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Irrespective of who prevails subsequent Sunday on the NCAA’s championship sport, 2024’s March Madness will go down in historical past as a milestone second for ladies’s sports activities. Not simply within the faculty basketball realm — however for feminine athletes total.
In an ideal storm, the annual bracket-bonkers frenzy across the NCAA faculty basketball match has conferred a stage of respect to the ladies’s sport that’s hardly ever been seen throughout sports activities media, however for the quadrennial exception of the Ladies’s World Cup. It’s taking place this yr for all the best causes – principally, math and gravity. The video games have been too good to disregard and the stats put up by such gamers because the College of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, Louisiana State College’s Angel Reese, USC’s freshman phenom JuJu Watkins and College of Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers are too eye-popping to not analyze.
This time round, the ladies’s match has had all of it: generationally gifted superstars, fierce Division I faculty rivalries which have been brewing for years, a mini-scandal round a profitable and sartorially adventurous coach and — on the final minute — one other stunning however maybe not stunning instance of the additional burden shouldered by feminine athletes. That is the stuff that drives dialogue, debate and shouting matches throughout ESPN and sports activities radio and podcasts all day and evening. It’s the stuff that has lengthy fueled pleasure and curiosity when males have the ball.
And including heft to all of that is the truth that NCAA girls’s basketball gamers now have a well-established path to show skilled within the U.S. through the WNBA. Monday evening’s unbelievable Elite 8 matchup between College of Iowa, led by Clark, and Louisiana State College, powered by Reese, might have sown the seeds of a Larry Fowl-Magic Johnson hoops rivalry that begins in faculty and extends into the skilled paint. The gamers on this yr’s match have by no means recognized a world with out the WNBA, which marked its 25th anniversary final yr. After Iowa’s win over LSU – a intently watched rematch of final yr’s NCAA championship sport through which LSU prevailed – a breathless Clark joined anchor Scott Van Pelt stay on the prime of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” Monday evening from the world flooring, sporting her freshly printed “Closing 4” match hat. It felt like watching generational change occur earlier than our eyes.
“The way in which the nation has supported us and our workforce and actually rallied round this workforce and a number of groups throughout the nation – it’s like we’ve simply elevated the sport a lot. That’s the good half for me,” stated Clark, who has declared her intention to participate within the 2025 WNBA draft.
A tidal wave of success, in fact, additionally brings scrutiny. Kim Mulkey, LSU’s dynamic girls’s basketball coach, has been underneath the microscope in latest days due to a deep-dive Washington Submit profile. Mulkey got here out swinging by criticizing the Submit and sports activities options author Kent Babb at an LSU information convention days earlier than the story was revealed March 30. Babb’s lengthy learn is a richly detailed, balanced take a look at Mulkey’s execs and cons as a coach in addition to her struggles with members of the family and her penchant for flashy outfits on sport day. It’s clearly the product of months of analysis and reporting – the type of journalistic funding that’s yet one more sign of public curiosity within the girls’s sport reaching new heights.
On March 31, nevertheless, one other newspaper story involving LSU elbowed apart the Submit’s finely drawn function within the cultural dialog. The Los Angeles Occasions stirred outrage with a preview column on that day’s Elite 8 sport between LSU and UCLA. Making a degree in regards to the public profile of each groups, columnist Invoice Bloch described LSU as being akin to the NCAA’s “soiled debutants” whereas UCLA amounted to “milk and cookies.” The thoughts reels. Block rapidly apologized for having “tried to be intelligent in my phrasing about one workforce’s angle, utilizing alliteration whereas not understanding the deeply offensive connotation or associations.”
Did the drama round LSU this week have an effect on the workforce’s efficiency on Monday, after they have been defeated by Iowa 94-87? Clark powered her workforce’s efficiency with an astounding 41 factors, 7 rebounds and 12 assists. Reese delivered a dominant 17 factors, 20 rebounds and 4 assists for her workforce.
Reese had tears in her eyes on the workforce’s post-game press convention as she mentioned her ultimate outing as a collegiate participant. The insults that have been hurled at her and the LSU workforce over the weekend have been sadly half and parcel of being on the pedestal after profitable the NCAA girls’s basketball championship final yr.
“I’ve been by way of a lot. I’ve been attacked so many instances – sexualized, threatened,” Reese stated. In the identical breath she added with nice readability of imaginative and prescient: “I’m unapologetically me. I’m all the time going to go away that mark and be who I’m.”
In that spirit go the final NCAA girls standing — undaunted, unbowed and on to Friday’s Closing 4 video games and Sunday’s championship. What a season.
(Pictured: LSU’s Angel Reese, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and USC’s JuJu Watkins)
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