MINNEAPOLIS — The NCAA is going to want you to focus on the pillows. Twenty-eight pillows, to be exact. The exact same number of pillows sitting in the women’s players’ lounge in Minneapolis as there are pillows sitting in the men’s players’ lounge in New Orleans.
The NCAA did that right. It showed that it could count to 28 in two locations.
And a year after the shame of its inequities was brought to public light by devastated and infuriated — but not surprised — women’s basketball players and coaches, the NCAA will want you to remember that when it had the choice, it chose to give the same number of pillows to the men as the women.
Because if everyone focuses on the pillows and the March Madness branding and the ping pong tables and the 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament bracket, it’ll feel as though change has happened. Because in the immediate moment, in this most tangible sense of this Final Four, yes, change has happened. And for the student-athletes this year, that matters. Let’s not forget that.
After a gender equity review and the public pressure that followed the highlighted disparities between the men’s and women’s tournament last year, the NCAA has made mostly surface-level changes. The larger truth is that the transformational pieces remain unchanged, and until those decisions see the same amount of attention as the pillows in a players’ lounge, the equity gap won’t truly close.
And on Wednesday, NCAA president Mark Emmert acknowledged as much.
“We certainly still know that we’ve got a ways to go,” Emmert said. “This is not a finished task or anything remotely close to it.
