NCAA approves payment for women’s basketball tournament teams

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Women’s basketball teams will be paid to play games in the NCAA Tournament every March, just like the men’s have for years, under a plan approved Wednesday at the NCAA Convention .

The unanimous vote by NCAA members, which was met with a round of applause, was the final step toward a pay structure for women playing March Madness after the Division I Board of Governors voted to unanimously for the proposal in August.

NCAA President Charlie Baker joined others in recognizing the creation of a performance fund to those who came before him and helped grow women’s basketball.

“We’re the lucky ones,” Baker said. “We need to be here the day this becomes a reality.”

There is now work to be done to continue investing in women’s basketball to further develop the sport.

“That’s what I hope, that one day someone will say about us that they’re sitting on the shoulders of the work that we’ve done,” Baker said.

Performance units, which represent income, will be given to women’s teams participating in the tournament which begins this year, the 43rd edition of the event. A women’s basketball team that reaches the Final Four could earn its conference about $1.26 million over the next three years in financial performance awards.

In the first year, $15 million will be awarded to teams from the fund, representing 26% of women’s basketball media revenue. That amount will reach $25 million, or 41% of revenue, by 2028. That 26% is comparable to what men’s basketball teams received the first year the performance unit program was created.

The proposal was split into two votes Wednesday, with the first dealing with payments starting with the next NCAA tournament. This proposal received a “no”, although the vote in favor of the creation of the women’s fund itself was unanimous. The lack of a unit system for the women’s tournament has long been the subject of strong criticism.

“It’s great that women’s basketball receives the much-deserved financial reward for its success in the NCAA postseason,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said.

The women’s March Madness plan is similar to the men’s basketball unit’s schedule. Each of the 32 conferences that receive an automatic bid to the tournament will receive one unit, and additional units will be awarded to teams that receive an at-large bid out of all 68 teams.

The longer a school’s tournament lasts, the more units the school’s conference receives. The conferences decide on the distribution of unit income to each of its members. Each unit was worth approximately $2 million for the 2024 men’s tournament.

Men’s basketball teams now receive 24 percent of the media rights deal, which totals $8.8 billion over eight years, starting this year. Women’s basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament under the new media rights deal between the NCAA and ESPN, about 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.

Women have a higher percentage of media revenue to reinforce the value of each performance unit.

The NCAA sharing March Madness revenue with its member schools has long been a feature of the men’s tournament. The 2018 tournament, for example, brought in $844.3 million in television and marketing rights, the vast majority coming from a contract with CBS and Turner Sports to televise the games.

Most of the money flows through the NCAA to conferences and then back to member schools, more than 300 of which field Division I basketball teams eligible to compete in the tournament. Schools primarily reinvest in athletics, from scholarships for athletes in all sports to coaches’ salaries to practice facilities, stadiums, baseball fields and arenas.

Julie Roe Lach, Horizon League commissioner and member of the Division I women’s basketball oversight committee, called the creation of the fund “a big step” not only for women’s basketball but also for women’s sports in general towards the goal of gender equity.

As women’s college basketball “grows in popularity,” Lach said they can’t just celebrate this moment.

“Like the men’s basketball fund, the women’s basketball funds are unrestricted, meaning conferences and institutions can choose how to invest these additional dollars,” said Lach, who emphasized that the Horizon League had policies ready to reward programs for strong schedules, performances and performances. playoff success.

The women’s tournament is coming off its most successful year ever, with a record audience of 18.7 million for South Carolina’s title game against Iowa, the highest for a basketball broadcast -ball of any kind in five years.

It topped the men’s championship game — UConn winning its second straight title with a victory over Purdue — by nearly 3 million viewers. The women’s tournament also saw record attendance.