After being in the women's basketball discussion yesterday, I came across an article in the Sunday NY Times, written by a former lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. She was for a time in charge of basic training of women at Parris Island, and she was shocked, she says, when she saw a row of chairs behind the women's formation, which the women were invited to use if they felt tired or light-headed. "And I realized," she says, "new Marines were taught that the corps had lower expectations for women."
She goes on to say that she found women were trained separately from men, and that they "hadn't performed better than men in almost every category since records had been kept." So she changed attitudes, and changed their training. She says shooting coaches told women that their arms were too short to shoot well, that the slowest women were allowed to set the pace for runs, that the hiking trails for women were shorter than those for men, and women were trained to build up their strength to avoid injuries. Before she arrived, she says 67 to 78 percent of women qualified in marksmanship. A year later she had raised it to 92 percent, in the upper range of the rate men qualified. Moreover, the injury rate went down to compare to the men's rate. Plus, "women ran faster when we placed them in groups based on ability."
She then wrote an article in a Marine publication describing these changes and their successes. And she was pushed out of her job, for "toxic" leadership, and the article was killed.
So what does this have to do with basketball? Or any other women's sport? I think it has to do with perception. And with attitudes. But some might say, basketball is different. Women are not as athletic as men. I think this raises a can of worms that no one today wants to open. And that is: any comparison of the athleticism of black men vs. that of white men. And whether fans today would watch ten white men play for the nation's basketball championship, as they did in the mid 20th century. But a white man dominated last night's game, you might say. And how many white men were on the floor?
My point is that, unlike the colonel, we perhaps don't demand enough of women. I wonder what Gene Auriema would say. I do seem to remember his teams would scrimmage against Connecticut men. But I don't know that it was against Calhoun's starters.
She goes on to say that she found women were trained separately from men, and that they "hadn't performed better than men in almost every category since records had been kept." So she changed attitudes, and changed their training. She says shooting coaches told women that their arms were too short to shoot well, that the slowest women were allowed to set the pace for runs, that the hiking trails for women were shorter than those for men, and women were trained to build up their strength to avoid injuries. Before she arrived, she says 67 to 78 percent of women qualified in marksmanship. A year later she had raised it to 92 percent, in the upper range of the rate men qualified. Moreover, the injury rate went down to compare to the men's rate. Plus, "women ran faster when we placed them in groups based on ability."
She then wrote an article in a Marine publication describing these changes and their successes. And she was pushed out of her job, for "toxic" leadership, and the article was killed.
So what does this have to do with basketball? Or any other women's sport? I think it has to do with perception. And with attitudes. But some might say, basketball is different. Women are not as athletic as men. I think this raises a can of worms that no one today wants to open. And that is: any comparison of the athleticism of black men vs. that of white men. And whether fans today would watch ten white men play for the nation's basketball championship, as they did in the mid 20th century. But a white man dominated last night's game, you might say. And how many white men were on the floor?
My point is that, unlike the colonel, we perhaps don't demand enough of women. I wonder what Gene Auriema would say. I do seem to remember his teams would scrimmage against Connecticut men. But I don't know that it was against Calhoun's starters.
