As March Madness returns, it’s time to look at the skeletons in the NCAA’s closet

March Madness is back. In a special episode of Edge of Sports, Dave Zirin takes a retrospective look at past interviews with Washington Post journalist Danny Funt on sports gambling, and with professor Diane Williams on the NCAA’s checkered past regarding women’s basketball.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden, David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Dave Zirin:

Welcome to Edge of Sports only on the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zirin. In this special March Madness edition, we are proudly airing two interviews that could not be more timely as college basketball and the road to the final four take center stage. The first is on the explosion of app-based sports gambling in the United States and the second on the hidden history of NCAA women’s basketball. So let’s start with gambling. You may not realize this, but more people bet on the NCAA basketball tournament than even the Super Bowl. We’re talking $3.1 billion and that’s just the legal betting. The Final four may not be the Super Bowl in terms of ratings, but it is the profiteering Super Bowl for FanDuel, DraftKings and all of those gambling apps that have not only colonized the commercial time during games but are also integrated into the sports commentary itself.

Who is Charles Barkley betting on in the tournament he’s supposed to cover? He’s about to tell you. What they don’t tell you is that these wildly popular apps have led to a crisis of gambling addiction, particularly a youth gambling addiction. Thousands of young people are calling hotlines for addicts feeling like they have lost control of their impulses and their bank accounts. They’re learning a hard lesson from which the young used to be insulated. The lesson that the reason those casinos look so nice is because the house always wins. This proliferation of addicts has become a mental health crisis so deep that Congress is even taking a look to see if more regulation is needed, but rest assured that oversight will be resisted. The facts are that this addiction economy has become the financial lifeblood of sports, and we need a deep dive to understand what this is all about, whether we are sports fans or not, and there is no better person to guide us into the underbelly of this world. Then reporter Danny Funt. This is Danny Funt’s beat sports gambling. He covers it for the Washington Post and he has a book coming out that breaks it all down. So he knows this world and this interview could not be more relevant. I started by asking him how big legal betting is for the economy of sports and where the trend lines are pointing to. Let’s go to it now, Danny Funt.

Danny Funt:

Yeah, I’d say it’s transforming every aspect of the business of sports, the fan experience, certainly the laws that affect sports and those aspects. Yeah, it’s a game changer. 38 states and DC have legalized sports betting several more expected to in the near future and from teams to commissioners to certainly the ncaa. Everyone is trying to cash in on that legalization, making some suspect choices in the process. And yeah, I mean they’re sort of facing the consequences as we’ve seen in some pretty shocking headlines recently, but it’s only going to continue. I still think we’re in the early innings of this sports betting experiment in the us.

Dave Zirin:

So you’re saying that the recent headlines, you’re talking about some of the betting scandals involving athletes as well as some of the statements of coaches and players who talk about being heckled or even being threatened because of fans not making their gambling quotas. Is that what you’re referring to?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, exactly. It was kind of funny. March Madness is one of the biggest betting periods of the year, certainly a time when the sports books want to get positive coverage and attract as many new customers as they can, and yet there was just an onslaught of grim news from the sho Otani betting scandal, an NBA bench player who got caught up it looks like with some basically a version of point shaving involving his prop bets to the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers saying he gets menacing voicemails from people when the Cavs cost betters money, the list goes on. It was a rough month for betting advocates.

Dave Zirin:

Yes. So is a reckoning inevitable if these stories keep continuing of players finding themselves with spare time, their phones disposable income and wanting to make bets? I mean, it’s such a perfect stew for more scandal and what would a reckoning look like and is it just too much money for the leagues to even want to have a reckoning for the effects of gambling?

Danny Funt:

That’s such a pressing question. I don’t know exactly. I think I’m skeptical that leagues would actually, that have recently legalized betting would go so far as to outlaw it. I think they might reign in the sorts of things you can bet on. One of the things that leads to all sorts of suspicious betting is that obviously you can bet on much, much more than just who’s going to win nowadays. You can bet on basically every facet of the game down to how a certain play is going to play out. So I think things like that could face stiffer regulations, the ways you can bet on college sports already are being reigned in. But yeah, I think the leagues have placed their bet, lawmakers have placed their bet and they’re kind of having to live with it, and I don’t know what level of addiction or what level of corruption would have to go down for them really to pull back in a meaningful way, but they’re being tested recently.

Dave Zirin:

You mentioned addiction, gambling addiction. What are we seeing on that front in the United States especially? Obviously since the legalization,

Danny Funt:

Pre legalization, the number that was floated was that roughly 1% of the population is susceptible to gambling addiction post legalization. Now that basically every smartphone is a casino, those rates could be as high as 4% I’m told, which is really a staggering number. You think about it like in a full NFL stadium, maybe 3000 people could be suffering from gambling addiction. It’s kind of incomprehensible. I think beyond that, it’s important to recognize there’s a clinically diagnosed gambling addiction that needs a medical intervention, but then there’s all sorts of problem behavior. Just like with drinking alcoholism is one thing, but people might drink more than they ought to along that spectrum, and the same thing is proven true with gambling, and it’s so important to note with that, that it’s not just can I gamble or can I not gamble? It’s the ways you can gamble and some of the most profitable types of betting, some of the most popular types of betting are some of the most addictive, and that’s certainly driving addiction rates across the country.

Dave Zirin:

I’m speaking just anecdotally, but my son who’s in high school has come home and told me about kids placing bets with other kids because they got their parents FanDuel accounts and my son said, dad, we’re creating a new generation of bookies out of our high schools. Is that just my son’s massive public school experience or are we seeing indicators about youth gambling addictions?

Danny Funt:

No, I don’t think that’s one-off. How old’s your son, by the way? I’m curious.

Dave Zirin:

Actually, he’s 15. He turns 16 tomorrow.

Danny Funt:

Yeah, that’s a classic time of life to start playing around with this. No, I think sort of an irony of legalization is it’s shown a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, Hey, bookmaking is a winning business. Maybe I should get involved in that. I was just talking, I live near Colorado State University. I was just talking with a student there who said the legal betting age is 21 by 19, as soon as he got to college, he was betting through offshore sports books that are unregulated and through some campus bookies who just like your son’s classmates got inspired by all the betting around them and said, Hey, this is an easy way to make a buck. No, I think the argument for legalization was we’ve got this robust black market, let’s bring it into the sunlight just as the same way that happened with cannabis and regulate it, tax it, implement some consumer protections.

In reality, yes, some of that has happened, but it’s also caused the black market to surge for a number of reasons with adults and certainly with young people. Young people, I don’t know exactly what age definitely are more susceptible to compulsive bedding, which is obviously dicey because they probably have a lot less disposable income, but it’s a reason why advertising that targets college students. You can understand why they’re attractive new customers, but that’s some of the most controversial types of marketing and some of the partnerships that Sportsbook struck up in recent years literally with universities in some of those cases got shut down pretty quickly just because that seemed like a line too far. Even for gambling advocates.

Dave Zirin:

Do the legal gambling concerns, the fanduels, et cetera, do they give a damn about these issues of addiction? You see they do the 1-800-GAMBLER at the end of their ads, or is this just window dressing the equivalent of a cigarette company saying, oh, by the way, you can get lung cancer?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, so true. I mean, I think whether they give or damn or not meaningful change can’t come from sportsbook self-policing. Just a week ago I talked to a guy who was one of the top officials at one of those kind of second tier sports books, and he was saying the incentives just aren’t there to crack down internally on problem gambling. Those are literally your best customers. Those are your whales who you’re showering with promotions and egging on with these kind of concierge services to keep those people betting. So their rationale as well, they’re our best customers. If we boot them, they’re just going to go to our competitors. We’re going to lose market share. They’re going to find a way to keep betting. So it’s not really in our best interest to do anything meaningful about that, which is why this person and a number of people across the industry are saying regulators need to impose much, much stiffer fines when sports books are caught recruiting or egging on problem betters, and there’s also ways beyond that, just really simple fixes short of banning gambling that would make a difference.

Like one of the tenants of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses. Chasing your losses is like pre-game. I bet on the Denver nuggets to win, they’re down at the first quarter, I place another bet they’re losing at halftime even more. I place a third bet. You can kind of trick yourself into thinking, well, the odds have gotten better, so if they make a miraculous comeback, I’ll make a fortune. Obviously, more often than not, that doesn’t play out classic way to bet over your head. So if a tenant of responsible betting is don’t chase your losses, perhaps sports books could just not take those bets past the point. If I keep depositing money in my account during a game and upping my bets, they could just cut you off and say, you need a cool down period. Things like that seem to me like a lot more practical incremental changes that definitely would make a difference.

Dave Zirin:

Let’s talk about the European experience with legalized sportsbook betting its effect on soccer. Does that have anything to teach us about how bad this could get or where this could go?

Danny Funt:

Yeah, I think absolutely the UK betting market is about a decade ahead of the US as far as legalizing online betting. If you just walk around London, the betting shops are all over town. It’s kind of those people over there are kind of numbed to that culture, but as far as seeing where they are as foreshadowing where the US could be, there’s definitely been kind of an awakening that, not that they’re going to ban petting anytime soon, but the public health consequences that come with it. I wrote it down anticipating that question. There was a study last year that found that what they called gambling related harms cost the UK 2.3 billion annually. So that’s a case where sure, they maybe get tax revenue. Sure, it might create jobs, but the harms are clearly outweighing the gains, at least according to this study. And you’ve got similar studies in the US showing that the economic price of the economic activity goes down in states that have vibrant legal betting markets, even if they’re bringing in a certain amount of gambling tax revenue. Again, the scales are imbalanced Beyond that gambling addiction. There is just a fact of life and it’s ubiquitous if you go to a soccer match just like it’s becoming at all sorts of American sports. So yeah, a lot of warning signs of where the US market could be headed.

Dave Zirin:

Now, I haven’t been surprised to see the explosion of sports gambling. I haven’t been surprised to see the rise in addiction rates. I’ll tell you what has surprised me is seeing how this has been embraced by members of the sports media. What are the implications of seeing so many established grade A trusted members of the sports media embracing this, giving odds during games and becoming spokespeople for sports betting? That has surprised me. What are the implications of that in your mind?

Danny Funt:

I think it’s definitely normalized sports betting and made it seem acceptable to the mainstream. You could argue in a lot of different things whether media is just a reflection like a mirror of society or whether it’s influencing society. I think there’s no doubt that there’s certainly been an influence in making sports betting just ubiquitous and intertwined with the fan experience. One of the first articles I wrote on this topic was for the Columbia Journalism Review. Looking at that question, what caught my interest actually was the ethical question of whether sports reporters should be betting on games. It seemed like a ripe opportunity for gambling’s version of insider trading, and I think some of that is definitely taking place, but just as far as media companies embracing gambling, there’s a lot of factors that made this the perfect time for sports betting to explode in the us.

Definitely one of them is how so many sports outlets are imperiled and facing brutal financial times. I know you looked at Sports Illustrated recently in one of your recent episodes, they tried to latch onto this bandwagon licensing their name to a sports book in Colorado here and a few other states that clearly didn’t write the ship, but yeah, from the biggest personalities in sports to the biggest names in sports, E-S-P-N-I think is a huge example. Recently licensing their name to a sportsbook, and now you go on ESPN’s website, you turn on a game, you’re indicted with appeals to bet on ESPN bet. I actually just spoke with a very knowledgeable bet who worked as an odds maker as well. He was saying similar to you that his 8-year-old son was seeing so many ESPN bet ads. This guy felt obligated to teach his son like the basics of probabilities, why betting is a losing venture for customers. It’s kind of surreal to think that a parent would feel a responsibility to coach their 8-year-old on that as they might responsible drinking or the dangers of smoking, but that’s just the world we live in.

Dave Zirin:

So if you were in charge of the sports world, how would you handle all of this? Is the wine simply out of the bottle and it’s just about managing the crisis? Is it possible to still ban this and get it out of sports? Where are we right now? And if you did have that kind of power, what could be done?

Danny Funt:

As I said earlier, I’m skeptical just practically speaking that any states are going to outlaw sports betting that have legalized it anytime soon. I think definitely when states kind of go online and are a little late to the party like Ohio and Massachusetts in the last year or so in North Carolina in recent months, they’re imposing much strict stricter regulations than some of the early states, just seeing bad examples of things that could easily have been avoided. So risk-free promotions were a reason why millions of people, I think took up sports betting thinking, oh, this is literally free money. I can’t lose. You certainly could lose your money. You could also get hooked on gambling from a false sense of how easy it could be. Those have been kind of stamped out. I think more promotions are basically fraudulent still and deceptive, and those could be police more aggressively.

I think a fairly straightforward fix that if I was this sports betting czar I would see too is in a lot of states, I think the regulatory apparatus just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes the state lottery is in charge of overseeing sports betting. Now obviously the lottery is in the business of raising money for the states. What sort of incentive do they have to crack down on sportsbook operators that are bringing in betting revenue? Even more questionable, I’d say, is when the lottery is in charge of running the sportsbook. In that case, you’ve got someone who’s functioning as an operator and a regulator. It’s no surprise that there are plenty of examples of them not self-policing very effectively. So I think state by state, if you had a truly independent commission that was charged with overseeing sports books, it would be a little bit of a fair fight. So often when customers say, Hey, this is deceptive. Hey, I’ve been screwed over by a sportsbook. The deck is stacked so much in favor of the operators of these companies, those sorts of complaints, even when I think they’ve been wronged, pretty egregiously, just go nowhere. So I think if you had a really aggressive independent regulator state by state, that would make a big difference, and there’s very few examples of that currently.

Dave Zirin:

I want to paint a picture for you and I want you to tell me if I’m being a Cassandra

Or if this is in the land of the possible, a chicken little, if you will, is there a future where sports gambling becomes so hegemonic to the fan experience that people start keeping their kids away, they don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate. The audience for sports thins, the profit margins do not. People start thinking the fix might be in, so they start drifting away, and at the end of the day, gambling, which has been so profitable as a revenue stream actually hollows out sports as we know it. Is that in the land of the possible, like an actual darn near destruction of this incredibly vast athletic industrial complex

Danny Funt:

Man, that really got my wheels turning. I hadn’t thought of that. And yeah, it seems feasible. The leagues are certainly betting against it. You brought up the integrity of the game, like do we think matches are fixed? There was always some of that, but it’s just gone through the roofs post legalization. Even players like Rudy Gobert on the Minnesota Timber Wolves made this money just at a referee recently and got a hundred thousand dollars fine for it. The obvious insinuation is he’s saying the ref is on the take. Maybe he’s looking out for a bet by swallowing his whistle or something. The confidence in the integrity of the games has definitely taken a hit, and yet the leagues aren’t spooked enough by that to really do anything about it. So that’s something that I’m really interested in as far as people saying, let me keep my kids away from sports. I just find American sports are so deeply rooted. I don’t know. I mean, maybe parents don’t take their kids to the race tracks because they don’t want them to start betting on horses. That might be a precedent worth looking at. But as far as football, basketball, golf, baseball, major sports that are the first things we talk about when we meet people, I don’t know. That feels a little out there, but I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.

Dave Zirin:

Hey, horse racing and boxing, were once two of the most popular sports in the United States. So just because something is doesn’t mean it will always be. I can’t let you go without mentioning that you’re doing a book and I was hoping you could tell us something about the book. What about sports gambling? Are you set to explore? What’s your thesis? What are you going for with this book?

Danny Funt:

Thank you for asking. I would say what I’m going for is I want to rewind a bit because I feel like just as a sports fan myself, as someone who follows politics pretty closely, it felt like the Supreme Court opened the door for states to start legalizing, and then seemingly overnight it was just, okay, New Jersey, Delaware. Soon after that, New York, Illinois we’re up to 38 states counting Nevada that have legalized, as I said, more are going to do. So you don’t hear a robust public debate about that. It seems like, okay, this is a moneymaking opportunity for states. We used to be adamantly against it, but now other states are doing it, so we got to get on board. The leagues used to speak about sports betting literally as an evil that was poisonous to sports. Now they’re sports bettings biggest backers, again, seemingly overnight.

So with the book, I definitely want to force us to have a serious conversation about these pros and cons, whether, as we’ve talked about today, the harms outweigh the positives. I also want to pull back the curtain a bit on what goes on inside of sports books. We see ads for FanDuel and draft gigs and Caesars pretty much everywhere. I don’t think a lot of us know exactly how those companies operate, how they think, they think about betters, what their motivations are, and I’m going to definitely get inside of those companies and give a closeup look at how they approach this game and try to anticipate where this is all going. As we’ve talked about, looking at Europe, even just looking at states that are a couple of years ahead of some of the others and the second guessing they’re having about what they’ve signed up for. So it’s a bit retrospective. It’s a bit of making sense of this chaotic world we’re living in and looking forward and seeing, as I said, we’re in the early innings. Is this going to be something that the powers that be are going to wish they hadn’t signed up for?

Dave Zirin:

Wow, that was the truth about the gambling industrial complex. Thank you, Danny. Fun. But now in this special March Madness edition of Edge of Sports, we turned to women’s hoops. Last year, the women’s college basketball Final Four for the first time, drew higher ratings than the men’s, significantly higher. In fact, this was historic, yet much of the way it was explained, centered around the then Iowa Senior Guard, the record breaking Kaitlyn Clark, whose Hawkeye’s team lost in the finals to South Carolina. Others countered this saying that the growth of the game is deeper than one player. A recent New York Times article opined that the NCAA had long set the table for this level of interest to take off, but both of these theories are woefully inadequate. Such a superficial analysis ignores the way that the NCAA suppressed women’s hoops for years. It also overlooks the Hidden history, the very foundation of Women’s College of Basketball that dates back decades to a league called The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the A IAW, the A IAW is a remarkable story all its own, and was the collegiate hoops home for legends like Lynette Woodard, Nancy Lieberman, and the Queen of the Court, Lucia Harris.

It’s also a history that the NCAA does its best to obfuscate because in this saga, they’re not the good guys. Well, we are about to revive one of my favorite interviews that we’ve done on the show. We are speaking to former roller derby great and current McDaniel College professor Diane Williams, who is the source of knowledge about the history of the A IAW. You want to learn where modern women’s college basketball really comes from. We got you on Edge of sports.

Speaker 3:

So I’ve been a fan of the Iowa Women’s team since I was a grad student there. Got to know a little bit about the coaching stuff, got been watching those teams for the last 10 plus years, and Caitlin Clark is an individual who is incredible, obviously ridiculously talented. I’m thrilled. She went to Iowa. She was an Iowa kid, and she really is an interesting figure in that she’s really taking seriously the idea of being a role model and the idea of being a star. I think in an interesting way, she’s balancing those pretty well and thinking about both her own success, her team’s success, and the broader picture of women’s basketball, of women’s sports, and of just celebrating the potential that is there, and she’s showing us some of that potential in her play and in the way she’s navigating all the different pressures and excitement of this moment.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, I think she’s really interesting too. I’ve felt like there’ve been times where the media has tried to play her against other players, particularly Angel Reese, Kelsey Plum, who we’re going to talk about a little bit more, and she doesn’t take that bait. I feel like she’s really sort of mature and intentional about being a white superstar, and that’s certainly unique for somebody that age.

Speaker 3:

It’s also such a reminder to me of all those top players on those teams have played together. They know each other, they go way back. And I think sometimes that’s one of those things that when media wants to jump in and divide, we forget that there’s relationships already existing there, and depending on how the players want to relate to each other, Caitlyn Clark seems to be dedicated to the lifting up and supporting across the board, and let’s go. Let’s all get better together. I mean, and relishing the competitiveness and the She’ll trash talk. She’s dedicated to her team. She’s going to defend what she thinks is right, and she always has, and she wants everybody else to too, right? Yeah.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Now, when she hit that 30 footer to set the NCAA women’s scoring record breaking Kelsey Plums, mark, the announcers were really big on saying that Caitlyn Clark has now scored the most points in college women’s history. Now, that’s not quite correct, is it?

Diane Williams:

No, it is not. So before the NCAA offered women’s intercollegiate sport period, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics, the A IAW, they had for 10 years been hosting Women’s Intercollegiate Sport. It was led by women. It was the entire athletic governance organization was founded by women who were physical educators and who were really dedicated to creating a different kind of sport culture and one that was for women, and it was educationally rooted. It had, the organization was focused on student athletes rights, their wellbeing, sport being a part of their educational experience, something that the NCAA sort of has a different take on a little bit more of a commercial view on that side. And so the scoring record, actually, Kelsey Plums record was from the NCAA years, which started in 82, but there’s 10 years of history before that that were also, there was another important record that Caitlyn Clark broke a few games later.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, speak about that. Who was the A IAW all time scoring leader?

Diane Williams:

Yeah, so there’s two. The big college scoring leader was Lynette Woodard from Kansas, and she set that record right at the end of the a I W’s time, even leading intercollegiate athletics for women. And actually, if you watched the game when Clark broke that record, Lynette Woodard was there. She was at Carver Hawkey Arena in Iowa City. They interviewed her before the game. They gave her a standing ovation, and both her and Clark have talked about the significance of both of them being there, and the idea that partly Woodard said, Clark is helping to bring attention to this history that has been really ignored. Some would argue buried that there’s so many women in intercollegiate basketball we don’t even know about. We don’t know their stories, we don’t know their glories, and yet this history is just, it was 10 years before the NCAA offered sport, and it was big.

Dave Zirin:

So you used the word buried. Why do you think this history is so buried and because that certainly speaks to an intentionality, to use that word again about the A IAW and honestly, I love sports history. Without your work, I never would’ve known about the A IAW. Why is this history obscured?

Diane Williams:

Well, so I don’t know if I can necessarily say why I don’t know the intentions, but I can tell you a little bit of the story. Right? When the a IW started, the NCAA didn’t have interest in facilitating women’s sports, and the folks, the women who went on to lead the organization said that, great, we’re going to go do it ourselves then. And they created a nationwide governing organization that was, at its peak, it was 970 plus members, colleges and universities across the country hosting 19 different sports, which is more than the NCAA has ever offered for women or men in three different divisions. So in 10 years, they grew from nothing to huge, and were really proving that there was, I mean, a lot of appetite for women’s intercollegiate athletics, which was feeding down to high school and youth, right? There’s this whole revolution happening, and they were leading it when Title IX was finally, so Title IX was passed in 72.

It took a number of years for it to be interpreted, and it wasn’t intended to be applied to sports. It was an educationally focused bill about academic programs funding. But immediately, particularly on the women’s side, they realized, oh, this could help us get some money, and we sorely need money. We have the resources. Were laughably small for what they were trying to build. And so during the seventies, title IX is being interpreted. The Congress is figuring out how do we even apply this to sport? What does it look like to have gender equity in sport? Sports are really different than who gets led into a dentist program or dental training program. And so ultimately, in 79, some standards come out of how we’re going to actually account for gender equity in sport. They’re both clear and kind of convoluted in different ways, but it became clear that it was actually going to be enforced.

Well, that was the idea. And really, I think the NCAA got nervous that while the NCAA as a governing organization and the A IAW, they weren’t subject to Title ix, but all of their member institutions were. And so if they were not in line with the law, it could be a problem. And so the NCAA had been sort of working with the A IWA little bit on parallel tracks in the early part of the seventies. They had verged away from that by the later part of the seventies. And by the time that this all happened, not only was the NCAA and men’s sport organizing against Title IX being applied to athletics against football being included, they were trying to get it exempted. There’s all kinds of things happening. But the NCAA was working actively against Title ix, including athletics, but it decided to switch course and start offering women’s championships without discussion with the A IW, without even recognition that there was already a massive infrastructure in place that was hosting women’s championships and the A IW.

There was some movements to try and work together. Maybe we can come together and find the best of both worlds, right? A highly competitive, financially sustainable model pulling from the NCAA side, but that valued the student athlete experience more and the wellbeing of the student athletes that quickly got dismissed by the ncaa, and instead, they chose to offer competing championships the same weekends as the A IW championships. In some cases, they financially incentivized schools to join their championships. They had the money and resources to say, we can pay for your travel, pay for your food, pay for your lodging. If you come to our championships. The A IW was just starting to generate some cash, just had some media contracts, couldn’t compete. And within a year, the A IW had ended ceased operations. And so the NCAA won in some ways, and there was a pretty big loss of an emphasis on student wellbeing for women’s sport and women having women role models in leadership positions in sport.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Ruthless by the ncaa. Talk about intentionality.

Diane Williams:

Yeah.

Dave Zirin:

Wow. Before we stay on that, the time in which the A IAW came to be feels very much in the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Were there direct connections between the broader struggle and the emergence of this organization?

Diane Williams:

So ideologically, yes. In that it was a movement to bring women into spaces that they had been told they weren’t allowed to be in.

And in a very public way, the organization itself was trying to navigate bringing together women who wanted to expand women’s sport opportunities across the country from different geographic regions, different political persuasions. Some of those women would’ve been all for identifying as feminist, and plenty of them would’ve been absolutely not to mention if they did, they could get fired if they were rocking the boat too much. They were all sort of navigating these expectations while trying to push forward something that was actually pretty radical, bringing women’s sport into the mainstream in this way. And so there was a lot of negotiating happening, which I think is often the case behind the scenes a little bit more. The A IW was working with some of the education and legal organizations in DC and they were hooked in. They had convinced them that women’s sport was actually a really important part of this whole conversation around women’s liberation and society. Then the Women’s Sport Foundation started around this time. There’s a lot of connecting happening, often a little bit more behind the scenes from the A IW what they were putting out front, but the connections were happening and it was helping when they needed to lobby congress say that they could call in some of those networks to talk about the importance of women’s sport and young girls in as a part of educational equity as a part of women having a more viable and a more vibrant role in society.

Dave Zirin:

So what at Long last do you think is the legacy

Diane Williams:

So many

Dave Zirin:

Of this organization, what is their living legacy today?

Diane Williams:

I see as you and I’ve talked about, I see some of their legacy in the movements around student athletes being active, demanding better conditions that they’re playing in just speaking up in realizing that they should have a say in the organization that is leading intercollegiate athletics. And that is something that is so different than the NCAA’s norm. Some of the shifts that have happened in the interest of student athlete rights has really been a part. Often there’s connection to people who are involved with a IW actually both in the leadership of the NCAA or schools, if they stuck it out, they often were there making change at people like Dr. Christine Grant and Charlotte West and plenty of others. So I mean, I really see the positive legacy is, and student, this is kind of cool because student athletes don’t necessarily know that they’re actually a part of a legacy.

Dave Zirin:

Yeah, I was thinking about

Diane Williams:

Dartmouth,

Dave Zirin:

The men steam forming the union and about how even if it’s not conscious, there is a thread that exists because of what you said, of demanding a voice

Diane Williams:

And

Dave Zirin:

Demanding some sense of ownership and autonomy over your life as a college

Diane Williams:

Athlete. Yeah. One of the former presidents of the A IW that I interviewed Pig Burke at the University of Iowa, said, well, paraphrasing, she told me when they’re college athletes, they’re 18, they’re legally adults. They should have a say in what’s happening out there in sports out there in their sport experience. And so that the union move is so exciting, and I’d like to imagine that a governing organization would consider how the student athletes are experiencing what they’re experiencing on teams and in the championship structure and in the schedules and all these things. And yet the NCAA has proven that they don’t care. They haven’t, there hasn’t been nearly enough attention paid to that and meaningful engagement of student athlete voice in governing that is so different than the model that is so top down that they have set up and was something that was integrated in the A IAW model. Student athletes had representation on the executive board on down to the school level, really different set up. So I hope that is, I see some of the legacy in there. I see the legacy for sure in some of the women coaches who are still coaching who go back to a IW days players who are in coaching sport media positions. There’s an interesting spill out from people who are connected to sport through the A IW and took those values into the jobs that they had even when it was under the ncaa.

Dave Zirin:

This history is actually getting a little bit of life with Lynette Woodard coming to the fore. It seems like this whole history is just ripe for a book. Is that something you’d be interested in pursuing?

Diane Williams:

I’m working on that. I’m working on

Dave Zirin:

That. You are working on a book. I’m about this. Terrific. Will you return to the program when the book is in print so we can go through what you learned?

Diane Williams:

Absolutely.

Dave Zirin:

That’s fantastic. And one last question, please. When you teach about this organization at McDaniel College, what is the reaction? I mean, I assume few if none know about it, but is this something that makes the students’ eyes go wide?

Diane Williams:

I think so. And I will say one of the neatest things about this organization that makes me want to talk about it to everybody, one is that it was visionary. It was a group of people who said, what exists in the norm isn’t good enough and we think we can do better. And then they did. And that to me is exciting because it reminds us that it’s flexible, how we manage sport, how we think about sport, what sport even looks like, who gets to be involved. And two, every single school had people, usually women that were leading the women’s athletic department, that were coaching their teams that are local heroes that that school may or may not even know about. And so when I teach about this at McDaniel, I get to talk about Carol Fritz, who was the women’s athletics director there. We have a beautiful display of women’s sport history like uniforms and field hockey sticks and things that I can point them to. And we can bring this history to a very local level and learn more about someone who’s like her name is on this beautiful display, but we don’t see her around as much anymore. But we can also learn more about the kinds of struggles that she and every other institution had. Somebody there that was doing that work and encountering a whole lot of resistance and deserves their flowers, deserves their thanks and deserves some cheering on from a generation that is now learning about it. Again,

Dave Zirin:

Thanks everybody for tuning in. We are so proud of Edge of Sports and hope to bring you more coverage at the collision point of sports and politics in 2025. Now, I want to let you know how you can support sports journalism without Stephen A. Smith, pat McAfee and ESPN’s Confederacy of Jackasses. Join the Real News Network now and power the independent media you believe in. Become A-T-R-N-N member. Do it today because that means more fearless journalism, more hard hitting investigations and more stories the mainstream media will not touch. Your support isn’t just appreciated. It’s essential. And don’t forget, subscribe to our channel, sign up for our newsletter and hit the bell icon so you never miss a report. Remember, we don’t get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going together. We can keep covering the sports and politics stories, others will not for Edge of Sports in the Real News Network. I’m Dave Zin. I want to say thank you to you, the viewers, the listeners. I want to thank Kayla Rivara, Maximillian Alvarez, David Hebden, and the entire TRNN team that keeps us going. Please support this work because in this era, if our media is not independent, if our media is not fearless, then truly we are lost.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Dave Zirin.