For a third grade class project, our teacher gave each of us a small white undershirt, some fabric markers, and an ambitious task - draw what you want to be when you grow up. Because at eight years old, you're supposed to know this kind of thing. I was less excited about the project than I was about the fact I get to draw on a shirt. This went against just about everything my mother would get upset about, trying to get ink and marker stains out of my sister's clothes and mine while doing laundry.
I arrived home that afternoon, closed the bedroom door like I usually did, and got right to work. Full disclosure here - I cannot draw worth crap. This holds true both now and when I was a a kid. So needless to say this shirt design was going to be pretty pathetic. And as an added bonus, I had to draw on fabric. Not exactly an easy task, especially for a third-grade kid. My mother suggested I slide a piece of cardboard inside the shirt, so the marker wouldn't bleed through to the other side. A clever idea me, as a really bad artist, wouldn't even think about doing. Time to get to work, little eight year old me!
Within moments of the teacher giving us our homework assignment, I knew exactly what I wanted to put on that shirt. I wanted to be a professional basketball player. At the time I wasn't aware there was more than just one professional league in the world. Professional, for me, meant the National Basketball Association. For obvious reasons, this meant my t-shirt drawing was to be some image on top of a silhouette of a basketball - similar to many NBA team logos today. I was able to draw a perfect circle for the ball, complete with the black ribs, or lines, that wrap around the ball. On top of this image I drew up some random stick figure about to dunk a basketball. I'm sure the stick figure guy looked rough, complete with goggles, naturally, that I wore while playing sports. I drew an Atlanta Hawks uniform on the stick guy, and voila. Success! Unfortunately there are no pictures of the finished product, but if I remember correctly it most definitely did not look anything at all like this.
Later in life, I decided I wanted to get into coaching basketball. I did this because frankly, I am lazy, and knew my work ethic wasn't going to translate into a NBA career, much less any other league for that matter. A girlfriend was playing basketball at our high school alma mater (I was in college by then) and recommended I help coach the girl's freshman team. I wasn't going to get paid for it, but I was okay with that. I was paired to work with a head coach who also happened to be the daughter of one of my former grade school teachers - but not the one who gave us the undershirt assignment. The coach was a friendly, funny lady, and our working relationship with the freshman girls was a good match. I even got an opportunity to coach a few games on my own. We probably lost those games.
We lost a lot of games, in fact. It was frustrating for the young ladies, but also served as a learning experience for all of us. One of the basic tenets of playing together, we told them often, was that they were going to have to work as a team if they wanted to win, or at least to keep the losses close at the end. They needed to communicate better, support one another, and most important, ditch the attitudes. The coach and I emphasized this in practices, bus rides, during games, and after road game trips to McDonald's. We didn't want to get too hard on them, because these were twelve and thirteen year old girls, many of whom were fresh out of that middle school phase where everyone is mean as hell to one another. Coach and I tried out best to help put those days behind them and work together as one - a concept that may very well have been a first for many of them. It was a great learning experience that unfortunately I was unable to carry on in new locations. I ended up transferring to a bigger school out west, and needed a paying job so I could afford textbooks and random foodstuffs to shove into my college face.
Early April brings about much-anticipated sporting events. It represents the final few weeks before the NBA and NHL playoffs commence, opening day for Major League Baseball, and the men's and women's Final Four. I list the women's Final Four last because, predictably, that's what everyone comes to think of it this time of year. I'm writing this while UConn's women are up by thirty with two minutes left before they advance to the national championship game Tuesday night. This outcome was probably expected, but for some reason it gets many people hot around the collar while they thumb away angry Tweets criticizing the women's game. UConn's head coach Geno Auriemma had to yet again put critics in their place, some of them prominent sportswriters.
The criticism itself is a strange monster, but always seems to circle around the same concept - women's basketball is boring. When you ask what specifically makes it boring, there's a litany of answers - there's no dunking, there's not a lot of scoring, there's no flash or substance like in the NBA, the arenas are mostly emp...
Let's stop right there and try to piece this together. Start with "boring" problem number one - there's no dunking. While there is little doubt it is more difficult for women to dunk a basketball on a ten-foot high rim, I have yet to meet any basketball fan who attends games strictly to see players dunk. It is not the only selling point to watching a basketball game. The most prolific player in the NBA right now - Stephen Curry - rarely dunks. Not to mention the game itself at the NBA level is moving further and further away from the basket.
Next, let's tackle this lack of scoring in the women's game. At the NCAA Division I level this past season, the top twenty schools in points per game for men averaged between 80.8ppg to 86.3ppg. For the women, the top twenty ranged from 75.5 to 87.6. The difference, in other words, is minutiae. But apparently it's worth complaining about.
I'm going to couple the issue of flashy players and otherwise empty arenas into one, because they're both really the same thing. This boils down to the business of the game itself, and I somewhat agree with the critical stance here. The marketing for women's basketball - at both the collegiate and professional (WNBA) level - is downright awful. When the women's U.S. Olympic basketball team won gold at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the fever pitch for game was at an all time high. Shortly after the Olympics, the WNBA was formed, along with a few other leagues that didn't quite have the strong financial footing the WNBA did. The game was popular, and on top of the women's sports market. The problem here is that this was almost twenty years ago. The popularity faded and the business side of the game failed to properly re-brand the product. And while they're certainly trying to keep the hype train of women's basketball going, it's simply not going to get to the level it was back in the late 1990s. It also doesn't help matters the media couldn't care less to help. Instead of both women's Final Four semifinals being on the same channel, ESPN decides to put one on their main network and the second semifinal on ESPN2 - the second game simultaneously while broadcasting a World Series rematch for baseball's opening day over on the main network. Over on Twitter, it took me awhile to find the proper hashtag to write things regarding the women's Final Four. For every national broadcast of a women's college or WNBA game, there might be seven men's games. Pretty hard to keep interest in something if you're not even reaching bare minimum exposure of it.
The lack of polarizing players in both the college and professional women's game can be seen as a misogynist viewpoint. Get any star player to be in trouble with the law, and see the rhetoric of which we label her. Get any woman to be abrasive with the media, and see what we call her. Get players to express bragging, playful dialogue with a member of a rival team, and see the names we pick for the two of them as they go back and forth on social media. They just cannot win in this regard. It's shameful to say, but they simply cannot be too polarizing without enduring the usual negativity. Instead of promoting it, having fun with it, and talking about it as we always do with the men's game, we'd be quick to shame women if they habitually performed similar actions. And it's not even with just women specifically. A coach like Gregg Popovich is short with the media and hates the establishment, and he is lauded as a great coach and winner, of which he is. Geno Auriemma, another great coach and proven winner, provides similar behavior and instead he is chided for it.
I will never quite understand why critics continually downplay women's basketball by comparing it to men's basketball. For me, they are two separate concepts playing a similar game. Think softball to baseball. You never hear people comparing, say, the University of Florida's softball team to the Toronto Blue Jays. As a former women's basketball coach, the game is the same as men, but the concept is different. Sure, there's a smaller ball and shorter length of game time, but instead of women's basketball creating its own identity, we've succumbed to the constant gibberish of why isn't it like this, why can't they do that, and we have just let it form its own evil presence. Stop comparing the two. Brittney Griner won't play in the NBA not because "she'll get destroyed", but because she doesn't need to in order to prove how good a basketball player she is. Don't compare Breanna Stewart to, say, Bill Walton, as one of the more decorated collegians to play basketball. Compare her instead to Cheryl Miller, who played Breanna's game. Coaches like Auriemma and others in the women's game have heard it all before, but instead of cultivating the narrative a different way, they're just dismissing it altogether. Which in all honesty, is probably the best thing to do right now - because the narrative is just going to return in another twelve months anyway, if not this summer when the WNBA begins. But perhaps it's time to start presenting the game from a different angle. Lord knows it's not 1997 anymore. If that were the case, maybe I'd still be coaching. And maybe remember what I did with that damn shirt.