Yesterday, Cori Close, the women’s basketball coach at UCLA, noticed something after the team’s Big Ten game yesterday against Ohio State.
Despite all manner of attention focused on women’s basketball in the Caitlin Clark era, there was only one journalist who came to cover the game — Benjamin Royer of The Los Angeles Times.
“We’re the only double-ranked game out today; the only one in the country, and we had no media day today. No media here. You’re the only one that’s asked to talk to me,” Close told Royer after the game.
Royer had watched the game from his home and contacted Close on the phone after the game.
In more than a quarter-century of covering women’s athletic events of all sorts, the ability of a site like this to be able to cover a sport ranges from the simple (just walk onto the campus, watch the game, do your job) to the ridiculous (filling out forms justifying who you are).
Some times, I can just fax over a request for a credential and I’ll get a response within a day, letting me know which door to walk into in order to gain access.
At other times, your Founder has experienced various levels of restrictions on game coverage over the years. To wit:
- Being shadowed by the athletic director of a small preparatory school in a major U.S. city, being interrogated as to whether the names of players in the sport were going to be on the website;
- Being told I couldn’t film interviews (audio was OK) because the athletic department had banned video podcasts by athletes at the school. Note: this was a decade before TikTok and other social media presences;
- Being rejected from covering a national tournament because the gatekeepers who ran it saw me as little more than a blog rather than a site that covers sports news — even though I had covered the games in this sphere for two decades;
- Being penned into a small area to one side of the team benches for a state final rather than a more optimal area such as the pressbox;
- Being denied field access altogether because the site was in a different state from where the games took place.
As female athletes at many levels are becoming corporate entities in and unto themselves, we’re starting to see overweening regulations as to who can and who cannot cover an event. I’ll give you one example: the LPGA. First off, you have to have at least one golf story on your site in order to be able to be credentialed for an event.
Second, there is a provision where a credentialed journalist becomes what the LPGA becomes a “covered person” under what is called the Tour Integrity Program, which precludes anyone connected with the LPGA Tour from betting on the golf event, or providing inside information to third parties for wagering purposes on the golf tournament.
Wow.
I’m sure there are other anti-wagering provisions that have come into being since the onset of legalized sports betting, especially in athletic competitions where low salaries are a concern.
But the thing is, too many people who now run sports see themselves as a gatekeeper as to who can and who cannot write about them or who can publish stories — good or bad — about the athletic concern or the people who play in them.
For me, yesterday’s angle would have been the “what you sow is what you reap” story about having a league fixture between two teams — as highly-ranked as they are — located 2,240 miles from each other in Los Angeles and Columbus.
And despite all of that, the game drew more than 8,000 people — the largest home attendance for OSU women’s basketball all season.
How more women’s basketball journalists didn’t cover the game is beyond me.