Are there funding differences between girls and boys sports at SJHS?
Last year, with the help of social media, we discovered how much the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) "prioritizes men’s basketball, contributing to gender inequity," and “significantly undervalues women's basketball as an asset,” according to a report by Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP.
The report by Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, a law firm hired by the NCAA to investigate gender disparities among the championship events, found the men were given better food, workout areas, recreation space, and gifts compared to their counterparts in the women's league. The women’s basketball players took to social media to draw attention to the different treatment they were receiving.
Sedona Prince, a player for the University of Oregon Ducks, posted a TikTok video on Twitter showing the differences between the men’s and women’s weight rooms. The women's weight room was just a set of free weights and some yoga mats, unlike the men's setup, with benches and tons of other types of weight equipment.
“When pictures of our weight room got released versus the mens, the NCAA came out with a statement saying that it wasn't money, it was space that was the problem,” Prince explained in the second part of the video. She continued to say that is not a valid argument—showing a huge empty space next to their practice court, which is next to their weight room.
In another response, Dan Gavitt, NCAA Vice President for Basketball apologized, but several women's college coaches, such as Mrs. Ann “Muffet” McGraw, former University of Notre Dame Women’s Head Basketball Coach, tweeted, “the fact that there’s a huge disparity between men’s and women’s sports is hardly breaking news. We have been fighting this battle for years.”
This can lead us to wonder, do we have equal sports representation and funding, here at SJHS?
photo by mia wurster
To determine this, we must first ask: where does all our athletic money come from? As explained by Mr. Kevin Guzzo, SJHS Athletic Director, all sports at our school have their own individual booster club. Some of the money provided for the sports come from their boosters.
“[The amount of money a sport receives] varies by the need of each sport, so some teams, like the smaller teams—golf, tennis—their boosters aren't as large because they do not need as much,” Mr. Guzzo said.
Essentially, when the team is bigger—having more parents and more needs—they receive a larger amount of money or funding from their boosters.
“A sport like football is expensive because we have to upgrade their helmets [and] shoulder pads every year. The school can only provide so much,” Mr. Guzzo said.
When we have sports like the girls and boys track and field team, it can be reasonably assumed that with more boys participating (95 boys and 57 girls), they get more funding than the girls because more people equals more boosters. In the April Wind-Up survey, students expressed they feel track is underfunded, but with such large numbers in the sport, shouldn't there be more money from the boosters?
When it comes to school spirit, SJHS has a lot of it. Football games are extremely competitive and hyped up for students. Basketball games are also very competitive and popular among students.
But when talking to a few girls from the girl’s basketball team at SJHS, who would like to remain anonymous, they expressed they feel the boy's basketball team gets more representation and more hype than the girl's team.
“It's weird the boy’s games were almost always on Fridays, when the girls typically play on Tuesdays or Thursdays,” One student said. This could be because more students go to the boy’s games versus the girl's games.
It is not just the girls basketball and track teams that feel underrepresented and underappreciated; In the April Wind-Up survey, there were many concerns about other sports, such as girls soccer, baseball, wrestling, hockey, boys and girls swimming, boys and girls cross country, boys and girls tennis, and so on. Many of the responses were aimed toward football getting the most representation and funding in the school.
Essentially, most of the funding in our school sports comes from boosters. The more people on the team, the more boosters there are, which translates to more money and support for that particular team.