NCAA’s Wake Up Call: A Reckoning on Gender Inequity in Basketball

ESPN Daily

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4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Shocking upsets. Buzzer beaters. Cinderella stories. This year’s Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament has been overflowing with drama and thrills. But last March, Oregon’s Sedona Prince posted a TikTok revealing the drastic differences between the women’s and men’s college basketball weight rooms during the NCAA tournament. After the video went viral, and reports of other disparities circulated, the NCAA was forced to apologize, and promised to review and remedy inequities throughout the game. So as the Women’s Final Four tips off tonight, ESPN’s Dan Murphy explains how much progress has been made in the past year, and how the business of women’s college basketball is still limited, economically, in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of their game itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dan Murphy, you've been reporting on the fallout from what has been called the shot heard around the
0:05.2	world in women's college basketball. And in this case, the shot, to be clear, is more metaphorical.
0:12.8	So what exactly happened here? So last year when we were still in our COVID bubble version of the NCAA tournament, the men showed up in Indianapolis, the women were in San Antonio.
0:26.8	And as soon as the women arrived on site, some buzz started picking up about the lackluster facilities and lackluster other amenities for them.
0:35.9	Dan Murphy is a writer for ESPN who covers the business of college sports.
0:41.1	And so Oregon, which was a pretty talented team and one of their top players,
0:45.7	Sedona Prince, show up and get a look at the practice facility.
0:50.4	And they see what was being called a weight room, which was in fact maybe a few dumbbells and a half a dozen yoga mats in this huge cavernous empty space.
1:00.5	If someone had knocked over one of these dumbbells, it would have echoed off the walls for minutes because of how much empty space there was.
1:08.7	So Sedona is taking in this echoing cavern that is pathetic, objectively, and what is her next move from there?
1:16.9	So Sedona Prince isn't just a really good basketball player. She's also a huge social media influencer. She's got something like 3 million followers on TikTok.
1:24.0	So what is a day in the life like for a D1 athlete in the long of season? I'm going to show you
1:27.9	guys. First, wake up. So she fires up a video showing some of the differences between what's
1:32.9	going on in San Antonio and what the men have in Indianapolis. I got something to show y'all. So for the
1:38.1	NCAA March Madness, the biggest tournament in college basketball for women. This is our weight room. Let me show you all the men's weight room.
1:46.0	Yeah, I'm looking at this now, Dan, and it's like the Rock's basement, what the men have.
1:50.0	It's like every single weight machine imaginable, even some seemingly that haven't been like
1:54.0	available to the general public yet.
1:56.0	Yeah, it's what you'd imagine that a big-time tournament would look like for a bunch of
2:00.0	top-notch athletes.
2:01.6	If you aren't upset about this problem, then you're a part of it.
2:03.6	This video immediately blows up.
	...

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