'We can't let down these amazing athletes ever again:' NCAA president vows commitment to gender equity
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NCAA president Mark Emmert reiterated Wednesday that the association âdropped the ballâ with regard to amenities for the womenâs tournament bubble in San Antonio and pledged to use the experience as an inflection point to reach greater gender equity across all sports and championships in the future.
âHow do we make up for those shortcomings from this day going forward and create the kind of gender equity we all talk about to make sure itâs a reality and not just language?â Emmert said during a 30-minute news conference leading into the womenâs Final Four. âAnd we have to do that. I have to do that. We can't let down these amazing athletes ever again.â
Over the two weeks, conversation about inequities between the menâs and womenâs basketball tournaments in quality of weight room and food has ballooned into a wider look at how the NCAA manages and markets its marquee product on the womenâs side.
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The NCAA has hired an outside law firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, to conduct an independent review of gender equity in all of its championships.
âWhile the gender equity review we need to do has to begin and focus on womenâs basketball, itâs not going to be only about womenâs basketball,â Emmert said. âWomenâs basketball, like men's basketball, those are the two marquee sports for the NCAA championships, and if you donât get those right, youâre not going to get anything right and my commitment to that is unequivocal. It has to be gender equity across the board.â
One of the issues that has come to the forefront in discussing differences between the men's and womenâs tournament is why certain branding, including the March Madness logo, has been used only for the menâs tournament. Attention has also been raised on why the menâs championship weekend is branded as the Final Four while the womenâs is referred to as the Womenâs Final Four in its official logo. Emmert said those discussions have already started to take place internally and that there was no barrier to the womenâs tournament using whatever marks and logos it wants.
âIf the womenâs basketball committee wants it used thereâs no reason they canât use it,â Emmert said. âSimilarly, Final Four is used by both, and if one wants to use the logo with a gender identifier is up to the committee, and they can do whatever they want to do with those things. The details of how and why those decisions were made, we'll get to through our review. iâm committed to making sure we use the marks as effectively as we can in promoting the NCAA.â
Emmert said he continues to be apologetic and to take personal responsibility for shortcomings at the womenâs event.
âObviously I wish that there had been both from me and everybody greater attention to exactly what was going on on both platforms, so that we didnât have these issues, whether it was the weight room issue or the food differentials,â he said. "Those things just shouldnât happen and we could have and shouldâve avoided the and we didnât. Thatâs a miss on my part, on everybodyâs part. We were really focused on getting through this during a pandemic and werenât focused on the kind of equity we needed to be. The thing Iâm most regretful for is we didnât catch it up front.â