Don’t back the bias: Women’s sports are here to stay

By The Editorial Board

As Iowa hero Caitlin Clark walked off the court docket for the ultimate time in Sunday’s girls’s NCAA Nationwide Championship sport, a sellout crowd and a nation of individuals sitting on the sting of their seats from residence skilled the facility of a sport constructed on empowerment.

The sport between Iowa and South Carolina peaked at 24 million viewers and averaged 18.7 million units of eyes all through, making it the second most-watched non-Olympic girls’s sporting occasion ever on tv, behind solely the 2015 Ladies’s World Cup ultimate. Placing girls’s sports activities apart, it was essentially the most watched sporting occasion since 2019, together with all males’s or girls’s school or skilled sporting occasions.

Nonetheless not a believer? Nicely, welcome to the minority.

As former NBA superstars Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce bickered on a podcast episode previous to the Nationwide Championship weekend, they got here to the conclusion that extra folks could name five women’s college basketball gamers than males’s. The crew realized that turnover within the males’s sport has made superstars considerably irrelevant, whereas the “electrical” atmosphere of girls’s basketball has turn out to be extra entertaining and interesting than ever earlier than.

“It’s blowing the blokes’ sport out of the water,” Garnett stated.

For the longest time, the gripe towards girls’s sports activities was foolish. In 2016, girls acquired simply 4% of sports media and tv protection. Sure, that’s all girls’s sports activities.

Nevertheless, even with the increase within the sport, not every little thing has been good. Throughout the entertaining March Insanity season, alongside got here an LA Times preview article whose depiction of LSU basketball as “villains” and “soiled debutantes” flashed the lasting problems with sexism, racism and bias surrounding the game. The since-edited column attacked not solely the character of head coach Kim Mulkey but in addition the character of her gamers and followers. On the finish of the day, a narrative like this could by no means move an editor’s desk if it used such terminology when depicting a males’s basketball sport that might certainly break TV scores information.

When the sport grows, so does the criticism. As individuals who take within the content material, we have to begin holding others accountable for the best way they speak concerning the sport and folks above all else.

Certain, Clark and LSU star Angel Reese had been considered one of a form and put girls’s basketball on the block, however their flashy and enjoyable fashion of play has impressed a era of gamers who will proceed to spark pleasure inside the sport. As they head for the subsequent degree of basketball, a brand new age begins. Don’t rely out the storylines: Ladies’s basketball is right here to remain.