Cynthia Littleton Business Editor No matter who prevails next Sunday at the NCAA’s championship game, 2024’s March Madness will go down in history as a milestone moment for women’s sports.
Not just in the college basketball realm — but for female athletes overall. In a perfect storm, the annual bracket-bonkers frenzy around the NCAA college basketball tournament has conferred a level of respect to the women’s game that is rarely been seen across sports media, but for the quadrennial exception of the Women’s World Cup.
It’s happening this year for all the right reasons – basically, math and gravity. The games have been too good to ignore and the stats put up by such players as the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese, USC’s freshman phenom JuJu Watkins and University of Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers are too eye-popping to not analyze.
This time around, the women’s tournament has had it all: generationally talented superstars, fierce Division I school rivalries that have been brewing for years, a mini-scandal around a successful and sartorially adventurous coach and — at the last minute — another shocking but perhaps not surprising example of the extra burden shouldered by female athletes.
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