On Tuesday night, the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, its coach and best player achieved a level of success unprecedented in that sport, and rarely attained in any team sport.
The Huskies capped another undefeated season (38-0) by defeating Syracuse 82-51 to win their fourth straight national championship – the first Division 1 women’s team to accomplish that feat.
Coach Geno Auriemma won his 11th national title, passing the legendary John Wooden (UCLA men’s hoop coach who won 10 in the 1960s and ’70s) for the most ever in college basketball.
And Breanna Stewart became the first male or female ever to be named most outstanding player of the Final Four all four years of her career. She and teammates Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck became the first-ever college players to finish all four seasons as a national champion because when UCLA was winning seven titles in a row between 1967 and 1973, freshmen were not eligible to play. The Stewart-Jefferson-Tuck teams finished with a four-year record of 151-5, including 24-0 in the NCAA tournament.
Yet those unprecedented accomplishments played out these past two weeks against a backdrop of detractors who complained that UConn’s excellence was accomplished by dominating inferior competition and was bad for the women’s game. That was fueled by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy who tweeted after a lopsided win March 26: ”UConn Women beat Miss St. 98-38 in NCAA tourney. Hate to punish them for being great, but they are killing women’s game. Watch? No thanks.”
Shaughnessy followed that up with a column March 28 in which he wrote: “Competition is why we watch sports. Who is going to win? Without that drama, sports would be no different from the theater, ballet, or symphony. The UConn women are so good they have stripped their sport of all drama and competition and made it similar to performance art. This is good for the game?”
Competition is among the reasons why we watch sports and appreciate the accomplishments of athletes individually and as a team. The men’s basketball championship game Monday night had arguably the most exciting finish in NCAA tournament history. No one could have predicted the closing five seconds as first North Carolina hit a 3-point shot to tie the game, followed by an even more improbable 3-pointer at the buzzer by Villanova to win the title.
UConn’s win Tuesday had none of that drama, as the Huskies scored the first nine points, raced out to a 23-6 lead and erased any doubt by building a 33-point lead in the second half. The reasons to continue watching UConn win a fourth consecutive championship were about appreciating the performance of highly skilled and motivated athletes achieving what had never been done before. That level of talent honed by hours of hard work and commitment to excellence is rarely seen on any athletic stage. The detractors who criticize UConn for setting back women’s basketball are using a standard not applied to male athletes. The UCLA teams under Wooden were not seen as diminishing the men’s collegiate game – their success heightened interest in the sport as other teams strived to achieve that same level of excellence.
This season’s Golden State Warriors often drub their NBA opponents – yet they are not criticized for killing interest in professional men’s basketball. To the contrary, a story line that has captured fans’ attention is whether the Warriors will post the best regular-season record ever in the NBA.
And as Auriemma pointed out in response to Shaughnessy’s comments, when Tiger Woods dominated professional golf between 1997 and 2008, he was not accused of making tournaments unwatchable. “When Tiger was winning every major, nobody said he was bad for golf. Actually, he did a lot for golf. He made everybody have to be a better golfer. And they did. And now there’s a lot more great golfers because of Tiger.”
The same can be said about UConn women’s basketball. Its success should be celebrated for bringing attention to the sport and used as a model for other players and teams to emulate. And that’s good for the women’s game.