"I really would have loved to have done what I normally do my last 12 minutes before a game instead of walking around out there, trying to see if the floor's screwed up," North Carolina State coach Wes Moore said Saturday before his team's tournament game against Texas. But his sport exists in the NCAA, which continually finds new ways to demonstrate it doesn't care about women's basketball, two columnists write. This time, the proof was in the sloppily drawn 3-point lines that were not the same distance from the basket on both ends of the court at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. Other times, it's been something else, Sally Jenkins writes in the Washington Post.
"I have a lot of colleagues who would say, 'Only in women's basketball,'" Texas Coach Vic Schaefer said after the game. Jenkins and the Athletic's Grace Raynor don't argue that. Jenkins gives examples and points out that a review documented the second-class treatment the NCAA gives women's basketball. "It's long past time for the NCAA to take some self-accountability and fix the disregarded, underfunded system that creates such amateur hour errors around an event that is becoming one of its most valuable and prestigious," Jenkins writes.
The screwups aren't all the fault of the NCAA, Raynor says. But still, there have been four embarrassments since first-round play began March 22, including racial taunts reportedly inflicted on Utah's team. Raynor writes: "What happened Sunday in Portland was not only a shame but an unacceptable stain on the NCAA, which just can't seem to get the women's tournament right after so much goodwill has been put in after the embarrassing exposure of inequalities versus the men's tournament" that the 2021 review brought to light. Jenkins' column can be found here, and Raynor's here. (More NCAA women's basketball stories.)
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