NCAA gender inequity files, pt. 5
Flow charts might be boring, but they are certainly telling.
Hi, friends!
So, confession time: I’ve been struggling to figure out exactly how to wrap up this series, in part because I have a tendency to make things way more difficult than they need to be, and somehow being aware of this tendency doesn’t make it magically go away, and primarily because these reports are so vitally important that it feels fundamentally wrong to put them in the file cabinet and forget about them.
But, the thing is, I’m in charge here — something I somehow forget from time to time — and I’ve realized that this is not an ending. These reports will influence basically all of our future work here at Power Plays, so there’s absolutely no need to make the final newsletter in our series some sort of a grand finale!
If you have no clue what I’m talking about, let’s take a step back.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been taking a closer look at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP’s reports on gender equity in the NCAA, which were released in three parts in the latter half of 2021.
The reports were commissioned by the NCAA after Sedona Prince’s TikTok about the difference between the weight rooms provided at the men’s and women’s tournaments went viral last Match and caused a national uproar over sexism in sports.
So far I’ve written four parts of the NCAA gender inequity files. If you need a recap, I’ve got you covered:
The NCAA gender inequity files, pt. 1: We kicked off the series with a deep dive into the disturbing discrepancies between the 2021 men’s and women’s basketball championships, focusing on the behind-the-scenes story of the weight room fiasco and startling inequities in covid testing.
The NCAA gender inequity files, pt. 2: In this piece, we continued to examine the 2021 men’s and women’s basketball championships, this time looking at the discrepancies in food, swag bags, recreation areas, signage, and entertainment.
The NCAA gender inequity files, pt. 3: In this piece, I look at the ways the NCAA actively disincentives sponsors from investing in women’s basketball by putting CBS/Turner in charge of the NCAA’s Corporate Champions and Partner Program for every single NCAA national championship despite the fact that CBS/Turner only has broadcast rights to the men’s DI basketball championship.
The NCAA gender inequity files, pt. 4: Finally, we broke down the NCAA’s vicious cycle of devaluation, which is best symbolized by the NCAA’s television contract with ESPN for the women’s basketball tournament worth approximately $100 million less than market value.
For part five, we’re going to parse out one of the most boring parts of the report — I’m so fun at parties — and look at the NCAA’s bureaucratic organizational structure.
Basically, we’re going back to basics.
The weight-room fiascos and lopsided contracts, swag-bag embarrassments and Gavin DeGraw performances don’t just pop up overnight; they’re branches stemming from a rotten core.
Let’s look directly at the NCAA itself.
The entire internal organizational structure of the NCAA centers men’s basketball
The flow chart below is included in the report to show how things are supposed to be run:
Technically, the NCAA has a SVP of Basketball is tasked with managing men’s and women’s basketball. However, according to the report, that job description is incredibly misleading. Below are sixteen bullet points I took from the report — obviously, the quote marks indicate I lifted it word-for-word.
From what the SVP actually does, to sizes of the staff, to who is included — or excluded — in important meetings, to contractor support, to tournament budgets themselves, this is who the NCAA is:
“[M]any stakeholders report that, in both practice and perception, women’s basketball essentially reports to and is subordinate to men’s basketball.”
“The SVP of Basketball … focuses the majority of his time and energy on men’s basketball, in large part because the vast majority of the NCAA’s current revenue comes from men’s basketball.”
One NCAA senior staff member told KHF that the SVP of Basketball is “not engaged in strategic thinking and initiatives” for women’s basketball.
In fact, “a significant number” of women’s basketball leaders actually thought the SVP of Basketball *was* solely the head of men’s basketball, rather than the head of all basketball at the NCAA.
Additionally, because the VP of Women’s Basketball isn’t on the senior management team, she does not attend the NCAA’s quarterly meetings with CBS/Turner and ESPN; this means she’s not in the room for crucial conversations, such as whether to hold the tournaments in 2020 or what the covid protocols were in 2021. Instead, women’s basketball has to rely on the SVP of Basketball to advocate for it in said meetings.
There are 11 full-time men’s basketball staff members and only seven full-time women’s basketball staff members. Additionally: “Taking into account the time that other NCAA employees (in divisions such as ticketing, corporate alliances, and statistics) allocate to support the Division I men’s and women’s basketball championships, men’s basketball has the equivalent of 21.86 full-time employees, while women’s basketball has only 13.92.”
Men’s basketball hires many more external contractors to run its tournament, while “women’s basketball staff tend to bear many of the responsibilities outsourced to contractors for men’s basketball.”
THIS PART MADE ME SO MAD: The NCAA has a contract with Anthony Travel (AT) to arrange hotel reservations and travel to and from the men’s and women’s tournaments. But while the current contract requires AT to arrange all travel for the men’s tournament “to and from airports” during the Final Four, the same contract specifies that the women’s Final Four “will utilize existing airport transportations when it is feasible.”
PLUS while AT is in charge of organizing hotel reservations for media, staff, committees, and fans at the men’s tournament, the women’s tournament has to handle such arrangements by itself.
PLUS there are always two AT employees on the ground at the men’s tournament, but never an AT employee on site at the women’s tournament, except in 2021 when the women’s tournament had to *beg* for one AT employee on the ground in San Antonio.
“Overall, the men’s and women’s basketball staffs operate in separate silos, and with one of those silos — men’s basketball — institutionally prioritized over the other” which “results in a dynamic where men’s basketball makes decisions, women’s basketball finds out about those decisions, and women’s basketball must then choose whether to follow suit.”
There is ZERO communication between the men’s and women’s basketball committees, which seems FUCKING STUPID.
“[T]he men’s basketball committees are comprised of more senior leaders within the NCAA membership than the women’s basketball committees, which negatively impacts the women’s committees’ ability to effectuate change.”
“As one interviewee aptly put it, due to the lack of athletic directors and commissioners on the committees, women’s basketball has ‘no juice to make change’ within the Division I Council and the Board of Governors; when the committees try to “request changes, growth, and solutions,” they often ‘fall flat.’”
“In 2019 — the last year for which the NCAA held basketball championships and has final spending figures — the men’s basketball tournament cost $53.2 million and the women’s basketball tournament cost $17.9 million.”
“Overall, the NCAA does not have appropriate measures in place for monitoring gender equity in the budget and spending process.”
As I said on the Burn It All Down live show last week in Portland, the best thing the NCAA has ever done is release this report in full. We’ve got receipts now, and they are not going into the back of the file cabinet. They shall be wielded frequently and fervently until there’s true change.
No more crumbs. Give us cake, damnit.
Love you all. See you tomorrow for the Friday Five.