Opinion: The NCAA's mishandling of the women's basketball tournament has bled into complaints about volleyball

If NCAA officials thought, or perhaps hoped, that the end of the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments would close the book on grievances about how their championships are run, well…let’s cut to Omaha where the women’s volleyball tournament bubble is set to begin next Wednesday.

“A lot of coaches are concerned about the setup in Omaha,” said four-time national champion Nebraska coach John Cook, who would have preferred using individual arenas in Omaha and Lincoln rather than a convention hall where as many as four games will be going on at once in the first two rounds.

“I think that’s a lot nicer of an NCAA Tournament,” he added.

Meanwhile, Big Ten network analyst Emily Ehman tweeted on Thursday that the digital feed of the early rounds on ESPN3 won’t have any commentators, which is a departure from previous years.

“This is not acceptable — and there is still time to make this right,” Creighton coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth tweeted at the NCAA, even though this is an ESPN issue and not something the NCAA has control over.

Purdue’s Dave Shondell tweeted that it was “BUSH LEAGUE.”

By that point, we were off to the races with complaint after complaint from the size of the travel party to practice and game times to concerns about flooring and changing area setups. It got to the point where the NCAA had to release a statement Thursday — they’ve gotten accustomed to that lately — refuting/explaining some of the points that were raised.

“Contrary to reports, players were never expected to change clothes on the bench — each team will have a secure changing area on site,” the NCAA said. And regarding concerns raised about the safety of the playing surface being laid down over the concrete floor at the convention center space, the NCAA said a felt underlayment and sport court floor would be laid down underneath to provide cushioning.

Keep in mind, none of these coaches have actually seen the setup yet in Omaha. They’re not scheduled to arrive until next week. But the narrative that it’s a substandard tournament has already been set — and it’s roiling the volleyball community.

“It’s going to come across as a high school type of deal,” Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield told the Associated Press. “It should feel special. For a lot of people, that won’t be the case.”

In many ways, the NCAA did this to themselves. By falling asleep at the wheel on setting up the women’s basketball tournament in San Antonio, making it easy for players to highlight disparities with the men’s tournament on things like weight room quality and player amenities, it ensured that there would be a microscope on every potential gender equity issue going forward. It also empowered coaches and players to speak up about perceived mistreatment, regardless of the legitimacy or context.

As Sheffield noted in his interview with the AP regarding the streams of early-round games not having announcers: “I have a feeling that could blow up as much as what the weight room stuff did in women's basketball.”

And it’s at that point where some of these complaints, to be quite honest, seem more like piling on than a legitimate critique over mistreatment.

If we’re still allowed to have a tiny bit of sympathy for the NCAA these days, what they’ve had to pull off since November holding Division 1 championships in men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s indoor track, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s hockey and now volleyball in a COVID-19 environment has not been an easy undertaking.

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All of these tournaments have been scaled back in one way or another, crammed into venues that aren’t ideal and assigned teams inconvenient starting times. But when you think back to where we were late last summer when the NCAA first started talking publicly about creating bubbles to get these championship events in — particularly for the sports that had theirs canceled in 2020 — some of these complaints seem a bit overblown.

Obviously, gender equity has to be at the forefront of everything the NCAA does going forward. But that does not mean that its approach to every sport and every championship has to be exactly the same.

The root cause for much of the uproar stems from the NCAA’s initial decision to reduce the volleyball tournament from 64 to 48 teams for this year while the basketball tournaments did not have any reduction in the size of their field. If any of us were college volleyball coaches, that would not sit well, even if everyone understands that the volleyball tournament isn’t as widely watched as either of the basketball tournaments.

From the NCAA’s perspective, they’re trying to run the biggest and best tournament they possibly can under the limitations of COVID-19 protocols, which includes having all the teams play at a convention center in Omaha that is practically connected to the hotels where everyone is staying. Even with a reduced number of teams, the NCAA is going to run as many as four games at a time in a divided convention hall until it gets down to the Sweet 16, which is another thing coaches are upset about.

For an event that they point to as a showcase of their sport, which has its own vibrant, growing fan base, that’s understandable. It’s not a normal tournament experience, and that’s unfortunate for the players. It’s also a product of the situation everyone is in until the pandemic ends where the NCAA is trying to balance opportunity to compete for a national title with reducing the risk of COVID-19 issues.

If there are areas in the health and safety of players where the NCAA is lacking, they should be called out strongly. If there’s a gender equity issue — which isn’t as easy to identify as it was with basketball since the NCAA isn’t holding an equivalent men’s volleyball championship — it should be condemned in the strongest terms.

But if some first-round games don’t have announcers on a streaming feed, or if a team has to practice at 7:40 in the morning or can’t bring its social media person into the bubble — all things that were raised as complaints this week — it does not necessarily mean the big, bad NCAA is at it again.

That doesn’t matter, though, when it comes to public perception. With its benefit of the doubt having all been used up in the women’s basketball debacle, the NCAA has made itself the most attractive of piñatas.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mishandling women's basketball tournament made NCAA piñata for other sports