Insights

Women’s college basketball did not just arrive, it’s always been here. Just ask the late Pat Summitt … 20 years ago.

The back of the loading dock area at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, in retrospect, was a strange setting for this. But here was Pat Summitt – the Pat Summitt – sitting up on a way-too-high dais, with a way-too-bright spotlight pointed right in her face, being asked about playing in the first-ever Women’s Final Four 25 years earlier. She paused, smiled, thought about what she wanted to say, and then leaned forward in her seat.

“We got instant credibility, exposure, and respect for our game,” she said. “That, to me, was just the very beginning of what you see now in women’s basketball. And without the NCAA, I mean, we would not have made the great strides at a relatively fast pace. It seemed a little slow at times, but just having that opportunity for the national championships to be on national TV, and for our players to be seen, and our coaches to have a chance to really help showcase the game with the help of the student athletes.”

For the record: Pat Summitt said this the day before the national championship game … in 2007.  

If you were not around  (or were not paying attention), the legendary head coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols was doing what she always did – stumping for the game. She was on the eve of winning her second-to-last national title, with a roster that included a sophomore named Candace Parker, and yet she was still having to explain why women’s basketball deserved equal billing.

Oh, there were things happening – ESPN, for the first time in its history that year, had wall-to-wall coverage of the game, including a simulcast on ESPN2, a real-time analysis show on ESPNU, a live chat with Nancy Lieberman, and a full team of reporters for ESPN.com – but there were still signs that the game was stuck in neutral.

But why? It didn’t make sense.

As a 22-year-old reporter covering the Rutgers women’s basketball program on the run to the title game, I can tell you, covering the women’s Final Four was … different. There was an element of a familial traveling circus. There were people who had been coming to this event for years, like you see at The Masters or the Daytona 500. There were the grizzled, old-school coaches Texas’ Jody Conradt and Penn State’s Rene Portland prowling the hotel hallways talking shop. And the forerunners in the media room, like the venerable Mel Greenberg of the Philadelphia Inquirer who fought to organize a weekly national Top 25 poll because it would help legitimize the sport.

All this was here – and there was Pat Summitt pounding the table trying to get people to understand how great it was. She knew. She knew people would come around.

This weekend is Final Four weekend. The women take the floor Friday and Sunday afternoon in Tampa; the men Saturday and Monday night in San Antonio. Both are unique events – part-convention, part spectacle – but the men always received the dearth of coverage and attention. Caitlin Clark’s ascension over the last few years has dramatically changed that, of course, but it was due in large part to the seeds that were planted over the years.

The product had always been outstanding – go, and you would see – but the hurdles were always in the way. Case in point: the prevailing line of questioning ahead of that Final Four was about the lack of attendance at the Regional Finals; and then ahead of the title game, was about how the stingy defenses created ugly games that might set the women’s game back.

(Again, 2007. Weird time.)

There will be a breathless amount of media coverage and #hottakes and social media musings about the first post-Caitlin Clark women’s Final Four. Will the ratings dip? What will happen? Will people still tune in? Please, do yourself a favor and ignore those. Women’s basketball hasn’t arrived – it’s always been here. No one was giving it the time of day, so you didn’t notice it over there in the corner of the sports world. Now, good luck trying to ignore it.  

The men will provide incredible games – four No. 1 seeds for only the second time ever – with the sport’s two biggest stars potentially on a collision course on Monday night. Duke’s Cooper Flagg and Auburn’s Johni Broome. It’s a marketer’s dream.  

For decades, Summitt knew this and did whatever it took to try and put the women’s game – women’s sports – on the same stage as the men. Every year, the men would set up shop in Atlanta or New Orleans or Indianapolis or Minneapolis, and just … exist. CBS came and brought its A-list talent; every media outlet in sent teams of camera crews and reporters; any administrator worth their job was there to get things done. Meanwhile, in addition to playing a brutally tough conference schedule, would pack her non-conference schedule with the likes of UConn and North Carolina and Stanford and Texas, in the hopes ESPN might give you a midday Saturday slot or CBS would let you be the lead-in to PGA Tour coverage and not be pre-empted for bowling or billiards coverage.

In 1995, when ESPN asked No. 1 Tennessee to play UConn on Martin Luther King Day, both teams were undefeated, Summitt told the network’s longtime director of college programming Carol Stiff: “For the good of the game, I’ll take the game.” Tennessee went to UConn and lost by 11. Afterwards, Stiff was chatting up folks in the hallway, when she saw Summitt, alone, standing outside of the locker room studying the box score. The coach saw Stiff uttered one sentence before walking off.

“For the good of the game, Carol.”  

She knew. She knew what it would take.

The people just needed to pay attention, and you had to give them a reason to do so.  

Now look.

‍