Baloncesto

I digress from our usual subject matter to consider events in the nearby town of Stoors, Connecticut, which bills itself as the Basketball Capital of the World. While some might think that braggadocio, it is at least defensible that Stoors is the U.S. College Basketball Capital, and probably indisputable that it's the U.S. Women's College Basketball Capital. How that relates to the globe is debatable, but I'm pretty sure they would beat any women's college basketball team from Albania to Zimbabwe. 

 

The first two rounds of the tournament this year were actually such outrageous blowouts that it was difficult to watch, even for a UCONN fan. You had to feel sorry for the opposing players and coaches, who discovered they didn't belong on the same floor. Toward the end of a recent Boston Celtics game, the announcer speculated that coach Joe Mazzula might be about to "geno." It turns out that geno is now a verb meaning "to empty your bench late in the game." 

 

But the truth is that coach Geno* Auriemma's problem is that the players at the end of his bench could start for just about every other team in the country. The team this year may be the best ever, even though they lost superstar Paige Bueckers to the WNBA after last season, and she was the Rookie of the Year. Her childhood friend Azzi Fudd (whose uncle Elmer is very proud of her) will likely be the number 1 pick this year, and she isn't even the best player on the team.

 

Okay, they still have to play the games. They will most likely face UCLA in the national championship, and I wouldn't say that's a mortal lock. Basketball teams can have their off days, and UCONN was indeed very cold shooting in the first round game. (It didn't matter, they crushed anyway.)  The reason I bring all this up is that women's basketball has come an incredibly long way in past decades, and that Geno Auriemma and UCONN have led the way. There still isn't enough well-developed talent to go around among 64 college teams, which is why the early round tournament games can be uncompetitive, but the top level of play is awesome. The game is exciting to watch, and the WNBA players just won a new union contract that's going to make them millionaires. 

 

While Geno Auriemma deserves the most credit for this of anyone, it's really a testament to a change in the culture. Title IX of the 1972 Civil Rights Act provided the financial basis for the revolution. Since universities had to give athletic scholarships to women, they had to compete with each other and make the game interesting enough to sell tickets and TV ads. That took a while. In the beginning, there were few if any women who could coach basketball at a high level and that's why the game depended mostly on male coaches for a while. That's changing slowly, but it's still the case that about half (I'm guessing) of top-level women's college basketball coaches are men. As female players retire and go into coaching, the supply of women will keep increasing, but we won't really have arrived until more women start coaching men. 

 

In the meantime, I'll just say that the world can change for the better. The backsliding we're facing now is infuriating and depressing, but I'm betting it's going to be short-lived. The nearly universal reaction of disgust when Dump insulted the U.S. women's hockey team -- and the shaming of the men who laughed at it -- is strong evidence in my favor. So Go Huskies!

 

*His name is actually Luigi, Geno is a nickname. Bet you didn't know that.