Dawn Staley, one of the crucial admired coaches in ladies’s basketball, excoriated the N.C.A.A. on Friday for its strategy to her sport and its nationwide event — a 64-team occasion that the governing physique of faculty sports activities acknowledged Friday had acquired insufficient assets in contrast with these obtainable within the males’s competitors.
“I cannot be quiet,” Staley, South Carolina’s coach, mentioned at first of a prolonged assertion posted on her Twitter account.
“What we now know is the N.C.A.A.’s season-long messaging about ‘togetherness’ and ‘equality’ was about convenience and a sound bite for the moment created after the murder of George Floyd,” she wrote later, referencing the Black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis final spring. Directing her sharpest criticism at Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, Staley mentioned that he and different affiliation executives couldn’t be allowed to “use us and our student-athletes at their convenience.”
“Every team here in San Antonio has earned and deserves at a minimum the same level of respect as the men,” mentioned Staley, whose workforce is a No. 1 seed. “All the teams here dealt with the same issues as the men’s teams this season; yet their ‘reward’ is different.”
Emmert and different N.C.A.A. executives on Friday acknowledged disparities — most prominently involving coronavirus testing and exercise services — and, in some cases, apologized for them. But Staley mentioned Friday night that it was “time for the N.C.A.A. leadership to re-evaluate the value they place on women.”
