UConn winning streak coverage: Whose to blame?

I tend to somewhat agree with Hardin’s point in that the underlying assumption about the lack of women’s sports coverage starts with the spectators themselves. The media itself takes fault in the men versus women sports debate, but in fact they are essentially giving the audience what they want. This kind of coincides with the article “NCAA March Madness :An Investigation of Gender Coverage in USA Today During the NCAA Basketball tournaments” by Cooper. In this article she points out that coverage, based on attendance, participation, and revenue, men were only underrepresented in the attendance category, showing that men’s basketball supersedes women’s from an audience’s standpoint. The UConn women’s basketball streak was a huge story that gained national attention. They created a large debate how they had beaten the men’s streak but I believe they made an even bigger deal about when they lost. This reminded me of Birell’s “Ideoloical Control of Women in Sport” where she talks about representing women’s sport in the media as tragic. Instead of focusing along on the positive and their win streak, they made an enormous ordeal about their one loss and not the fact that they are still a top notch program. The only time that I ever usually see any talk of women’s basketball in general in a positive light is with the UConn or Baylor program just because they have 2 very poignant stars on the floor. Other than that, there is barely a snip it on ESPN or any major sports outlet about women’s basketball. Even Gino Auriemma chimes in and comments that" If we were breaking a women's record, everybody would go, 'Aren't those girls nice, let's give them two paragraphs in USA Today, you know, give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and then let's send them back where they belong, in the kitchen.'"(http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/news/story?id=5937356) This somewhat coincides with the idea of power and the dominant ideology that women’s sports are watered down, not as action packed, and essentially more a hobby compared to male sports. I believe her statement how performance of gender has something to do with this, but her example of women wearing skirts and men not I think doesn’t fit here. I think a more appropriate analogy would be something like men are usually the victors and women are the ones that need help in situations of distress. This is definitely a norm embedded into are gender societal roles. I think a thing that starts out these gender norms are when we are little as indicated in Mark Messner’s “Playing Center: The Triad of Violence in Men’s Sports”. He talks of how even at small ages, boys and girls are somewhat conditioned in ways that coincide “correct” team names and colors that are appropriate for each gender. The ways in which we are conditioned as young children and the ways we view our own gender and the other really take a toll on us in the rest of our lives. It essentially nurtures us into creating our own ideologies of what is the “right” or “wrong” way to explore our gender. Hopefully as parents, we are able to display equity across genders and show that both have an equal opportunity and should have the same rights to play no matter what. However in the end, sporting journalism will always make women’s sporting news take a backseat to men’s, even in times of great triumph.