Uconn Women Best In Basketball Period!
Written by gologan, Wednesday December 29 2010
I had a discussion with a couple of friends of at a Christmas party about the coverage of women's sports and the viability of starting a women's league or team as well as whether or not title IX has done what it was meant to do.
My original statement was that the reason for the focus on mens sports was because it is a different product to be marketed differently than women's sports. For example men are more athletic than women so it is more exciting to watch a mens basketball game for the dunking and the individual talent they display. They say women are more fundamentally sound therefore theirs is more of a team game than the mens game. Layups are not as cool as a thunderous breakaway dunk.
Another argument is that because of the physical differences between men and women the two games are not equal. If women set a milestone such as winning 89 consecutive games is it not the same because they have not played against men? In college football teams are often judged by the strenghth of their schedule. The response usually is, teams can only play the competition put before them. It is a sad statement on the state of sports as not only the argument of equality based on physicality is unfair as well as the idea that women have to use sex to get more people to watch especially men.
As the movie, "A League Of Their Own," as well as the number of mens leagues that have started up and folded within the past twenty years have shown, it is very difficult no matter the gender to have a product that rivals an established league. Let us not forget that at one point the NFL was a league struggling to survive.
Also if one is to make an argument for equality in the marketing of their product one fact cannot be ignored and that is winning. With all of the milestones that University of Tennessee head coach Pat Summit achieved including being the winningest coach in all of college basketball, winning over 1000 games, the question was asked would she would have as much success with a mens team? I ask does it matter? Since title IX was instituted some mens programs have been cut to provide for womens teams at a number of schools. The truth is, some womens programs including the University of Connecticut have been more successful by far than the mens team.
All in all regardless of gender all sports shoud be treated the same. A winning program makes a school or a city look good. Scheduling women's games on a different day or channel to make sure mens games are put in primetime belittles the effort of women to be treated equally as much as saying they should make their uniforms more sexy to get more viewers. A good team is a good team no matter who they are. Let's support all of our teams regardless who their opponent is and cheer just as loudly for a lay up as a dunk. The Duke-UNC rivalry isn't any less of a heated rivalry because women are the combatants.
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