NCAA President Charlie Baker joined others in giving credit for the creation of a performance fund to those who came before and helped build women's basketball.
“We’re the lucky ones," Baker said. "We got to be here on the day it became a reality.”
Now comes more work to continue investing in women's basketball to grow the sport even more.
"That’s the part I hope, that someday down the road, we all will have someone say about us that they sit on the shoulders of the work that we did,” Baker said.
South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, whose Gamecocks went undefeated winning last year's national championship and her third overall, said her first thought hearing of the vote was a simple "YES!"
"This continues our fight to lift women's basketball to historic levels," Staley said. "I appreciate the decision by the Kaplan Hecker and Fink law firm to include the lack of units in their report as a key issue holding women's basketball back from capitalizing on the historic viewership and quality of the product on the court."
So-called performance units, which represent revenue, will be given to women's teams playing in the tournament starting this year, the event's 43rd edition. A team that reaches the Final Four could bring its conference roughly $1.26 million over the next three years in financial performance rewards.
In the first year, $15 million will be awarded to teams out of the fund, which is 26% of the women’s basketball media revenue deal. That will grow to $25 million, or 41% of the revenue, by 2028. The 26% is on par with what men’s basketball teams received the first year the performance units program was established.
Teams making this March’s NCAA Tournament won’t actually be paid until the organization has a full tournament of data available.
Still, North Carolina coach Courtney Banghart, who also is president of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, called the reality of postseason units a great day and a reward for the investment by athletic departments in women's basketball.
“The long awaited, hard fought for and well-earned day is here,” Banghart said. “I am so grateful for the effort of so many to bring this reality to our sport. Women’s basketball is more popular than ever before, seats are filled, arenas are sold out, and games are on national TV almost every night.”
The proposal was broken into two votes on Wednesday, with the first on the payments being earned starting with the next NCAA Tournament. That received one “no” vote, though the vote to establish the women’s fund itself got a “yes” from all 292 members present.
“It’s great women’s basketball is getting the long-deserved financial reward for NCAA postseason success,” Louisville coach Jeff Walz said.
The women's March Madness plan is similar to the men's basketball unit program. Each of 32 conferences that receive an automatic bid to the tournament will receive a unit, and additional units will be rewarded for teams that receive at-large bids to the 68-team field.
The longer a school’s tournament run lasts, the more units the school’s conference receives. Conferences decide the distribution of unit revenue to each of its members. Each unit was worth about $2 million for the 2024 men’s tournament.
Men's basketball teams now receive 24% of the media rights deal, which is $8.8 billion over eight years, starting this year. Women's basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament in the NCAA's new media rights deal with ESPN — roughly 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.
The women have a higher percentage of the media revenue deal to bolster the value of each performance unit.
The NCAA sharing March Madness revenue with its member schools has long been a feature of the men's tournament. The 2018 tournament, for example, brought in $844.3 million in television and marketing rights, the vast majority from a contract with CBS and Turner Sports to televise the games.
Most of the money flows through the NCAA to conferences and then back to member schools, more than 300 of which field Division I basketball teams eligible to play in the tournament. The schools mostly reinvest in athletics, from scholarships for athletes in all sports to coaching salaries, training facilities, stadiums, ballparks and arenas.
Vanderbilt coach Shea Ralph won a national title playing at UConn and helped the Huskies win six more championships as an assistant coach. She ended Vanderbilt's NCAA Tournament drought last year and called Wednesday's vote a testament to "decades" of hard work.
"It is an exciting time to be competing for a spot in the NCAA tournament,” Ralph said.
Julie Roe Lach, commissioner of the Horizon League and a member of the Division I women's basketball oversight committee, called the creation of the fund a “huge step” not just for women's basketball but women's sports in general toward the goal of gender equity.
With women's college basketball “skyrocketing in popularity,” Lach said they can't just celebrate this moment.
"Like the men’s basketball fund, the women’s basketball funds are unrestricted, meaning conferences and institutions can choose how we want to invest these extra dollars,” said Lach, who noted the Horizon League has policies ready to reward programs for strong schedules, performance and postseason success.
The women's tournament is coming off its most successful year ever, which included a record audience of 18.7 million for the title game won by South Carolina over Iowa and Caitlin Clark, the highest for a basketball broadcast of any kind in five years.
It outdrew the men's championship game — UConn winning its second consecutive title with a victory over Purdue — by nearly 3 million viewers. The women's tournament also had record attendance.
NCAA notes
In another milestone, the Division I approved a championship for women’s wrestling. Divisions II and III will vote on adding it in the coming days. ... SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said any changes to the College Football Playoff would need unanimous approval. The change most likely to be considered right away would be a shift in the seeding. The top four seeds in this year’s tournament all received byes and all lost their first games. ... Discussions about new rules that would give athletes five years to complete five years of eligibility continue. DI council chair Josh Whitman, the AD at Illinois, said “one of the attractive elements of, whether it’s a 5-for-5, or whatever it may end up being, is maybe we can create something that’s simpler, it’s cleaner, it’s easier to understand.”
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AP Basketball Writer Doug Feinberg in Miami and AP National Writer Eddie Pells in Nashville contributed to this report.
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