A brand new proposal to begin the ladies’s basketball season days sooner than the lads’s season might amplify the rising highlight on the ladies’s recreation.
The NCAA’s males’s and girls’s basketball oversight committees have proposed beginning the ladies’s basketball season on the Monday that falls 22 weeks earlier than the ladies’s Ultimate 4 every season, two days earlier than the beginning of the lads’s season, starting with the 2025-26 marketing campaign. With the ladies starting their season on a Monday and the lads commencing their season on a Wednesday, the ladies’s recreation would “have elevated advertising and marketing and promotional alternatives contributing to elevation of the game at a campus stage,” per the NCAA’s launch Wednesday.
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The change would additionally assist each sports activities keep away from conflicts with Election Day and supply extra flexibility for TV home windows and venue calls for.
The beginning date and size of the apply season at the moment varies between 21 and 22 weeks for males’s and girls’s basketball, each of which begin their seasons every year on the identical day.
If the Division I Council approves the change in October, the primary recreation for girls’s basketball may very well be performed Nov. 3, 2025, and males’s basketball might begin Nov. 5, 2025. Each sports activities are scheduled to start their seasons Nov. 11, 2025, beneath present tips.
The NCAA and ESPN lately agreed to an eight-year, $920 million extension on the media rights deal for 40 championships, a package deal that features the ladies’s Ultimate 4 and nationwide championship recreation. The expansion of ladies’s basketball — which surged as Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and others grew to become celebrities lately — is credited with taking part in a major function within the large enhance (3 times the earlier deal) in income the NCAA will obtain. Of the $115 million per the 12 months the NCAA will obtain beneath the brand new deal, $65 million of that whole is hooked up to the ladies’s NCAA event, NCAA president Charlie Baker informed Entrance Workplace Sports activities this 12 months.