What's most remarkable about Woodard's 3,649 points scored at Kansas State from 1978 to 1981 is that many of those points were earned in vans because no one paid for the female athletes to fly. I'm saying that. Woodard's most sustained air time was when he took a lark toward the rim. Even though she was cramped for hours, she was able to shoot toward the net like a pianist touching the keys. The tallest women in her van suffered the most. However, her accomplishments with Woodard are not officially listed in the record books. That's because the NCAA's male administrators flatly refused to sanction or fund women's sports until 1982. In response to questions, an NCAA spokesperson said there were “no records” for women's sports prior to that date. Completed while the school/team in question was her NCAA member. ”
In summary, the NCAA does not consider women's basketball records to be records. The NCAA didn't recognize it as a record before 1982. want Women in organizations.
“These records should have been combined a long time ago,” Woodard said. “…we're quick to erase things we don't like or think we don't like. It's unfair. There's a lot of history there, and we shouldn't ignore that.”
What exactly is a record? This is a symbol of “continuous exploration,” as Norwegian philosophy professor Dr. Sigmund Roland teased this question in an essay in The Philosophy of Sport. As Roland observes, records are not precise mathematical-physical comparisons of points or seconds within a standard space-time framework. A record is actually Non– Accurate, simply thanks to time and progress. Johnny Weissmuller's pool was not Michael Phelps' pool. But they occupy the same human book. Records are symbolic messages that bring together possibilities, history, and memory all in one.
This is the true history and memory of women's basketball. The NCAA of the 1970s was a male fiefdom of crew-cut athletic directors who believed that every dime devoted to women's sports came from the direct sacrifices of men. When a coach named Marinell Meadors proposed starting a women's basketball team at Tennessee Tech and asked for funding, her athletic director sneered, “I'll give you $100.” She had to drive her team in a small bus that was very dilapidated, and she was worried that the sliding door wouldn't close all the way and would throw the players out of the door on the freeway. Such that.
The only way for women to change things is to win. Things changed after we won. So these ostracized female college students started their own organization called AIAW, and for 10 years they funded it, ran their own championship events, and grew the tournament. They set records wearing cheap polyester uniforms with no breathability, jerseys that weighed down with sweat. They held bake sales and washed cars to raise money, squeezed their long bodies into 12-passenger vans on their knees, packed bologna sandwiches, and drove cross-country to compete in tournaments.
“Ten hours was not unusual,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said.
During the first Women's Basketball Championship in 1972 in Normal, Illinois, the team slept in a motel room, four people per room. Still, Immaculata University nuns who came all the way from Pennsylvania expressed their fanaticism for Kathy Rush's team by banging pots and pans so loudly that noisemakers had to be banned. I couldn't calm down what was happening.
Over the next decade, even as players like Woodard went hungry, their performance arc grew breathtakingly. Because women had to wait hours to be allowed onto the floor until the last, worst and most obscure male athlete came out of Allen Fieldhouse in Kansas.
“Every day was a battle just to get practice time,” Woodard recalled. “And to eat, because the cafeteria closes when we practice in the evening.”
But they wouldn't have traded the experience. Because it gave them a pride of ownership and a sense of being the architects of themselves and their game. Their success was completely earned and nothing was given to them. They did it for nothing in return, out of pure love for it and because they had a lot to say to build themselves from the ground up.
“I sailed with my soul,” Woodard says.
By 1981, the AIAW had hosted 41 championships in 19 sports and broadcast women's basketball on national television. That's when the NCAA swooped in with a hostile takeover, pressuring universities to abandon the AIAW in order to absorb what women had built. And they stuck the AIAW record under an asterisk in the back of the book, presumably hoping everyone would forget the NCAA leadership's past of sexist miscalculations.
Records should not be about whether something was completed under the proper organizational alphabet, the NCAA rune. At the end of the day, Woodard said, the NCAA is just a collection of “call letters.”
There is nothing trivial about this. It is an act of erasure. Example: The NCAA considers the University of Michigan to be the college football all-time winningest record holder with 989. But the NCAA was born in 1910, and Michigan started playing football in 1879. The NCAA doesn't go on strike. Or put an asterisk on anything the University of Michigan won “pre-NCAA.” Otherwise, Fielding Yost, his 56-game winning streak, and most of Michigan's season will be lost. The NCAA wouldn't dream of ignoring those years.
But women's basketball is getting it done. They take away everything that was done before the NCAA. And here are some of the people and things you lose. Ann Meyers, Lucia Harris, Nancy Lieberman, Cindy Brogdon, Carol Blazejowski. It's like it never existed. Call up the NCAA record book online and try to find your mark. they aren't there.
The first seven seasons of Pat Summitt's career took place outside of NCAA festivities. So were C. Vivian Stringer's first 10 cases and VanDerveer's first 3 cases. And all about Margaret Wade. But strangely, in an illogical ultimate fit, the record books actually include wins by female coaches that pre-N.C.A.A.
“That is contradictory,” Vanderveer said in an email exchange. “these are basketball record. And even before the NCAA took over control of women's basketball, women's basketball was being played at a high level. ”
Therefore, it is very important to give Woodard's performance the proper respect and recognition. Now is the perfect opportunity to correct that. That way, when Clark sets a record, a real record, it means what it should. With three games left in the regular season, Clark is still 56 points behind Woodard and 75 points behind men's record holder Pete Maravich, and it seems likely he will break both records by March. When that happens, we must remember that without Woodard and other AIAW-era heroines, there would be no Caitlin Clark.
“Caitlyn has had an amazing, sensational career. High tide floats all boats,” Woodard said. “There's a lot of things she's making people aware of, which I think is great. But I hope that if the call letters change in the NCAA, she might get her record mixed in.” That’s all.”
