Women’s Basketball Seeking Parity, but Is Slow in Achieving It

Although the men’s and women’s Final Fours will be taking place a mere 32 miles apart, the gap that separates the money and interest the two sports generate is much wider.

Consider this: the University of Maryland, participating in this weekend’s women’s Final Four, will take home about $30,000. But the Maryland athletic department will earn an estimated $1.3 million from the success of the Atlantic Coast Conference men’s teams, even though the Terrapin men made it no further than the second round of the ACC tournament and had a losing season.

The biggest reason for the disparity is that the women’s tournament has very little television coverage. Every season, while ESPN and CBS saturate the airwaves with the men’s tournament, the women work with a near-zero budget and near-zero publicity.

But the sport is making progress.

While the NCAA men’s tournament has become a well-established tradition, the women will be completing their eighth NCAA tournament Sunday, and there’s evidence it may finally be finding an audience of its own. This season, ESPN televised all four women’s regional finals, and will also broadcast Friday’s national semifinals before CBS grabs the finals.

There’s more: for the first time ever, Tricia Bork, the NCAA’s assistant executive director for championships, said five foreign credentials have been issued for women’s Final Four coverage. And at Maryland, Coach Chris Weller said season-ticket holders last season numbered 100, compared to 400 this season. “The one thing that tells me a tremendous amount are the studies in team attendance,” Bork said. “They’ve (women) made such significant gains when you compare it to men’s teams 25 years ago. They’ve made these kind of strides in a much faster time.”

But there’s a long way still to go just to reach the financial level of success enjoyed by the bottom-rung teams in the men’s NCAA tournament.

For example, among the men, Louisiana Tech, a team from an obscure conference (American South) without an automatic bid, just getting into the field and advancing to the round of 32 drew a $500,000 paycheck. The same went for Middle Tennessee State and Siena, other small schools that pulled first-round upsets. Then again, the paycheck for losing in the first round wasn’t so bad either: about $250,000.

On the other side of the coin, the remaining men’s teams -- Duke, Seton Hall, Michigan and Illinois -- will earn around $1.25 million for advancing to the Final Four. The participating school takes 70 percent of that, then divides the other 30 percent with the other schools in its conference.

In last year’s NCAA men’s tournament, teams earned these amounts depending on which round they advanced to: first round, $239,635; second round, $479,269; regional semifinals, $718,904; regional finals, $958,539; and Final Four, $1,198,173.

The breakdown for the 1988 women’s basketball tournament: first or second round, $7,673; regional semifinals or finals, $23,018; Final Four, $30,692.

So if a school sent teams to both the men’s and women’s tournaments, and the men lost in the first round while the women won the national championship, the men’s team would still earn nearly eight times as much money. The only advantage the women enjoy is that they do not have to split their earnings with the rest of their conference.

The lack of regular-season and early-round NCAA television exposure presents such a financial problem for the women that they must often play tournament games on someone’s home court. The need for people in the stands means the NCAA committee must be selective about sites, a situation similar to that of the men’s National Invitation Tournament. Many feel this gives an unfair advantage to schools that draw well -- Auburn, Louisiana Tech, Texas and Tennessee. In three of the four regional finals this season, a team played on its home court.

“At some point, I hope that women’s basketball can get to the point where they don’t have to (play home games in the NCAA tournament),” Weller said. “But, where it is today, it has to be done.”

Should women’s television exposure continue to grow and feed money into the sport, it may help abolish home-court NCAA games, not to mention bring exposure to the successful schools.

“I think the national TV exposure and beating Indiana was the best thing that could have happened to Richmond basketball,” said Dick Tarrant, who coached the Spiders to one of the biggest upsets of last year’s men’s tournament. “It’s helped attract better players -- I don’t know if we’ll get all of them or not, but they’re definitely more attracted to us.”

Richmond provided a good example last season of the increasing quality of men’s basketball at smaller schools, and now, it’s becoming clear that the NCAA may be more cognizant of them. Louisiana Tech, for example, wasn’t sure if it would get invited to the NCAA field despite a 22-8 record that detractors said was built up against weak teams. When the pairings came out, the Bulldogs had not only made the field but were given a No. 9 seed. The school then legitimized that seed with an 83-74 first-round win over No. 8 seed La Salle.

This small-school recognition has not yet occurred on the women’s side, where upsets are as rare as sellout crowds. In this year’s tournament, only one of the 16 first-round winners -- UNLV -- was able to win again in the second round, where they faced teams that had earned byes. In this weekend’s Final Four, all of the participants were the top-seeded teams in their regions. On the men’s side, Illinois was the only top seed making the Final Four.