In Their Court: The Experiment
NBC News
Episode 3: The Experiment
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Hello. I'm Bob Costas to be joined in a moment by Dick Enberg, for the athletes who have come to the American South and many well prepared for Hotlanta. The test approaches. The hour is finally here.
IBTIHAJ MUHAMMAD: We're back at the ‘96 Olympics. It's August in the ATL and the women of Team USA are going head to head with Brazil in a gold medal game.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Bolton with the deflection and you show the numbers there. 7:15 remaining here on the first half. A sold-out Georgia dome, the gold medal game for women's basketball, United States leading Brazil by 9. This is the game everyone has waited for, two undefeated teams, the United States against the reigning world champion team, Brazil. And --
MUHAMMAD: The U.S. women's team is taking no prisoners. And the crowd is on the edge of their seats.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Just over four minutes gone by, all team shooting well, United States absolutely on fire.
MUHAMMAD: But today, our attention isn't on the players. We're focused on someone sitting on the sidelines in a crisp white button-up and high-waisted chinos. It's USA Coach Tara VanDerveer. She's watching like a hawk as her team settles into the game.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: 43-year-old Tara VanDerveer took a leave of absence at Stanford University and she has guided this team to 59 straight wins.
MUHAMMAD: All Tara has done in the months leading up to this is eat, sleep and breathe Olympic training. She's traveled the world with her team preparing for this game. In fact, she's been preparing for this moment her entire life.
TARA VANDERVEER: My earliest memories of playing basketball are in the third grade. And pretty much from that time on, I've been hooked. I am a hoop head. I'm a basketball junkie, just crazy about this sport. I was always a student of the game from a very early age.
MUHAMMAD: Now, decades later, she's competing for Olympic gold.
VANDERVEER: Where I went to school, the boys that were the best basketball players on the varsity teams wrote in my yearbook, you know, “You'll go to the Olympics someday,” but they didn't have the Olympics for women's basketball at that time. But I did.
MUHAMMAD: Tara's lifelong analysis of the game had come full circle. She'd made good on a childhood dream that had seemed impossible just a few decades earlier.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Tara VanDerveer, who’s the coach at World Championships Team --
MUHAMMAD: And one of the big reasons for her and Team USA’s success, the NCAA. It had been 15 years since the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, had taken over women's collegiate sports. The organization's fingerprints, they were all over this Olympic basketball game. Tara VanDerveer had made her career as the head coach at Stanford, winning two NCAA championships before taking a break from college ball to coach Team USA. And her team of players --
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Our starting lineups for the United States, Sheryl Swoopes. Katrina McClain, Lisa Leslie, Teresa Edwards and Ruthie Bolton, the players --
MUHAMMAD: Of the top players on the women's team, six were NCAA champions. Five more have made it to the NCAA final four. And then there's Lisa Leslie, who was such a standout performer in college. There's an annual NCAA award named after her. Like I said, the NCAA’s imprint was all over this game.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: It was over, the United States in complete control here on the second half. 97-69, just under four minutes remaining, USA has led by as many as 31 in a game that they only lead by 11 at halftime.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Well, they certainly have --
MUHAMMAD: From this vantage point, it really looked like the NCAA’s play to enter women's sports had worked. Women's basketball seemed to be thriving. In fact, things were going so well. Some people with deep pockets started to wonder, could this sport be even more?
VANDERVEER: Their competition and what they were trying to achieve, it's bigger than the gold medal. We're talking about the very foundation of professional basketball in the United States for women.
MUHAMMAD: I'm Ibtihaj Muhammad and this is “In Their Court,” a series about 50 years of Title IX told through the rich history of women's basketball. Today, we dive into the after shots of the NCAA’s takeover of women's sports.
VAL ACKERMAN: My earliest memories of star female athletes probably kicked in with the ‘72 Olympics, the great Olga Korbut. She was the bomb.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: The Soviet Union's women gymnastic team featuring 17-year-old Olga Korbut, who won three gold medals at the Olympics last year.
ACKERMAN: And then that carried over to the great Nadia Comaneci, who was at the next Olympics.
MUHAMMAD: The voice you're hearing is Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman. Today, Val helps cultivate some of the most promising young athletes in the country. But even as a young girl, she knew the power of giving the best female athletes in the world to stage.
ACKERMAN: I remember being so inspired by that, and in the school yard or front yard, or whatever, trying to be a gymnast sort of imitated walking on the balance beam and doing walkovers and back bends. And you know, I remember being so inspired by the figure skaters at that time. Dorothy Hamill, she had a great haircut.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: Dorothy was just 19-years-old when she took home the gold in the 1976 Winter Olympics, known for her moves on the ice, and of course, that bob hairstyle we all wanted. Dorothy quickly became America's sweetheart.
ACKERMAN: And then, of course, the great Billie Jean King, that was headline news. Being able to watch Billie Jean play Bobby Riggs in the battle of the sexes, that was captivating and amazing.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: In 1973, 90 million people gathered around their televisions to watch one of the biggest spectacles ever, the highly publicized matchup between women's tennis star Billie Jean King and men's tennis great Bobby Riggs. Now --
ACKERMAN: It was heroes-sheroes, I guess we call them. To young girls like me, because why you saw them on television, they were the most famous women's athletes among them at that time and that was victory, the ultimate empowerment moment.
MUHAMMAD: Val's obsession with the Olympics will come full circle in two decades, when in 1996, she found herself working for the NBA alongside legendary Commissioner David Stern. Her job, to keep a close eye on the progress of the USA women's basketball team. And why?
ACKERMAN: Because we were in the back room, trying to figure out if, you know, if there should be a WNBA that might launch coming out of the hopefully successful Atlanta games.
MUHAMMAD: It turns out the ‘96 team success was actually a test to see if women's basketball could sustain a professional league. Behind the scenes, Team USA was being scrutinized and appraised, because despite how far these players had come, there was still no stable professional league for women, no place for them to go after their college careers.
Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, there were brief moments when women's professional leagues would pop up. But none of those leagues survived. That is until 1996.
ACKERMAN: The WNBA was directly born out of the success of the USA Basketball Women's Olympic Team that played in Atlanta in ‘96. That team was, in turn, the culmination of a year-long tour that started out in the fall of ‘95. That was co-managed, in part, by USA Basketball and by the NBA.
MUHAMMAD: USA Basketball replugged these bright young women's players with NCAA Division 1 pedigrees, and prepare them for a run at Olympic gold. Their performance would decide if women could have a professional league.
ACKERMAN: We sort of had the idea that in order to guarantee success, we needed to put a team together many months out, to make sure that they had time to gel, to train together. The USA women had not won the gold medal in the Barcelona Games ’92, had not won the gold medal in the 1994 FIBA World Championship. And this team was supposed to win. We truly had the best players in the world. But there was something going wrong.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: I wonder if the United States has gotten that wake-up call after what the unified team did to them two days ago.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: But they should be getting it right about now. We'll have more --
MUHAMMAD: Enter Tara VanDerveer.
VANDERVEER: This particular team trained for a whole year together. It was a one of a kind experiment. And all the women made sacrifices to play overseas, to train, and to commit to winning a gold medal. And I met with David Stern to say, “This is what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a plan.” We traveled all over the world. We went to Lithuania, Italy, China, Australia, Russia, Ukraine. We played a total of 52 non-Olympic Games, traveling the world.
MUHAMMAD: All the while, at the NBA headquarters, Commissioner Stern and Val Ackerman were watching. They weren't just assessing the team's performance on the court, they were also looking at how the world perceived them.
VANDERVEER: It was a test ground. It was a way to gauge the interest in a team of best-in-the-world women's players. It was a chance to see what the fan support was on the road, what the TV interest was, how sponsors were reacting, what sort of merchandising initiatives we could create around the team. All that was happening and we were busy taking notes.
MUHAMMAD: But the moment that really changed everything, didn't happen on the road or even on the court. It happened in a boardroom.
VANDERVEER: A moment I most remember is when Sports Illustrated came out in 1996, early summer, with their Olympic preview issue, which is their custom every Olympic Games. And lo and behold, on the cover was our national team. And of all the teams or individuals they could have chosen to put on the preview issue, that's the one they chose, the USA Basketball Women's National Team.
MUHAMMAD: Printed across both the front and back covers of Sports Illustrated was a stunning image of star players, Sheryl Swoopes, Katrina McClain, Ruthie Bolton, Lisa Leslie, Teresa Edwards, and their coach Tara VanDerveer. All of them are in bright red, levitating above the ground, striking a pose.
VANDERVEER: So if there was any proof that we had broken through, that this team had done what everybody expected, and then some, that was it. And I just remember getting a copy, sort of being blown over, walking down to David Stern's office, and without a word, just handing it to him as we were assembling for a meeting that very day with ESPN to talk about TV arrangements for the WNBA. And David was speechless. He smiled, didn't say anything.
And then he led the march down the hallway where ESPN execs were huddled in. And as was his way, he just threw the issue on the table, didn't say anything. They saw what it was. They smiled. That was the proof, if there needed to be any, that women's basketball had arrived.
MUHAMMAD: There was going to be a new profession league, something Tara VanDerveer could scarcely have imagined.
VANDERVEER: when I was in college, before Title IX was passed, I lived in an apartment with three other basketball players. And we would practice like at 7:30 to 9:30 at night, after the man, and then we'd go home and have Hamburger Helper for dinner. There was no training table. We washed our own unit, practice stuff. We didn't have practice gear. I worked in the dining hall and clean tables and everything to pay for school.
But I remember with my teammates, we would sit around late at night and fantasize. You know, we’d say someday, there's gonna be a pro league for women and we go, aha, that will never happen. But, in fact, that has happened.
MUHAMMAD: Not only had Tara lived to see the birth of the WNBA, it was beyond her wildest dreams. She had personally helped prove that it needed to exist, that women were worth it.
VANDERVEER: I wanted women to be able to play professionally after college, to have that experience because, really, women become the best basketball players when they're probably 28, 29, 30 years old. And to be able to have that as a career has been, I think, a great choice for some women to be able to make.
MUHAMMAD: And so in 1996, just a few months before Team USA would take home the Olympic gold, the WNBA was born. There were many events that needed to click into place in order for that to happen. But all of them began with the NCAA’s entrance into the game. In fact, you can pretty much draw a straight line between the NCAA takeover, the 1996 Olympics, and the rise of the WNBA.
The NCAA’s professionalization of college ball made a pro league possible. But success comes at a price because there's a cost to letting a male-led, male-dominated organization into a woman's space.
After the break, the other side of this story.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MUHAMMAD: Donna Lopiano was the last president of the AIAW, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. When the organization toppled, she said something interesting started to happen.
DONNA LOPIANO: As soon as the NCAA opened its door to women and offered money to those to come in, then the decision-making was taken out of the hands of the women who are athletic directors and who are responsible for the beginning of women's athletics. They became, like, I call them prisoners of war, but the NCAA called them the senior woman administrator.
MUHAMMAD: The NCAA still has senior women administrators today. The organization defines them as, quote, “the highest ranking female in each NCAA athletics department or conference office.” According to the NCAA, these positions were created to ensure that, quote, “Women were involved in the male-dominated administration of college athletics.”
LOPIANO: It was an interesting disguise of the takeover, you know, women's sports and the relegation of women into lesser positions of power when they were controlled by the NCAA.
MUHAMMAD: In 1981, the NCAA entered women's sports. The decision made a lot possible for women's basketball, like the success of the ‘96 Olympic team and the birth of the WNBA. But it also changed the sport fundamentally. Women used to run women's basketball. But by the 1990s, that had changed. And there was one group of women who have felt that change the most, the women on the sidelines, the ones mapping the X's and O's, the coaches.
MUFFET MCGRAW: Well, it's interesting because back when the AIAW was founded by women, all women at the top of it, you just thought, well, of course, there is. That's the way it should be. You didn't think like we do today, we look and we say like, “Why aren't there more women leading this?”
MUHAMMAD: That's Muffet McGraw. In the early 1980s, she was the head coach of the women's basketball team at Lehigh University.
MCGRAW: I was coaching at Lehigh. And all of a sudden, you had a choice. You could go AIAW or NCAA. It was a tough decision. But you thought, well, the NCAA, they're gonna promote us more. We're gonna get more. We're gonna be equal to the men. You know, everything is gonna be great. So we pretty much all went to the NCAA.
Looking back, now we're fighting so many more battles about getting more women in leadership positions, getting more women coaching. So maybe we made the wrong decision way back then.
MUHAMMAD: In 1987, Muffet McGraw will become the head women's basketball coach at Notre Dame. She'd lead the Fighting Irish to 26 NCAA Tournaments, but she still remembers what the first tournament was like.
MCGRAW: We're taking pictures, “Oh, my gosh, there's the NCAA logo on the court. Let's take a picture here.” You know, we get off the plane. We're just completely enamored with us being in the tournament.
MUHAMMAD: The NCAA had money. The organization's tournaments were flashy. There was an allure to it all.
MCGRAW: It's sort of like somebody saying you have credibility now. You're a program now. You're not just a team. You're on the national level. All of a sudden, it's gonna help recruiting. If you get to the NCAA tournament, it's gonna to help build things. People are gonna start talking about you. We're gonna get more fans. You know, everything is gonna grow.
MUHAMMAD: Muffet McGraw really knows what she's talking about when it comes to the NCAA. Over the next three decades, she'd lead the Fighting Irish to nine Final Fours and two NCAA championship wins. Just take a listen to this game tape from the 2018 NCAA Final Four where Muffet McGraw's team crushed the UConn.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: It's heartbreak for the Huskies and onto the finals for Notre Dame.
MUHAMMAD: She's one of the most successful coaches in NCAA history.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: The head coach to the Fighting Irish, Muffet McGraw.
MCGRAW: Hello, everyone. I've been here for a long time. We have the best fans in the country, the best band in the land. (CROWD CHANTING)
MUHAMMAD: But she says that's really only half the picture. Because at about the same time that her team was on the rise, she was noticing something else happening.
MCGRAW: I just remember looking around the room and seeing a lot of male coaches. And then we met with the Commissioner and that was another guy. And suddenly, I remember thinking, dang, where are all the women? Where are all the women in leadership?
MUHAMMAD: Muffet thinks there were a few different reasons women started disappearing in the world of sports. One of them was the process of hiring.
MCGRAW: You look and you say like, “This woman would be great for this job.” And then she doesn't get it and you think, “Well, you know, what went wrong?” There were times when men were hired from the men's coaching staff at the school. You know, maybe the coach got fired, “Oh, you know what, that assistant coach was pretty good. Let's bring him over to coach the women.” Or, you know, this guy was an alum and he does this, “Let's bring him in to coach the women.”
MUHAMMAD: Recruiting for women's basketball positions worked like an old boy’s club. And the boys kept getting the jobs. That's not how it worked in men's athletics.
MCGRAW: When football and men's basketball opens, they go to a search firm. They have a shortlist. There's a whole process. They're calling people in the conference level, trying to find people. When the women's job opens, they wait to see who applies. And they're not going out and searching for that woman. So, you know, women really suffered because that network, the old boys network, boy, that was alive and well. And you call somebody about a job, and they're suggesting all these men. And we don't have that.
MUHAMMAD: Remember, what had been so special about the AIAW was that, in a way, it had functioned like a girl's network. But that network was now being overrun. And this trend, Muffet says, was only compounded by the gender dynamics at that time.
MCGRAW: We have so many men in our game because they interview differently, they network differently. Women get into the interview, and you know, we're always talking about “we,” right? You talk about, “Oh, things went really well at Notre Dame.” Well, you know, I had a great staff. You know, my team was terrific. We helped each other and we never talk in “I’s”.
When men go into the interview, they're saying like, “I can build this program. I'm gonna win you a championship. I'm gonna do this.” And of course, the AD is going like, “Dang, well, okay, you know, I'm gonna take this guy.” And so it turned into all these men getting jobs. And then when men aren't successful, they go somewhere else. You know, they land up on somebody else's bench somewhere.
When women aren't successful, it's as if our entire gender has failed. “Well, I hired a woman coach. I tried it. It didn't work, back to a guy.”
MUHAMMAD: There's another factor that played into this. In the ‘90s, the few women who were getting coaching roles started to sue for better pay. Ironically, that made gender equity in the sport even worse.
MCGRAW: Think what happened to female coaches along the way was when Title IX came in and started talking about, you know, we need to have equal opportunity. We need to have equal pay. We need to have a lot more things. I remember women started to think, “Okay, I'm gonna sue. I'm tired of this. We're not getting equality. We're not getting what we deserve. So I'm going to start taking it to court.”
Well, suddenly, there were some lawsuits. And a lot of the women won the lawsuits, and we started to get paid more. And that was when the men came over, because now suddenly, well, it's a legitimate job. Now, you're gonna make some good money being a coach, where before, I mean, my first job, I think I made $30,000 coaching at Lehigh. But once that dollar sign changed and it became something that men would say, “Oh, I can't make it in the men's. There's too many other people going for this job. I can't get a foot in the door,” they make it over to the women's side, right? When Title IX came out in the early ‘70s, 90% of our coaches were women. Fast forward to today, 40% of our coaches are women.
MUHAMMAD: We reached out to the NCAA about this. The association said they can't speak to school decisions around hiring as those hires are done without their involvement. While Muffet understands that what she is describing revolves around university level politics, she says, “All roads still lead to the NCAA.”
MCGRAW: When you look at how the NCAA is set up, the women's basketball vice president, the person in charge of women's basketball, reports to the guy that does men's basketball. So you're pretty much saying to anybody that's looking in your hierarchy, women are not as important as men. She's reporting to him instead of her reporting directly to the president, which is what the men do.
MUHAMMAD: At the end of the day, the NCAA oversees and regulates collegiate sports. It sets the standard. This hierarchy sends a clear message. If top positions of power always go to men, even the highest women, well, they'd still ultimately be reporting to men.
MCGRAW: That's when I get really frustrated with the fact that we never have women in charge. And if we had women in charge of some of these places, things would be completely different. If we had more female ADs, more female college presidents, more women at the NCAA level that are in the top leadership positions.
And I think people look at sports and they say, “Well, sports are run by men,” especially football, you know, it's run by men. But when you look at the pro sports, and there are women starting to creep into a lot of the positions. You have a female general manager for baseball. You have women coaches in the NBA. You have all these assistant women coaches. Even in football, we looked at the Super Bowl, we had female assistant coaches and a female referee. We are making strides professionally, but not at the college level. And that's where we need to make change.
MUHAMMAD: This isn't just a question of representation. When there are so few women at the top, it changes the kinds of decisions an organization makes. Even today, according to an external gender equity review, the NCAA Commission, the NCAA spends millions more on the men's tournaments, while designing media agreements that undervalue women's sports. That's why Muffet McGraw wants to see a shake-up in the NCAA’s leadership.
MCGRAW: The President of the NCAA Mark Emmert has not advanced women's sports under his watch. He has created a culture where men are valued more than women. And his leadership has not given women the opportunities for any kind of respect, or any kind of value, or any kind of equality. And I think we need to make a change in leadership and look at a new president.
Now, it would be great if we could hire a woman. But there's plenty of men out there that are very pro women and want to include women, and are doing great things for women. And we need somebody that can see both sides of the coin.
MUHAMMAD: We reached out to Mark Emmert’s team, but he declined to sit for an interview for this series. In 2021, in response to the discrepancies in resources allocated towards men and women athletes during March Madness, Emmert said, quote, “We know that we've had decades of undervaluing women's sports throughout the entire sports spectrum.” Then in April, President Mark Emmert and the NCAA Board of Governors reached a mutual agreement to have Emmert stepped down effective June 2023. This was after our conversation with Coach McGraw.
There was no reason given for Emmert’s departure. But in a statement, NCAA Board of Governors Chair John J. DeGioia said, quote, “With the significant transitions underway within college sports, the timing of this decision provides the association with consistent leadership during the coming months, plus the opportunity to consider what will be the future role of the president.”
MCGRAW: It's been really hard to watch men take over women's basketball. I've been coaching for 40 years, and I feel like we've been fighting the same battles with the NCAA the entire time. And frankly, I'm just tired of this. I mean, it's been this way for 50 years. When is it going to change?
MUHAMMAD: After the break, the NCAA tries to address what they think has gone wrong with the game. Spoiler alert, it's not the decline of women coaches.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MUHAMMAD: By 2012, the NCAA had been sponsoring women's basketball for 30 years. And despite all the things the NCAA was supposed to be doing for the game, the number of female coaches in the sport was dwindling. Attendance and television ratings were flatlining. The sport basically wasn't getting the kind of attention and reception that men's basketball was receiving. The NCAA has started to take notice.
MCGRAW: The concerns that I was hearing a decade ago were that women's basketball was not generating the kind of revenue that was seen on the men's side. And questions were cropping up about whether anything could be done to make that happen. The NCAA approached me about a senior leadership position at the national office. Mark Emmert was president of the association. And I wasn't interested in making the move, but I did say, to Mark, “Look, if I can be helpful in any other way, particularly in the sport of basketball, just let me know.” And that led to discussions about a consulting project around the women's game.
MUHAMMAD: The NCAA was concerned about two things.
MCGRAW: One, a sense that there wasn't a lot of parity at the highest levels of women's college basketball. It seemed like the same teams were winning year in and year out, and other sort of teams weren't breaking through. In the same way you saw on the men's side, where Cinderella stories are a bit more common, it wasn't happening in women's basketball. So there was a sense of how can we do more to liven up the game?
The second piece was a sense at that time of stagnancy around attendance and ratings, and a sense of uneasiness about the revenues not being there, in the same way they were in men's basketball to support investment and operation.
MUHAMMAD: And so the NCAA asked Val to look into those two questions and see what answers she could find.
ACKERMAN: It was a project I did on my own, I interviewed 100 people. I went to games. I had attendance data that the NCAA furnished. I had financial data that I was able to pick up from various sources. I had ratings data from ESPN that I was able to use to create some analysis around what was I hearing about women's basketball at that time. I was hearing a sense that more needed to be done to get the sport to the next level.
I mean, there were ADs who were very frustrated that the sport was not bringing in more money, that they were bound by Title IX to provide equitable experiences for student athletes. But those experiences were not paying for themselves, if you will, on the women's side. Men’s basketball, then and now, continues to generate good revenue, in some cases really good revenue at the campus level.
Football has been a great benefactor, to be honest, to women's basketball because schools that have prominent football programs bring in a fair amount of money that funds, for the most part, the rest of the department, including women's basketball. I was hearing comments about the important role that coaches needed to play in terms of being out in the community, interfacing with fans on top of their jobs as the X's and O's experts.
I was hearing ideas about how to reformat the championships. What could be done to make sure we could get better attendance in the early rounds of the tournament, what can be done to get better attendance in the later rounds of the tournament, what can be done to maybe liven up the games through some rules changes.
MUHAMMAD: There were a lot of people in the sport who felt the woman's game needed to refresh, new ideas about how to appeal to investors and fans, and there was pressure on many sides for the sport to make more money.
ACKERMAN: That's why some of my inquiry was directed to, okay, how could we make women's basketball look better on television or seem more appealing to fans like scoring.
MUHAMMAD: At that time, shooting percentages in scoring had reached all-time lows.
ACKERMAN: Men's basketball, at the highest levels, we see tremendous interest from networks. We see robust ticket sales and attendance at buildings. We see an embrace by corporate partners. And to be honest, we're not seeing that in the same way in women's basketball in any significant way.
So I guess the question really is how do we bring that along? What resources would be needed in order to create the kinds of marketing and sales outcomes that everybody seems to want here. And that really does get into investment. All of that, I think was in the backdrop as I was putting this together. So that was really the focus of what became eventually a report that became known as the women's basketball white paper.
MUHAMMAD: Almost immediately, this report garnered media attention. The New York Times covered it, ESPN covered it, USA Today published a profile on Val. The interest wasn't just in the problems plaguing women's basketball, but in the solutions her white paper offered.
ACKERMAN: The inquiry really was about how we could get it to the next level. The thesis, in part, was that there was tremendous potential still.
MUHAMMAD: She had a lot of ideas, like joining the men's and women's tournaments to create a single event like a Tennis Grand Slam, and moving the women's Final Four to the weekend to garner more fans, or --
ACKERMAN: Additional staffing to make sure that proactive promotional activities are undertaken, thoughtful marketing strategies to see if there are sponsors out there who might be specific to women's basketball as opposed to add-ons, you know, on a men's package deal.
MUHAMMAD: At the end of the day, Val's job was to focus on things like marketability, revenue generation and lack of investment. She's careful to emphasize that even though this was about college ball, the focus of her report wasn't on the treatment of athletes or equity. This wasn't about Title IX.
ACKERMAN: I was not looking at it through a Title IX’s lens. I was not charged with or didn't occur to me to say, “Okay, are we all being Title IX compliant here?” The premise was that women's basketball seemed stuck at that time, in a general way. And the inquiry really was about how we could get it to the next level. And frankly, a lot of progress had been made in women's basketball.
Since Title IX, at the collegiate level, in terms of the number of programs, the visibility of the women's Final Four, the fact that women's basketball had a pro league in the form of the WNBA that was built on the back of Title IX and the women's college game, the operational part of Title IX is happening the way it's supposed to be happening.
MUHAMMAD: But not all people believe Title IX was doing the job it was set out to do. In the summer of 2012, 20 black women from the world of sports met to have a frank discussion about Title IX. The focus of the salon was simple, trying to understand the widening gap between opportunities for white women and black women in sports.
Covering the event for the New York Times, William C. Rhoden later wrote, “Race is, by far, the most debilitating limitation of Title IX, yet you barely hear any discussion of it.” Black and white women are far from equal under Title IX. And even in basketball, a sport dominated by Black players, the gap in opportunities is felt.
ARCHIVAL RECORDING: The black and brown community is something that is always targeted. But at the end of the day, I think the beauty of the black woman is she's always find a way to still make it work for her.
MUHAMMAD: That's next time on “In Their Court.” In Their Court is written and produced by Privi Varathon (ph) and Abe Selby. Our associate producer is Olivia Richard. Additional production help from Amelia Acosta, Sarah Hughes and Bob Mallory. Original music by Jesse McEntee (ph), sound design by Rick Kwan. Ryce Enbarnes (ph) is our technical director. Stephen Roberts and Reed Chirlane (ph), our executive producers. Madeleine Heringer (ph) is our head of editorial.