Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Paying respect to the women’s game
I learned years ago the key to coping with the daily grind is to plan ahead and do something you enjoy to pull you through.
It can be dinner with friends, a night at the movies, a show on TV or something as simple as a long walk with someone you love.
This afternoon, I will start the week off like a growing number of sports fans and watch the championship of the NCAA Women’s Tournament on ABC beginning at 2 p.m. CST. I may even tailgate, something I’ve done plenty of times for football but never for women’s sports. Have you seen the numbers? The Elite Eight, which featured Caitlin Clark scoring 41 points against LSU, became the mostwatched women’s college basketball game ever, with 12.3 million viewers tuning in. The Final Four on Friday likely also drew a large viewing audience, although I haven’t seen the numbers on it yet.
The women’s game is finally receiving the mass appeal it has long deserved, which North Little Rock girls’ coach Daryl Fimple cited when he went on social media and posted a picture of himself wearing a shirt that read “I watched women’s basketball BEFORE it was cool.” That’s a reference to the Barbara Mandrell song “I was country when country wasn’t cool.” Fimple certainly has the receipts with over 500 career victories as a high school girls coach.
I was late to the party in respect toward women’s sports. My introduction to high school basketball for girls came in the late 1970s when my sister, Rhonda, played at Caraway. That was back in the day of 6-on-6 basketball when three girls on one team played defense and the other three played offense without crossing onto the other side of the court.
Yep. That was a thing, I guess, because the rules-makers didn’t think girls were athletic enough or had the stamina to run up and down the full court like the boys. Can you imagine Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers or Angel Reese grabbing a rebound then being forced to stop at mid-court and hand off to another player?
Me, neither.
After years of resistance, Arkansas in 1980 became one of the last states to abandon the half court 6-on-6 format in favor of the 5-on-5 game we see today. When I became a sports writer, I learned the girls still had a long ways to go in terms of equal coverage in the press. I worked for a sports editor in the mid-1980s who told us to just add a couple of paragraphs at the end of the boys’ story and we’ll be fine. Guess so, because I don’t remember receiving any complaints about it from readers of our newspaper.
Admittedly, I became part of the problem and I began one paragraph with “In the pony tail game …” I thought it was funny at the time. I know now it was demeaning and sexist and not funny at all.
Attitudes changed over the years and I’ve been proud to work for 25 years for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspapers that provides equal sports coverage for the sexes. Just last week I drove nearly 50 miles one way to cover a softball game at Gravette then turned around the next day and drove over 40 miles one way to cover a baseball game at Bentonville.
I thoroughly enjoyed both assignments and the games were well-played.
Today I’m off the clock. But I can’t wait to watch the culmination of a terrific NCAA Women’s Tournament finale between unbeaten South Carolina and an Iowa team led by Caitlin Clark, a truly generational player.
I may even grill some brats, just to get ready.