Beginning with the 2025 NCAA Tournament, women’s college basketball will finally receive financial “units,” just as the men’s teams have for years. Units are multi-million dollar payments the NCAA awards to conferences based on the number of games a given team plays in the March Madness tournament.
The unanimous vote by NCAA membership (292-0) was met with applause in the jam-packed ballroom at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. It was the final step toward a pay structure after the Division I Board of Governors voted for the proposal in August.
“I can’t tell you how excited we are to have an opportunity to run with it,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said.
Public outcry against this disparity (among many others) between the men’s and women’s basketball teams began in the wake of the 2021 Kaplan Report. That report outlined several gender disparity issues that had existed for years in NCAA sports but became particularly obvious after the 2021 NCAA Tournament, which was played in a bubble in San Antonio for the women and in Indianapolis for the men.
The NCAA acted quickly to amend some of these differences, bringing the women’s tournament to 68 games like the men’s tournament by adding four play-in games and allowing women to use March Madness as…
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