ON THE basketball court, the gentlemen of the University have won 13 games this year and lost 12; their record in their conference is 3-9, which you don't have to be a sports fan to figure out is rather poor. The ladies have them beat, and rather dramatically: 20-8 overall, 8-4 in the conference. (These are the Athletic Department's Web site's figures, as of Monday.)
When it comes to coverage in The Cavalier Daily, however, it's the men who are winning -- by a slim margin in the regular sports section, and with a complete shutout in the Gameday special feature. Every Gameday this month has been on men's hoops, and Gameday Editor Ernie Washington, who has been in that job for a year, said he recalled producing only one Gameday on a women's team -- last spring, and the game was lacrosse.
Is this a problem?
From a perspective of fairness, it might seem to be. Why shouldn't women's sports get as much attention as men's? Why should a losing team get more coverage than a winning team?
Aaron Perryman, a sports editor for The Cavalier Daily, saw some merit to the idea that women's and men's sports should receive comparable attention from the newspaper. "I feel like the main sports page has that balance," he said. He told me the newspaper was sending reporters to cover the road games of both basketball teams and publishing stories both before and after their games. Gameday is independent of the sports section Perryman co-edits.
Fans of sports that receive less coverage may also be displeased; I received a complaint about swimming coverage this week. Questions of sex discrimination and gender roles may not be relevant here, but the idea of fairness might still be invoked: What's so special about basketball?
It's important to remember, though, that newspaper articles are not prizes to be won by the best teams. Indeed, they should not be thought of as given to the teams or the players, but as provided to the readers. The sports sections, like the other sections, exist to keep their readers informed about what is important to them.
It's difficult to say that any sport is important in the sense in which, say, the presidential election and the honor committee's deliberations about the boundaries of the honor system are important. Such importance as athletics ordinarily has lies not in the impact it has on the University or the country -- athletic contests normally have very little effect on those who choose not to follow them -- but rather in the interest that the general public has in sports. There are exceptional cases when a sports story has broader significance, when it engages with questions beyond athletics or is an extraordinary example of excellence or achievement, but these are rare.
Washington argued that the readers of The Cavalier Daily are more interested in men's than in women's basketball. "You see a lot more students at men's games than women's games," he said, and added that one can overhear more conversation about the men's team than about the women's team.
The NCAA's statistics support the view that the public just isn't as interested in women's basketball as in men's. Average attendance at University men's games in 2007, according to the athletic association's Web site, was 13,521. The women's statistic: 3,668. That's a difference of nearly ten thousand fans each game.
Might The Cavalier Daily do something about this gender gap? Perhaps a little, if it ran more stories and some Gameday pages on women's basketball. This newspaper is one of the loudest voices on Grounds, and if it directs its readers' attention to women's hoops, they may pay attention. But while turning a spotlight on a previously obscure team might enable people who had never heard of it to discover something new they could enjoy, women's hoops is already well-known. I doubt the newspaper could possibly draw 10,000 more people to each women's game, or shift 5,000 from the men.
Nor should it try. It's honorable for journalists to struggle to get readers to pay attention to the most important events of the day. Those events are important whether the readers pay attention or not, and if the readers are to fulfill their civic roles well, and sometimes even if they are to watch out for their private interests, they need to pay attention to them. But the importance of sports normally comes from the fact that people are already interested in them. If the readers stopped caring about sports altogether, the section could be dropped. If the readers care less about one sport, or one team, than another, that's a good reason to give that team less coverage.
Alexander R. Cohen is The Cavalier Daily ombudsman. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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