The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame :: Lynette Woodard
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Lynette Woodard - Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame
A four-time Kodak All-American at the University of Kansas (1978, […]
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View: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/16/1231817283/caitlin-clark-scoring-record-lynette-woodard-pearl-moore
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The NCAA erased an entire generation of women’s sports
The purpose of records is not to satisfy the incurable enthusiasms of men with sweating beer bottles in hoarse bar arguments over arcane decimals. It’s to provide some memory-measure of great deeds. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is approaching a great deed, but the NCAA record book cheapens it by...
The purpose of records is not to satisfy the incurable enthusiasms of men with sweating beer bottles in hoarse bar arguments over arcane decimals. It’s to provide some memory-measure of great deeds. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is approaching a great deed, but the NCAA record book cheapens it by historically gutterizing women’s basketball. The greatest scorer in major-division women’s collegiate history is not Clark, but Lynette Woodard of Kansas. You’d never know this, however, because the old NCAA had no respect for Woodard’s era, so it canceled it, and asterisked it.
The most remarkable thing about Woodard’s scoring mark of 3,649, set at Kansas from 1978-1981, is that many of those points came after she’d been folded into a van because nobody would pay for women athletes to fly. The most airtime Woodard got was when she’d go skylarking to the rim. She could flutter a shot in the net like a pianist touching keys, despite being cramped up for hours - the tallest women suffered the most in those vans. Yet Woodard’s accomplishment isn’t formally in the record book because NCAA male administrators flatly refused to recognize or fund women’s sports until, get this, 1982. In response to a query, an NCAA spokesperson responded that women’s records pre-that date “were not completed while the schools/teams in question were NCAA members.”
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By 1981 the AIAW staged 41 championships in 19 sports and put women’s basketball on national television. Which is exactly when the NCAA swooped in with a hostile corporate takeover, pressuring universities into abandoning the AIAW, to absorb what the women had built. And they stuck AIAW records under an asterisk at the back of the book, perhaps in the hope everyone would forget the NCAA leaders’ sexist miscalculating past.
Records should not be about whether something was completed under the right organizational alphabet, the NCAA’s runes. After all, the NCAA is just a set of “call letters,” Woodard observes.
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There was only one way to change things for women: by winning. You changed things by winning. So, ostracized university women self-formed an organization called the AIAW and for a decade funded and ran their own championship events - and grew them. They set records in cheap polyester uniforms that didn’t breathe, jerseys that got heavier with their sweat. They held bake sales and washed cars to raise money, and forced their long bodies in 12-seat vans with their knees up, packed bologna sandwiches, and drove cross-country to tournaments.
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“Caitlin is having a wonderful, sensational career, and when there is a high tide, all boats float,” Woodard says. “There are so many things she is making people aware of, and I think it’s a great thing. But I just hope that if the call letters ever changed on ‘NCAA,’ her records might be blended.”
