WOMEN WINNING IN FRONT OF NO ONE Students say female NCAA athletes are ‘underappreciated’

By PJ Pfeiffer ppfeiffer@statenews.com

The NCAA announced that the women’s Division I tournament was allowed to use the term “March Madness” in their title in 2022. The iconic phrase has been a part of the men’s tournament since 1982.

This same year, the NCAA expanded the women’s March Madness to 68 teams competing in the tournament. The men’s was expanded to 68 teams in 2011.

There has long been discourse surrounding how female collegiate athletes are treated compared to their male counterparts. Some students believe there is still a long way to go to make the NCAA more equitable for women.

Elementary education sophomore Tristyn Guerrero said the injustice that women face in the sports industry is absurd and is clear to see from an outside perspective.

The ways that men are treated compared to women within sports, especially collegiate basketball, “shows the history of how women have been treated,” Guerrero said.

“Overall, women in sports are treated completely differently,” Guerrero said. “They get less attention … they get fewer resources.” Investigators found that, for a 2021 men’s tournament, the NCAA spent $125.55 per player in the first two rounds, whereas for the women’s tournament, the organization spent $60.42 per player, according to a report by The

New York Times. The money they spent included signage and decor items, such as banners and posters.

Human biology sophomore Andy Kuo, who played competitive basketball until high school and has consistently watched college basketball for years, believes that the NCAA shows favoritism to men, especially when it comes to the March Madness tournament.

“I think that men get a lot of favoritism when it comes to watching and promoting the sports,” Kuo said. “The (MSU) women’s team is fantastic, and they are underappreciated all the time. They do not get a fair chance at the same advertisement and promotions that our men’s team does.”

The Kaplan Report, an assessment that the NCAA created, was constructed to track the gender disparities between the men’s and women’s tournaments. The budget for the 2019 March Madness tournament was one aspect of the report. The NCAA spent $28 million on the men’s tournament, while it budgeted $14.5 million for the women. The budget included