The NCAA faced a moment of reckoning this spring when Oregon women’s basketball player Sedona Prince shared a video showing that, although there was ample space for a weight room at the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the NCAA had only given the women a tiny fraction of the equipment it had provided the men. That unequal treatment isn’t new: Athletes in women’s college sports have consistently received less investment and support from the NCAA than their counterparts in men’s sports. But this year, athletes and coaches in women’s basketball, softball, women’s volleyball and women’s golf spoke out about it — and the world was clearly listening.
The NCAA was forced to apologize and improve the weight room at the women’s tournament, and it eventually hired an independent firm to conduct an equity review of its championship events. “When we start talking about these things and when student athletes speak up about it, that’s how change happens,” Prince told “Good Morning America” in April. “And you can see when we all spoke up about it and used our voices, there was change. We started, like, a movement for sure.”
Importantly, that movement is expanding beyond student-athletes and others who are directly involved in college sports. According to a new survey by the organization College Pulse, college students are overwhelmingly saying that enough is enough when it comes to gender equity and name, image and likeness rights in college sports.
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