too is because of the limited visibility of women's basketball.
Speaker 2 00:07:03 I got something to show y'all a whole year since that video was posted and look who we got the first time the women's tournament has ever been branded as March madness. Let's go, baby. We won. We won.
Speaker 1 00:07:15 I guess we'll check back in next year for w and your news. I'm Allison RO.
