NCAA APOLOGIZES TO WOMEN’S TEAMS FOR INEQUITIES
NCAA basketball administrators apologized to the women’s basketball players and coaches after inequities between the men’s and women’s tournament went viral on social media and vowed to do better.
NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt vowed to do better during a Zoom call Friday morning, a day after photos showed the difference between the weight rooms at the two tournaments.
“I apologize to the women’s student-athletes, coaches and committee for dropping the ball on the weight room issue in San Antonio; we’ll get it fixed as soon as possible,” Gavitt said.
During the call, other differences were raised: There are 68 teams in the men’s field, 64 in the women; and the NCAA pays for the men’s National Invitational Tournament,
but not the women’s NIT.
“The field size and NIT, those would be decisions made in conjunction with membership,” Gavitt said. “Those are not decisions we could make independently. They are good questions and it’s timely to raise those issues again.”
In a step to solve the weight room issue, the NCAA modified space in the convention center to turn it into a usable workout facility. That work should be completed today. The NCAA had offered to put a weight-lifting area in the open space next to the practice courts, but coaches didn’t want that because then other teams would be in the vicinity when they were practicing.
“We fell short this year in what we have been doing to prepare in the last 60 days for 64 teams to be in San Antonio. We acknowledge that,” said NCAA Senior Vice President of women’s basketball Lynn
Holzman, who is a former college basketball player.
Stuck and unstuck
The BYU Cougars already have the biggest assist in the NCAA Tournament and
they’ve yet to play their first game.
Jesse Wade was stuck in an elevator for 40 minutes at the team’s Indianapolis hotel before his teammates forced open the doors and freed the junior guard.
The whole affair played out on Twitter on Thursday night, including a video showing several teammates prying open the elevator doors and an ecstatic Wade popping out into the hallway to cheers.
“Scariest moment of my life but I knew the boys had my back,” Wade tweeted.
He also tweeted, “I’M OUT 40 minutes feels like a lifetime when you’re trapped inside an elevator. All I can say is that if you think I had it bad in there you should see the elevator door after the boys got me out”
Ties to the past
Coaches and players cross paths all the time in college basketball, and now that Virginia has arrived in Indianapolis, coach Tony Bennett will have a situation more unique than most when his Cavaliers face Ohio in the first round on Saturday night.
The Bobcats’ third-leading scorer, is the son of Dean Vander Plas, one of Bennett’s teammates at Green Bay from 1988-1991. That team was coached by Bennett’s father, Dick, and the Phoenix reached the NCAA Tournament in 1991 and made two NIT appearances.
Bennett said the younger Vander Plas was named after his dad.
“(That) makes me feel old,” Bennett said. “Ben came to a camp here — I think he was in ninth grade — to Virginia. And I’m so happy for his success”
Notable
Marquette’s first losing season since Steve Wojciechowski’s debut year resulted in the coach’s exit. The Golden Eagles fired Wojciechowski after a sevenseason tenure in which he went 128-95 but earned no NCAA Tournament victories. Wojciechowski was 59-68 in Big East competition.