WNBA: Seimone Augustus, Penny Taylor headline Basketball HOF nominees

In late December, the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame announced the nominees for the Class of 2024. We catch up on the players, coaches and teams that are candidates for enshrinement, along with other news.

• By
  
  Cat Ariail
  
• on January 6, 2024 4:00 pm

After touching on a couple of news items from the WNBA and NCAA, this week’s edition of “This Week in Women’s Basketball” serves as an opportunity to catch up on the 21 individuals and three teams nominated as candidates for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2024.

NCAA announces new media rights deal with ESPN

On Thursday, the NCAA and ESPN announced a new eight-year, $920 million media rights deal. Women’s basketball remains one of 40 collegiate championships covered under the agreement, meaning, unlike the men’s NCAA Tournament, the women’s tournament will not a have a separate, unbundled media deal.

NCAA president Charlie Baker suggests the contract values women’s basketball at $65 million per year, which is more than half of the annual value of the deal and 10 times more than the deal that expires at the end of the 2023-24 season. According to Baker, the NCAA could reward women’s basketball teams that advance in the NCAA Tournament with performance units, a revenue-sharing system used for the men’s tournament. Each men’s team that receives a tournament berth earns a unit, with additional units available for advancing. The revenue from performance units go to a respective team’s conference, with the revenue distributed to the conference’s member schools over a six-year period.

Women’s college basketball coaches, many of whom had lobbied for a standalone media agreement, immediately expressed the importance of implementing a performance units system. South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley asserted:

We need that part of it to happen. Not, you know, just for women’s basketball. We need it for women’s basketball, but we need it on our campuses because that’s what’s happening on the guys’ side. We need that to happen, and then I do think you’ll start seeing administrators realize that we are revenue producing, a revenue-producing sport. That’s one of the things that’s holding us back.

North Carolina head coach Courtney Banghart, president of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, expressed a similar sentiment:

How do you tell [athletic directors] to continue to invest in women’s basketball other than out of the goodness of their own heart? Now, once we get money assessed and money attached to postseason success and you get rewarded, it’s the next step in bringing other people along too as ADs’ hands are forced a little bit.

The new…