Women's game deserves more love from the fans

I hope, one day, I'll have a daughter.

I hope she'll be athletic, drawn to sports, maybe even very good at one.

But if this happens, if in two decades she's in college and, for argument's sake, a basketball star on an elite team, will she and her teammates still be second-class citizens in the battle for the hearts and minds of fans?

Unless we change the way we view women's sports, I fear this will be so.

The NCAA women's basketball tournament is unfolding, though you're not alone if you've paid no attention. The women are headlined by the most dominant team on either side of college basketball's gender fence: undefeated Connecticut.

But as always, the women are lost in the tall shadow created by the men and their March Madness grab for glory.

ESPN, to its great credit, gives the women's tournament ample coverage no matter the ratings. The broadcasts, however, betray a sad reality: At many of the games, even the most important ones, there's paltry buzz and far more empty seats than fans.

Consider the second-round tournament game between Virginia and California, played at USC's 10,258-seat Galen Center. About 700 fans showed up.

Consider Maryland's Sweet 16 game played in basketball mecca Raleigh, N.C. For one of the tournament's best games, 3,000 fans were dwarfed by the spacious 19,722-seat RBC Center.

Consider that the first two rounds of women's play drew an average of 4,100 fans. The men routinely quadrupled that.

There's been low-level gnashing of teeth about all this. Among the excuses: The view that the women's game doesn't merit attention, and the hackneyed belief that women should be happy because their game is at least growing, albeit slowly.

Among the proposed solutions: move the tournament so it doesn't compete with the men, and play all NCAA games on the favored team's home court.

Hogwash!

Women's college basketball is fine, high-caliber competition. It should be judged on its own merit and deserves greater attention.

The women's game shouldn't be happy with slow, incremental progress. Little else changes slowly in our Twitter-mad society. Why should this?

Moving the tournament or reworking the games to play them on home courts (something the men don't do) is condescending. Instead, we need to look in the mirror.

We're simply not ready to accept strong, aggressive women playing sports. And this is nowhere truer than when dealing with college basketball.