Adia Barnes has spent over half her life in women’s basketball. Along the way, the Arizona coach has made dozens of connections, so she wasn’t surprised when some of them reached out during the Wildcats’ inconceivable run to April’s national championship game. Yet, it was messages from people she didn’t know that made her appreciate the magnitude of the moment.
“I got DMs from like Doc Rivers,” Barnes says. “He DM’d me about our team and how I'm doing a great job. It was touching for me that they paid attention. They cared.”
Such was a major question during this one-of-a-kind tournament in San Antonio, which televised every game nationally for the first time in women’s NCAA tourney history: How many people cared? The initial returns conveyed a clear sense that the NCAA didn’t—at least not as much as it cared about the men’s tournament. But those public disparities didn’t stop the players from knocking down contested threes, weaving through the lane on acrobatic layups and conveying a pure sense of joy to play the sport they love. Through the ecstasy of winning, heartbreak of losing and all the small moments in between, the players and coaches drew eyeballs—both intentionally and unintentionally—to the sport of women’s college basketball.
“It will be looked at as a turning point for the popularity of this game,” says ESPN broadcaster Ryan Ruocco, who called play-by-play for the women’s tourney. “All those people who sort of just tuned in out of curiosity ended up getting presented with this incredible, riveting tournament and a ridiculously entertaining property.”
Already, the recognition has reached a point where Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer, fresh off a national championship, says random people on the street stop to congratulate her when she walks her dogs—a far cry from when VanDerveer grew up without even the opportunity to play organized basketball herself.
“We’re connecting now with the random Joe guy on the street, and it’s exciting,” she says. “That will help our sport grow and become more mainstream, and I think that’s the direction we're going in. It’s a good direction.”