Week 3 - UCONN Women at #1

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Not surprisingly, the UCONN women's basketball team is back at #1.  Head coach Gene Auriemma said it best when he discussed the issue of his record breaking women's team: ""If we were breaking a women's record, everybody would go, "Aren't those girls nice, let's give them two paragraphs in USA Today, you know, give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and then let's send them back where they belong, in the kitchen'...the reason everybody is having a heart attack...is a bunch of women are threatening to break a men's record, and everybody is all up in arms about it."   Well said, Gene.  The truth behind this statement reigns clear when we see the kind of coverage that women's sports get on channels like ESPN and in major newspapers.  What I found interesting wasn't so much the content of the article, but the fact that this was the only ESPN headliner on this particular day that had to do with women.  The article discusses the UCONN women's team and how they managed to maintain their #1 ranking in the Associated Press poll, just above Stanford.  In class, we discussed the amount of women's sports in the media and how, even though women's participation in sports has increased, the amount of air and print time that females recieve has actually decreased.  The fact that this was the only article on ESPN dealing with women clearly shows that.