After videos went viral last March detailing the inferior weight room setup provided to the women’s basketball championship, NCAA president Mark Emmert commissioned an external gender equity review across all sports.<\/p>\n
Phase one of the report came out in early August and focused specifically on men’s and women’s basketball. Monday’s report was the second phase and detailed inequities across all other NCAA-sponsored sports.<\/p>\n
The 154 page report can be found here<\/a> and it should be required reading for anyone involved in sports. The majority of the report is a breakdown of inequities in individual sports, but the opening 60 pages do a stellar job of showing how the problems shown therein are systemic, problematic and fixable.<\/p>\n This report contained no information that was surprising or groundbreaking to anyone that has spent time around the NCAA and in particular, women’s college hockey. The inequities are not new. While helpful to have the information gathered and reported from an outside source and freely available to the general public, it also does not matter if the report does not incite major change.<\/p>\n Despite being a non-profit that is supposed to be focused on the student-athlete experience, the report found “woven into the fabric of the NCAA is a pressure to increase revenue to maximize funding distributions to the membership.”<\/p>\n “Phase II of our review has shown that this same pressure has led the NCAA to invest more\u2014and in some instances considerably more\u2014in those championships that it views as already or potentially revenue-producing, while minimizing spending for other championships. Because the mere handful of championships that the NCAA views as revenue-producing are exclusively men\u2019s championships\u2014Division I baseball, men\u2019s basketball, men\u2019s ice hockey, men\u2019s lacrosse and wrestling\u2014this has significant implications for efforts to achieve gender equity between the men\u2019s and women\u2019s championships in those sports. The NCAA\u2019s simultaneous failure to put in place systems to identify, prevent, and address gender inequities across its championships has allowed gender disparities in these and other sports to persist for too long.”<\/p>\n The study looked at spending, marketing, fan engagement and corporate sponsorships both men’s and women’s championships within a single sport and found a number of issues. Achieving gender equity does not mean that the NCAA will spend the same amount of money on all players, but the report found that the NCAA has no process for monitoring if the difference in spending per athlete is equitable. In hockey, the report found, the NCAA spent $9,805 per student-athlete at the men\u2019s hockey championship and $3,421 per student-athlete at the women\u2019s in 2019.<\/p>\n “The NCAA\u2019s continued investment in one gender\u2019s championship over the other\u2019s can perpetuate disparities by limiting the less-resourced championship\u2019s capacity for growth and development,” the report said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The hockey-specific case study section opens with this: “The Division I Men\u2019s Ice Hockey Championship provides a markedly different experience for its student-athletes than its counterpart, the NC Women\u2019s Ice Hockey Championship. The men\u2019s championship, which is a much larger event involving twice as many teams and four-to-five times as many fans, benefits from greater promotion, more extensive television coverage, and a more professional ‘look and feel.’ One stakeholder with experience at both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s tournaments observed, ‘It\u2019s really like they\u2019re different sports.’\u201d<\/p>\n “In this way, the ice hockey championships are a stark example of how the NCAA\u2019s broader decision to provide greater support to more revenue-producing championships has a gender equity impact on the student-athlete experience. As one stakeholder put it, ‘[The NCAA] uses its decision-making and negotiating power to bolster men\u2019s hockey events, while squandering opportunities to support women\u2019s hockey in ways that would both help the sport and itself.'”<\/p>\n Some of the biggest takeaways:<\/p>\n A longtime major point of concern and contention in women’s college hockey is how limiting travel costs is one of the primary criteria used during tournament field selection. The words “bracket integrity” do not appear anywhere in the manual for selecting teams. (My Twitter thread on this is here<\/a>).<\/p>\n It seems like a good time to remind you that the primary goal of the NCAA DI Women's Hockey Tournament Committee\/Seeding is to not spend money. pic.twitter.com\/AZtMoEFgJD<\/a><\/p>\n — Nicole Haase (@NicoleHaase) March 4, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\n