Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311210110
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Growth in women's basketball isn't a gusher, but it's not drips and drops, either. And Virginia Tech and Radford may get wet.
One of the most visible changes in the game - the expansion of the NCAA Tournament field from 48 to 64 teams - gives Metro Conference contender Tech a better chance at its first NCAA appearance. The Big South's tournament champion has an automatic bid for the first time, opening the door for the Highlanders.
Other changes such as more television and three-official crews will be noticed long before March - but not everywhere or for everyone. Only six conferences (ACC included, but not Metro or Big South) will use three officials. And even though, for example, Home Team Sports will televise at least 19 women's games this season, at least six will be on tape-delay.
Not even the expanded NCAA Tournament is as good as it sounds for at-large prospects, Virginia Tech coach Carol Alfano said. Because of the increased number of automatic bids, there are only seven more at-large bids than when the field was at 48.
Most gains in the women's game seem to come slowly or with sacrifice. Expansion of the NCAA field was delayed, Alfano said, because first-round games will remain at campus sites and the NCAA doesn't have the staff to oversee 32 sites. Marcy Weston, the NCAA's national coordinator of officiating, says many schools don't have enough money in their women's basketball budgets to pay for three-person crews.
The Metro tournament title game is on live TV, but starts after the men's championship game, probably around 9:30 p.m. Not ideal, but . . .
"We want that," Alfano said. "That's better than nothing. That's why we play at such a terrible time. You just kind of have to start somewhere. We're going to take what we can to get on TV."
Radford coach Lubomyr Lichonczak said women's basketball might be wise to get more brazen, perhaps lobbying for a day off between the semifinals and final at the Final Four, as the men have.
"We've got a product that obviously people care about," he said, noting that this year's Final Four at the Richmond Coliseum already is sold out. "I think we deserve to dictate to the network when our games should be played."
There's one boiling issue on which women's coaches aren't looking for compromise: Salaries and contracts. The Women's Basketball Coaches' Association is taking a survey of its membership, due in late November, that's designed to compare compensation of men's and women's coaches in areas such as base salary, length of contract, perks, radio/TV show money, buyout clauses and bonuses.
Some coaches, such as Alfano, Lichonczak, Virginia's Debbie Ryan and Tennessee's Pat Summitt, either have gotten contracts or equalizing pay raises within the past year. Alfano has a four-year deal and Lichonczak this fall signed a two-year extension of his original three-year deal.
Inequity remains, said Maria Ahmann, a spokeswoman for the Women's Basketball Coaches' Association.
"We don't have any concrete information, but in general, they're unequal," Ahmann said. "The whole problem with the issue is that nobody really knows. There's a lot of speculation and a lot of guessing going on."
Not about the root of the matter, Alfano said. For too long, she said, women's basketball coaches have been paid less with no job security because the men's game happens to be a more attractive product to fans and TV, making it a big-money sport with big-time pressure and heavy contracts and salaries.
"Debbie has done a lot for UVa," Alfano said. "If the dollars aren't there, that's not UVa's fault."
The dollars may be coming, although the women's game is unlikely to command a seven-year, $1 billion TV contract for its tournament, as the men's game did with CBS. The women's game, however, benefited from that contract when the NCAA got CBS to agree to televise three NCAA women's regular-season games and the women's Final Four. ESPN has jumped in, too, with a 16-game schedule.
HTS, a regional cable network, will air a 10-game ACC package, five and possibly seven Big East games and two Colonial Athletic Association contests. The ACC and CAA tournament championships will be televised live; the Big East's will be shown on tape delay.
The business reason, said HTS communications director Scott Broyles, is to target alumni and to counter-program against over-the-air networks.
"You see, certainly, a growing excitement in the sport," Broyles said. "You've got some quality play, some more personalities."
That's what the women's game is searching for, Alfano said - a Michael Jordan, a focus for fans' attention. If a TV viewer is impressed with Ohio State's Katie Smith, for example, he or she may tune in again even if a top-ranked team isn't on. And maybe they'll be interested enough to buy a ticket to a local game.
Nationally, attendance has increased 55.5 percent from 1988 to last season, reaching an all-time high of 2,886,936. However, only 26 of 294 Division I teams averaged 2,000 or more in home attendance in 1992-93; 57 averaged 1,000 or more.
The average attendance for all Division I games in '92 was 871. Tech drew 499 per game with a high of 1,500; Radford averaged 320 with a high of 900.
"It's got to be the thing to do, the acceptable thing to do," Alfano said. "It's not the student body filling up the stands."
A demographic fan study conducted by the women's coaches association at the women's Final Four in 1988 showed a typical fan was a woman aged 25-34 and likely to be single. The men in the survey were mostly aged 35-44 and likely married with children.
Winning and marketing the product, Alfano said, may pull more students into coliseums.
"We haven't gotten that mystique yet," she said. "As we win, people will make it a social event."
Alfano, Tech's coach since 1978, has seen the Hokies' program push past boundaries before. Tech's growth in some ways mirrors what Lichonczak calls "phenomenal" advancements for women's basketball nationally in the past 10 years.
"We have a very progressive athletic director," Alfano said of Dave Braine, who succeeded Bill Dooley after the short reign of Dutch Baughman. "Look how we crawled in the '80s. I've got scars that'll never go away on my knees. We've come from being the least-committed program [in the Metro] to probably the most committed program. We're a front-runner now."
In a summer issue of Women's Sports and Fitness magazine, Radford ranked 10th among Division I institutions in a survey that studied the relationship of each school's percentage of women's athletes and the money spent on them. Lichonczak said the situation is improving nationally, too.
"I think the growth is outstanding," he said. "It's only human nature that if you're involved in it, you want the growth to go faster. [But] we're getting there."
by CNB