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Hoopsters’ Uniforms on the Loose

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

When collegiate women from Duke, Georgia, Purdue and Louisiana Tech hit the court for the NCAA Final Four tonight in San Jose, the cut of their uniforms probably won’t be the first thing on their minds. But television viewers watching the lineup of well-sculpted bodies in baggy shorts can’t help but notice basketball wear is not the most flattering. These athletes have thighs to die for, yet they camouflage them in the folds and pleats of oversized clothing. Contrast this to the sleek, streamlined looks of volleyball players, gymnasts, speed skaters and track stars, and one wonders why basketball’s women choose to look so frumpy. Is there any style in this March Madness?

“I love our uniforms. I wouldn’t change a thing,” says Erica Gomez. The UCLA point guard and her team narrowly missed the chance to go to the Final Four when they were beaten by Louisiana Tech on Monday.

The older generation may be used to the small shorts and big hair of the Magic Johnson and Larry Bird era, but for today’s athletes, baggy shorts are better. The trend toward longer, looser-fitting shorts is widely acknowledged to have started with Michael Jordan during his days with the Chicago Bulls. The look dribbled down to the college level in the early 1990s, when Michigan Fab Five Freshmen took their shorts to new lengths and women players followed suit.

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Champion Products calls the trend “upsizing.” The Winston-Salem, N.C.-based company supplies uniforms for several NBA, WNBA and NCAA teams. “NCAA uniforms are designed from women-specific patterns. Champion sends uniforms cut to a player’s specifications, but the player upsizes to get “the oversized look,” says spokeswoman Nicole Blake.

The style doesn’t score points with Ann Meyers Drysdale, the first woman to earn a scholarship to play UCLA basketball from 1975 to 1978 and now an ESPN women’s basketball commentator. “I would like to see a cleaner look on college players. But it’s a generational thing. When I played basketball in college, we liked our short shorts. Women today like them baggy.” (When Drysdale played college basketball, there was no such thing as a sports bra. Ouch!)

Today’s players get away with wearing oversized uniforms because NCAA regulations do not address the issue. “Our regulations deal mostly with the size of letters and logos on jerseys. The length of shorts follows popular trends,” according to NCAA spokesman Wally Renfro. Both the NBA and WNBA have rules that a player’s shorts must be an inch above the knee.

L.A. Sparks center and Wilhelmina fashion model Lisa Leslie believes college women prefer the loose look because of their age and body image. “In college I wore T-shirts under my basketball uniform, but now I could never wear a shirt while playing. It shows where you are with your body and how young you are.”

USC center Adrain Williams agrees. “Many players are self-conscious about their bodies. A lot of times we have slim frames and we want to hide our skinniness. I used to run track and even then I wore my basketball shorts.”

Although women’s basketball shorts are indisputably baggy, some teams are following the WNBA’s lead, wearing designs with shorter and more tapered legs. This more form-fitting style was developed for the women’s NBA league when it was born in 1997. “We looked at the performance of uniforms in women’s college games and noticed a problem with fit. It looked like the uniforms were fit for men and it made for sloppy presentation,” explains Tom O’Grady, vice president and creative director of NBA Entertainment, who was instrumental in creating uniforms for the WNBA. “We noticed women’s shorts in college games were so long and baggy, they seemed to get in the way when players were dribbling.”

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Some alternatives to the college shorts considered by WNBA included unitards similar to the ones worn by the 1996 Australian Olympic team, Skorts and even dresses. USC’s Williams cringes. “I could not see playing basketball in those.” Luckily, the sketches never got off the drawing board. “The women players made it very clear they wanted a uniform with the same style as the men. They wanted to be taken seriously as athletes,” O’Grady says.

What won out for the WNBA was a jersey with a narrower torso and greater shoulder coverage than the men’s NBA style, and trunks slightly wider at the hip with a shorter inseam and a tapered leg. These subtle changes in cut are being reflected in the silhouettes of some college uniforms. “We have worked with Nike (the school’s supplier) to give the women’s jerseys and shorts a more tapered effect, and at fixing the neck lines, armholes and waist to fit the feminine physique. Women want to have their own style,” says USC head coach Chris Gobrecht.

Some teams are asserting their individual styles in other ways. Louisiana Tech has opted for a V-neck short-sleeve jersey, instead of the typical sleeveless look. Players are getting more daring too.

Now that women have carved out a place for themselves in the paint, there is not as much pressure to look like the boys, says UCLA’s Gomez. “Most women players want to look feminine on the court because of the masculine stereotype of basketball. You even see some wearing makeup and nail polish.” Just don’t ask them to wear tight shorts.

E-mail booth.moore@latimes.com.

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