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Message: [QUOTE="BBallF, post: 3929741, member: 10435"] I just wanted to put my 2 cents in about this unquestioned and glorified concept of parity by which is meant broad based equality. First of all, it's an illusion in any sport where the players get to choose their venue to play that sport in. Is there parity in college football? Why does it have to exist in women's college basketball? The best players are not going to magically go to numerous and varied schools because UCONN loses an NC or doesn't get to an FF. They are going to go where the other best players are going, where the best coaches are, where the historically successful programs are, and where it will best suit them. That has largely happened in women's basketball except that the parity is concentrated at the top of the sport in the usually represented schools like UCONN, SC, Baylor, Stanford, Notre Dame previously, etc. Secondly, grow the sport? Most people, men and women, boys and girls, will tell you that the single best game in both tournaments was the UCONN- Baylor game. That, and a player like Paige, and a team like ours this year, grows the sport. What little girl, who was serious about hoops or even just learning would not want to be like Paige? Or to play at UCONN with teammates like these? You want true parity, hypothetically take the top 40 players in the US in high school and send them to 40 different schools. What would you get? A dilution, a drop off in the quality of the sport itself, and people not even watching. If parity means UCONN doesn't win an NC and someone else does, look at the last 2 full years before Covid. Did that grow the sport? It helped 2 programs ( one only temporarily) but it didn't grow the sport. Growing the sport is agreeing to take your #1 ranked team on MLK Jr. Day in 1995 and play the #2 ranked Huskies on national TV and then being arch rivals for years. Or having a player like DT with her charisma lead her team twice to a title. Or now, with a young player crying with the POY trophy in her hands telling her teammates she loves them and watching them all coming to surround her with pure affection for her and each other. That grows the sport, not an unexamined adherence to an unrealistic concept and an assertion without evidence with a fundamental goal to be to have a woman's sport approached differently from a man's sport. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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