Her Video Spurred Conversation. Will It Change Women’s Sports?

There is no counting how many thank-you notes Sedona Prince might receive this month: from the four additional teams that will participate in the now 68-team women’s basketball tournament; from the participating players, whose gift bags will now be identical to those received by their male counterparts; from the new employees the N.C.A.A. hired to beef up its women’s tournament staff; and from the tournament referees, who will now be paid the same as the officials who call the men’s game.

And the hat tips may not stop there.

They could come from the coaches, administrators, fans and other women’s sports champions who for years have cajoled or cried out — even from postage-stamp-size soap boxes — for the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament to receive support similar to what was given to the hugely popular and lucrative men’s tournament.

Prince, a junior forward at the University of Oregon, accomplished last March what generations before her could not when she posted to social media a video she had cobbled together highlighting the disparity between the tournaments in a way that could not be explained away.

It showed how the men, whose 2021 tournament was anchored in Indianapolis because of the coronavirus pandemic, were provided an expansive ballroom filled with free weights, hand weights and machine weights as far as the eye could see. The women? The workout facility in San Antonio, where their tournament was centered, had a thigh-high tower of 12 hand weights — and plenty of empty space.

The 38-second clip ricocheted around social media, and included one accelerating assist from the N.B.A. star Stephen Curry, who retweeted it to his three million followers, adding, “wow-come on now!” (Within days, Prince’s posts had been seen more than 13 million times on TikTok and Twitter.)

Soon a spotlight was illuminating other inequities between the tournaments — in virus testing, food, branding — reemphasizing how the N.C.A.A. has treated the women’s game as an afterthought and its participants as second-class citizens compared with the men. The outrage came at a moment when gender and racial equity was getting greater attention in sports and other areas of American society. It prompted the N.C.A.A.’s president, Mark Emmert, who first tried to explain away some of the differences, to apologize and commission an external gender equity review.

Five months later, a report by the law firm of the civil rights lawyer Roberta A. Kaplan detailed how the N.C.A.A.’s broadcast and corporate contracts, revenue distribution model, organizational structure and culture had conspired to create, normalize and perpetuate gender equities between the two tournaments.

The 114-page report, which also proposed a litany of remedies, began by acknowledging Prince’s video, which it called the equivalent of the shot heard round the world.

“There’s no question it provided a jump-start,” Emmert said this month in an interview at the Southeastern Conference women’s tournament in Nashville. “The graphics of it were obviously impactful. Some of the information, as you know now, of course, wasn’t perfectly accurate, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is it enlivened a lot of the conversation and debates that the schools haven’t been very attentive to, and we have been now.”

The N.C.A.A., which represents more than 1,200 schools and where change comes at a glacial pace, has made some of the easy fixes in the name of gender equity for this year’s tournament.

The women’s tournament has been expanded from 64 to 68 teams (the number the men reached in 2011) and will be branded, like the men’s tournament, with the moniker March Madness, a move the N.C.A.A. had previously resisted.

There have also been more subtle changes.

Whatever welcoming gifts are delivered to the men — swag bags typically filled with T-shirts, caps, towels and other branded merchandise — will also be given to the women. The mobile apps for the two tournaments will be more compatible, there will be similar March Madness branding on courts and locker rooms and at the Final Four (New Orleans for the men, Minneapolis for the women).

There have also been organizational changes. The N.C.A.A. men’s basketball and women’s basketball staffs are now each 10 members; previously, they were 11 for the men, seven for the women. And the men’s and women’s committees, which had almost no interaction, now meet quarterly.

A gap in spending between the tournaments, which Kaplan’s report said was $35 million last year, will be narrowed by millions, said Dan Gavitt, the N.C.A.A.’s senior vice president for basketball, who declined to provide a precise figure.

(There are some inherent differences in expenses because the first two rounds of the women’s tournament are played on campus arenas, while the men’s games are played at neutral sites. Additionally, the women’s Final Four is typically played at an N.B.A. arena while the men’s is hosted in a football stadium.)

“Every budget line is compared and contrasted,” Gavitt said. “Where there are differences, they are resolved in the name of equity.”

These steps are considered long overdue by women’s basketball players and coaches and regarded as obvious fixes. But what Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer found most encouraging about Kaplan’s report, which interviewed 144 N.C.A.A. executives, staff members and coaches and administrators who serve on the organization’s councils, is that it buttresses an argument she and others have long been making: that there should be greater investment in women’s sports.

The women’s championship game last year, in which Stanford edged Arizona, drew 4.1 million viewers on ESPN, slightly more than the average N.B.A. playoff game last season. TV ratings spiked last week for the SEC and Big Ten tournament finals. The report also noted that the top women’s basketball players are more likely to remain in college longer than the best men’s players before turning pro, thus allowing fans to develop familiarity with them, which helps marketing. It also noted the popularity of women’s stars on social media: Paige Bueckers, the Connecticut sophomore guard who was last season’s Associated Press player of the year, had 900,000 Instagram followers then — more than the combined followers of the 20 players who were starters in the men’s Final Four.

“The narrative has been that women’s basketball is a loser, and that is not the case,” VanDerveer said. “And in fact, with vision and support, it could be so much better and so much bigger.”

The report concluded that the women’s tournament, whose broadcast rights have not been put up for competitive bid since 2001, is substantially undervalued. (ESPN paid $41.8 million last year for the broadcast rights of the women’s tournament and all other N.C.A.A. championships last season except for football and men’s basketball.) The report estimated that the women’s tournament itself could fetch $81 million to $112 million annually when the 13-year contract with ESPN expires after the 2024 season.

“I’d love for the numbers in the Kaplan report to be right,” said Emmert, who added that the N.C.A.A. had begun internal evaluations of broadcast partners. “It’s not just about money; it’s about making sure we can use our championships to promote these amazing athletes.”

Dawn Staley, the coach of top-ranked South Carolina, said real change would not occur until the N.C.A.A. changed its revenue distribution model for the men’s tournament, which incentivizes investment in men’s basketball at the expense of the women’s game. The N.C.A.A. last year distributed $168 million to Division I conferences based on a formula that measures men’s tournament success over the previous six years.

The Kaplan report suggested that those funds should be distributed 50-50 based on how well each conference’s men’s and women’s basketball teams performed, though it should be phased in gradually (5 percent per year for 10 years) so as to limit disruptions to current athletic department budgets.

This would incentivize schools (and conferences) to invest in women’s basketball just as the current model has encouraged them to invest in men’s basketball since the 1980s.

“It took a lot of work to keep us where we were,” Staley said of a college sports system that is weighted toward men’s sports. “I don’t get it. We all got that much testosterone? Isn’t our money green?”

In the aftermath of last year’s tournament, Staley, Stanford’s VanDerveer and UConn’s Geno Auriemma — the three most prominent women’s basketball coaches — joined U.C.L.A. Coach Cori Close, a member of the N.C.A.A.’s basketball oversight committee, on weekly calls to kick around ideas on how to leverage the moment for the good of the game. They would often invite a guest.

Asked if there would have been a Kaplan report without Prince’s video, Close did not take long to answer.

“The short answer is no,” she said.

Close added: “What I appreciate about Sedona’s courage, but it slapped me in the face, is that we’ve done so much to protect these women and shelter them from the realities of their journey, and yet the inequality gap is only widening. This moment, more than any other time, the student-athletes have all the power.”

Prince has been an unlikely catalyst.

Far from a rabble rouser, the 6-foot-7 Prince grew up in Liberty Hill, Texas, embarrassed about her height, slumping her shoulders and keeping her thoughts to herself in an effort to fit in. But that changed in her freshman season at the University of Texas after her recovery from an operation to repair a broken leg went awry, resulting in a life-threatening kidney infection.

“I started saying: ‘You know what? I’m going to start saying things I believe in,’” said Prince, who felt betrayed by trainers and doctors at the university. “But I haven’t always been like this.”

To watch Prince in the video — direct, a bit cheeky and speaking with authority — is a reminder of the circumstances a year ago.

The players who arrived in San Antonio for the 2021 women’s tournament, like the men in Indianapolis, had been robbed of that experience the previous season when the onset of the pandemic forced the abrupt cancellation of the season. They had endured regular testing, stringent protocols, canceled and postponed games, and shortened schedules — all in the hope of enjoying an end-of-season reward: the tournament. (Stanford was on the road for nine weeks because local health restrictions did not allow them to play at home.)

“The N.C.A.A. tournament was where we were like, ‘This is where we’re finally going to have an experience and it’s going to be fun,’” Prince said this month in an interview at the Pac-12 tournament in Las Vegas. “There was this sigh of relief: We made it here.”

But when players arrived nearly a week before their first game and settled in, they were greeted by something else: inadequate food, continued isolation, daily virus testing, makeshift practice and workout facilities, and some venues that were no bigger than high school gyms. Even the gift bags were meager compared with what was given to the men.

“It was just a disappointment to get there and see it was nothing like we expected,” she said.

After a few days of this — and seeing the N.C.A.A. try to explain away the inequities that had been mentioned on social media — the Oregon players vented to one another at practice. Prince decided to act because she had, by far, the biggest social media following on the team.

She made the video and posted it on TikTok. It created a few ripples, but little else, so she posted it on Twitter.

“Twitter is where that kind of stuff gets coverage and traction,” said Prince, whose social media presence has mushroomed to three million followers on TikTok, 250,000 on Instagram and 43,000 on Twitter. “And that’s when the craziness happened.”

Within 48 hours, Prince had been retweeted by Curry, interviewed on CNN and, voilà, the women had new workout facilities almost overnight.

“This was a thing that was almost impossible not to be angry about, even men and people who don’t watch sports,” she said. “That’s why it got so much attention. It wasn’t a small weight room; it wasn’t a tiny little gap. You couldn’t not see the problem.”

Prince is hopeful this year’s tournament, which should be closer to normal as pandemic restrictions wane, will also be a better experience — particularly for the teams whose season-long goal was simply to get to it. Oregon is seeded fifth in the Wichita region and will play its first game against No. 12 seed Belmont on Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn.

She hopes the change sparked by her and others speaking out last year emboldens the next generation of players to do the same. As for her own experience? She is hoping the meals are better — and the weight rooms, too, she said with a smile.

“If that video got one-twentieth of the amount of views it did, who knows,” Prince said. “There might not have been an investigation in the first place, so that’s disappointing. But now that the N.C.A.A. has taken some responsibility for what it did, it’s cool to see. Hopefully in this tournament, we’ll see a lot of things have changed.”

She paused for a moment and arched an eyebrow.

“Hopefully,” she said, perhaps wondering if she will have to put her phone to use again.