by kwheele4 on March 25, 2021
The Scowl
Women Deserve It All: Why Men’s NCAA Tournament Players Should Be Stripped of All Amenities
by Miss Madness ’22
Welcome to March! Obviously most college students know what comes with March: the NCAA Women’s College Basketball Tournament. So, how come the men’s teams got so many more amenities this year?
The NCAA claims that because the men get more “views” they should be treated differently than women. Clearly, the NCAA has not considered the importance of TikTok. Several female basketball players in the NCAA tournament not only play basketball, but have exciting careers on TikTok as well.
The real question, then, should be why are the women not the only ones getting these amenities? They are putting in a lot of great advertising work for the league, while the men are not, so they should be treated like the champions that they are.
The men’s teams are, in a word, upsetting. There have already been so many upsets that not even a single person has a perfect bracket. How is that worthy of a gym? Why should that allow them to have better food than the women? Seems backwards.
Plus, shouldn’t the men be given the wide open room for their various interviews and press junkets? They’re constantly being put on television, so they should probably have a place to do their little podcasts and interviews. The space could be perfect for ring lights and mirrors which they’ll need to make sure they look camera-ready for their Zoom calls.
How about in an attempt to pay back some of the damages done to women in terms of the gaps in pay, the lack of advertising for female teams, the less expensive tickets to female games, and all other forms of gendered oppression, the NCAA just gives all the amenities to women and leaves the men high and dry like the women are typically left?
Title IX says to treat men and women equally in similar sports, but since the NCAA has never cared about that in the past, why start now? Instead, they can make up for their past mistakes by repaying the women for everything they have stripped them of in the past. Then, when the men complain, it’s like they’re getting a taste of their own medicine!
As radical as it may sound, treating men the way that women are usually treated—with little to no funding and help—should be quite simple. They are supposed to be equal, right? So this equality would just come from a simple role reversal, where women get the spotlight that is constantly taken from them!
Clearly these women have got some major abilities to make their voices heard, so why not amplify that noise by treating them like the gods they are so that they can show the world that, in fact, the NCAA does care about them! At least appearing to be conscious of gender could be a fantastic PR move for this organization—but they would have to keep it up and not drop the ball every year.
The female NCAA players made so much noise with their social media content that the NCAA has no choice but to create the radical concept of compensating women for the losses that they have accrued over their thirty-plus-year history in the league. Rather than evening out the playing field, the NCAA should flip the switch and have men suffer through funding cuts and low media attention while the women get their chance to show off their talents in the exact same sport.
So, NCAA, you should really consider giving women all of the amenities that were given to men and you wouldn’t even have to pay thedifference—just strip the men of all amenities to give women extra. You’d be sending quite the message to the world if you did!