Women’s basketball players still outperform their male counterparts, but there is still room for improvement, according to a new report.
With the 64 teams in the 2019 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Championship announced on Monday, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) released its report “Keeping Score When It Counts: Academic Progress/Graduation Success Rate Study of the 2019 NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournament Teams.”
As has always been the case, the women continue to outpace the men academically. The overall Academic Progress Rate (APR) for the men is 973 and 986 for the women, but the 986 is less than last year’s 987.
Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and author of the study said this is probably an anomaly. Fifteen women’s teams scored a perfect APR score of 1,000 and 29 women’s teams had a 100 percent graduation rate.
“The women continue to lead the men in all the categories that we examine in the report,” said Lapchick. “The one slippage is that the gap between African-American and White female student-athletes increased (3 percent in 2018 to 8 percent in 2019), but I’m guessing that’s an anomaly because they’ve been so strong.”
The average Graduation Success Rate (GSR) for African-American D-I men’s basketball student-athletes is 79 percent. The GSR for African-American D-I women’s basketball student-athletes is 88 percent, which is down from 91 percent in 2018. Lapchick said this is likely due to the teams that made it into the tournament. The statistics come from the 64 teams in the tournament, not all of Division I.
“The women have always had stronger academic results since we’ve been doing the study and I think it is partially due to the fact that there are so few opportunities for women to play professional basketball,” said Lapchick. “They know they need to focus on getting that academic preparation for a life after sport.
