The NCAA girls’s basketball match is expanding to 68 teams origin with the novel season, giving it an equal need of participants as the males’s match as section of a concerted effort at gender parity.
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The males’s match expanded to 68 teams in 2011 with four first-spherical video games traditionally played in Dayton, Ohio. The key four for the ladies’s match will take build on the campuses of teams seeded within the tip 16 this season, however they’re going to circulate to a to-be-determined neutral attach origin with the 2023 match.
“This immediate expansion of the ladies’s basketball championship reinforces the truth that leaders within Division I are dedicated to strengthening aspects of the ladies’s basketball championship that straight away impact student-athletes,” said West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons, the chairman of the Division I Council.
“We look for forward to the certain alternate this can have for the student trip on the championship,” Lyons said, “especially as it pertains to equal crew alternatives to compete within the match.”
The expansion of the ladies’s match became as soon as amongst the suggestions attach forth in August after a comprehensive exterior gender fairness overview performed by the law company Kaplan Hecker & Fink. It became as soon as commissioned after backlash driven by social media of disparities within the males’s and girls’s tournaments, alongside with weight rooms and other facilities.
ESPN will broadcast the first four video games on the side of the leisure of the ladies’s match.
“The expanded bracket and championship alternatives for Division I girls’s basketball student-athletes are paramount,” said UT-San Antonio athletic director Lisa Campos, the chair of the Division I Ladies individuals’s Basketball Oversight Committee.
“Right here is a transition one year for the match, and exact consideration will most definitely be given for other development areas, alongside with opening-spherical video games taking build at a predetermined attach, in whine to beef up the championship trip.”
Other suggestions consist of exploring a joint Final Four with the semifinals and title video games held within the identical city on the identical weekend, though that wouldn’t happen except no longer no longer as a lot as 2027 with web sites already locked in except that time.
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The NCAA already had licensed the ladies’s match the utilization of the phrase March Madness in its branding.
“This motion corrects an disagreement that has existed between the males’s and girls’s championships for a decade,” Danielle Donehew, executive director of the Ladies individuals’s Basketball Coaches Association, said about match expansion, “and affords equitable postseason participation alternatives for Division I males’s and girls’s basketball student-athletes.”
