Yesterday I returned to Los Angeles after a thrilling weekend covering the Big Ten Women’s Basketball Tournament in Indianapolis, Indiana. Despite watching USC lose the title to UCLA in the third Crosstown Showdown of the season, I feel really excited about watching these teams compete in this conference in the future.
The Big Ten is the oldest Division I NCAA conference in existence and actually predates the NCAA itself by 10 years. The conference was founded in 1896 and incorporated as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives. Representatives from Purdue, the University of Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern and Wisconsin gathered and formed the conference with the aim of regulating college athletics, which had grown rampant with corruption and malpractice.
The Big Ten was one of the first conferences to sponsor men’s basketball, but didn’t begin sponsoring women’s basketball until the 1982-1983 season. Though this was a gender equality issue, it was also bound up in debates that have spanned decades to the modern day around sports and ‘amateurism’.
Through the first half of the 20th century, collegiate athletic programs across the nation struggled with the idea of compensating student-athletes. Different conferences had different ideas about the supposed purity of college sport and how money might corrupt athletics. If student athletes were paid, some argued, what would be the difference between college and professional sports? It’s almost funny to imagine these conversations in the context of our current Name, Image and Likeness climate.
The Big Ten was one of the last holdouts, offering athletic scholarships that only covered the cost of tuition. That all changed in 1957 when the NCAA ruled to allow for the disbursement of full athletic scholarships. Big Ten programs grew frustrated with their inability to pull top-tier players, and some even faced scandals around ‘illegal’ athletic scholarships. After four years of failing to attract top talent with limited incentives, the Big Ten finally voted for full grants in 1961. However, the parameters of what a scholarship entails still remain under debate across programs.
The history of college athletics is one of ever-present debates around money and ethics. But that’s not to say that gender discrimination wasn’t at play. The first four-year women’s collegiate athletic scholarship wasn’t awarded by the NCAA until 1974, when basketball legend Ann Meyers arrived at UCLA. And though Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972 was vital for the surge in women’s sports funding and participation, in order to be ‘equal,’ women’s sports had to adopt the models set forth by men’s sports.
In the 1960s, the Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW) became the official governing body for regulating women’s sports. The CIAW gave way to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) in 1971. Leaders of the AIAW didn’t want to follow in the NCAA’s commercialized footsteps and were strongly opposed to the idea of athletic scholarships.
But the AIAW couldn’t provide an organizational structure that would result in championships. The NCAA — alongside a smaller organization, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics or NAIA — could offer national championships and other incentives to programs. In 1982, despite 10 years of AIAW leadership in women’s sports, 17 of the top-20 women’s basketball programs decided to participate in the NCAA. The AIAW quickly fell to the wayside.
Louisiana Tech beat Cheyney State 76-62 in the first NCAA women’s basketball tournament that year. As many Trojan fans know, USC won the title the next two years in a row. At that point, the Pac-10 (USC’s conference at the time) didn’t sponsor women’s athletics, so the incentives offered by the NCAA were likely a major draw. The USC women’s basketball program is as embroiled as any in this historical debate on gender, amateurism and sports.
As USC and several other Big Ten women’s basketball teams prepare for the upcoming NCAA tournament, it’s beneficial to think about how far women’s athletics have come. Women and girls participate in sports at higher rates than ever could have been imagined when Congress enacted Title IX. As I watched crowds pour into Gainbridge Fieldhouse all weekend in support of their basketball teams, I was reminded that women’s sports are not only extremely competitive, but becoming more and more central in the world of your average American.
But we should also challenge ourselves to push for more. Title IX’s emphasis on equality, for instance, meant that the female physical educators who built up women’s college sports were pushed out of leadership roles and replaced with ‘professional coaches.’ The focus on education that had previously defined women’s athletics gave way to commercial interests.
As both a journalist and a fan, I am beyond excited for the future of women’s sports. I also wonder what they could look like if we divorced them from the existing models of men’s sports. It’s too late to go back, but we can imagine (and co-create) a future wherein women’s sports are not bound by the limitations of what came before.