UCLA Women's Basketball Draws Attention to Gender Inequity Amid WNIT Run
In March of 2021, Oregon forward Sedona Prince went viral for highlighting the disparity in the bubble training facilities for the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.
People across the country were drawn to Prince's video, which showed the lack of space, equipment and gifts given to the female athletes compared to their male counterparts. It even caught the attention of the NCAA itself, and several meetings and hearings were held in the offseason before institutional changes were announced later in the year.
The swag bags were evened out in 2022, and the women's tournament was allowed to use March Madness branding for the first time ever. While broadcast rights and broader discussions of perception remain topics of debate on the gender inequity front, it was certainly a start.
But on the NIT level, the gaps remain unaddressed.
UCLA women's basketball has made it all the way to the WNIT semifinals, where they will face off against South Dakota State on Thursday night. The game is being played in Brookings, South Dakota, with a sold-out crowd expected to attend, but the building hype around the tournament is apparently not enough to raise it to the level of the men's NIT in a financial or logistical sense.
While schools are paid to have their men's teams participate in the NIT, it's the opposite for the WNIT.
The men's tournament is owned and operated by the NCAA, with schools typically chartering flights for their teams to travel across the country through the semifinals and finals that take place at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The women's tournament, meanwhile, is owned and operated by Triple Crown Sports, a for-profit company that charges schools for competing, and is played on campuses from start to finish.
Coach Cori Close said she doesn't blame Triple Crown Sports for attempting to make money as an independent entity, but that the structure still puts women's sports at a certain disadvantage.
"I feel really grateful for our athletic department – this is a cost, to play in this tournament," Close said. "It is an inequitable experience."
Close likened the format of the WNIT to six one-game tournaments, with schools having to bid each round on hosting the next contest.
Part of that inequitable experience goes beyond the money changing hands, also impacting the coaches, players and staff members bouncing around from arena to arena throughout March.
Since schools have to pay to have their teams participate in each game, it inevitably becomes more difficult financially and logistically to book charter flights rather than commercial. The Bruins had a 13-hour travel day to get to Corvallis for the quarterfinals last weekend, and that was after going to Laramie, Wyoming, for the Round of 16 only a few days earlier.
UCLA had to split into three groups and take a total of five flights to get to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Tuesday before finally taking the one-hour drive to snowy Brookings together and arriving at 1:30 a.m.
Guards Charisma Osborne, Camryn Brown, Dominique Onu and Kiara Jefferson have all addressed the struggles in press conferences and on social media throughout the past week, sometimes doing so unprompted or completely proactively. Those actions are largely in line with how some of the veterans have made their voices heard over the past two years, with their More Than a Dream podcast highlighting their efforts in social justice since 2020.
The players have faced opposition on Twitter from users who advised them to stick to sports and stop complaining, but Osborne said she values her platform too much to stay silent on issues that impact her teammates past, present and future.
"Me starting (More Than a Dream) with Lauryn (Miller) and Cam and Michaela (Onyenwere) last year has really just opened my eyes a little bit, just speaking up about things that I'm super passionate about," Osborne said. "Just talking with the team, I think it's important to just bring awareness ... so that people in the future can have better opportunities than what we have right now."
Osborne said assistant coach Tasha Brown told the whole team that they should try and have as much fun as possible despite the imbalance of treatment they're facing, and Close said she, too, has had to try and balance those two sides of the postseason run.
"I want to be careful about that, because on the one hand, I want that to change," Close said. "Even though it doesn't affect our group, it has a chance to affect change for future generations. At the same time, this is what we earned. We're not gonna make any excuses, we're gonna lean into the hard and we're gonna go have a great experience."
Regardless of how they got there – by beating UC Irvine, Air Force, Wyoming and Oregon State and traveling to Las Vegas, Laramie, Corvallis and Brookings over the past month – UCLA does have a game to play Thursday night.
The first goal is to survive and advance, moving on to a potential WNIT championship game against either Seton Hall or Middle Tennessee. But on top of that is a goal for the players and coaches alike to achieve change and advance women's sports beyond the roadblocks they still face to this day.
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