Improving NCAA women's basketball

[Charles T]

Basketball analyst Debby Antonelli was director of marketing for women's basketball at Ohio State and Kentucky for eight years. Of marketing's four Ps, product, price, promotion, place, product is most important. It must be improved, DA says. NCAA runs 89 championship events. In terms of profit centers, the women's basketball tournament is 89th. And it's been last for many years.

In brief, and paraphrasing, her three ideas are:
1) Get in the gym and practice; get better.
2) Reposition and re-brand the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16. Eliminate regionals and move to one city, Las Vegas, as the NCAA has done in Oklahoma City and Omaha for the softball and baseball college baseball world series. It's essential if WBB is going to sell to the 18-35 male demographic. "We've never reached out to that market," says DA. "It can be done in Vegas." And separate from the NCAA corporate partner program. But to get corporate sponsors requires better inventory to sell.

3) Offensive Incentive Plan. "We need to become better scorers," DA says. Only 23 of Division I women's teams shoot 45% or better [men have 124 teams]. Incentivize coaches. ADs and conferences should reward coaches whose teams shoot 45% or better and average fewer than 14 turnovers per in-conference game. Conferences have the money to offer $100K for schools' WBB programs who reach these levels.

Amen. Antonelli has some good ideas. I like her focus on making the women's game even better, not on answering uninformed critics.

 

[UcMiami]

Basketball analyst Debby Antonelli was director of marketing for women's basketball at Ohio State and Kentucky for eight years. Of marketing's four Ps, product, price, promotion, place, product is most important. It must be improved, DA says. NCAA runs 89 championship events. In terms of profit centers, the women's basketball tournament is 89th. And it's been last for many years.

In brief, and paraphrasing, her three ideas are:
1) Get in the gym and practice; get better.
2) Reposition and re-brand the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16. Eliminate regionals and move to one city, Las Vegas, as the NCAA has done in Oklahoma City and Omaha for the softball and baseball college baseball world series. It's essential if WBB is going to sell to the 18-35 male demographic. "We've never reached out to that market," says DA. "It can be done in Vegas." And separate from the NCAA corporate partner program. But to get corporate sponsors requires better inventory to sell.

3) Offensive Incentive Plan. "We need to become better scorers," DA says. Only 23 of Division I women's teams shoot 45% or better [men have 124 teams]. Incentivize coaches. ADs and conferences should reward coaches whose teams shoot 45% or better and average fewer than 14 turnovers per in-conference game. Conferences have the money to offer $100K for schools' WBB programs who reach these levels.

Amen. Antonelli has some good ideas. I like her focus on making the women's game even better, not on answering uninformed critics.

I think the 'profit' ranking is based on them breaking down the ESPN contract equally between the 88 other championships they run (besides the men's BB tournament), where in reality 95% of the money for that contract is because of the Women's tournament.