Debbie Antonelli notices it when she’s home, and finds it disheartening: Girls who are not playing basketball, but something else.
Nothing against those other sports, but . . .
The former N.C. State guard and longtime television commentator – now in her 26th consecutive season as an analyst for a variety of outlets — thinks the game she loves is becoming less attractive to young girls for a very simple reason:
There’s too much physicality, even brute force, that’s trumping skill and the fundamentals the late John Wooden famously lauded about the women’s game.
Antonelli thinks this is not only turning girls away from playing basketball, but also is turning off fans who may want to watch.
“We’re losing players to other sports, to volleyball, soccer, lacrosse,” Antonelli said. “People don’t want to come to a women’s basketball game and see so much physicality.”
This is one of the major points addressed in Val Ackerman’s white paper on women’s basketball. But for advocates like Antonelli, the concern has been growing for a number of years.
“Girls in my neighborhood aren’t playing basketball. They’re playing volleyball,” she said on a rare day off in late February from her home in Charleston, S.C. “We’re leading girls away from the game.”
The other sports aren’t exactly non-contact – ACLs and concussions abound in soccer, prompting book-length attention about rising injury worries for young female athletes in general.
But those options, especially volleyball, Antonelli says, offer “a different kind of physicality” that might be more appealing for some girls than basketball.
Ackerman’s recommendations included an emphasis on officiating to clean up excessively physical play.
Among coaches, DePaul’s Doug Bruno has been making the most impassioned plea for years, as he recounted in response to the Ackerman report:
“ONE CHANGE! . . . that can make the women’s game more entertaining: ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS protect the player with the ball. . . The player with the ball must be treated as SACRED.”
There has been a modest jump in scoring this year, and Antonelli often ends one of her many pro-offense tweets with: “Put on earth to do what? #SCORE.”
It’s a mini-manifesto best symbolized by Kentucky’s 133-130 quadruple overtime win over Baylor in early December in the highest-scoring game in NCAA history.
Last summer, Antonelli challenged herself. For 31 consecutive days in July, she made herself not just to take, but make, 100 shots from 15 feet, every day:
The reason I chose the 100 shots a day challenge in the heat and humidity of summer in the south, not in an air conditioned gym, was because I wanted to prove I could and wanted to be a part of the solution in our game.
She said she’ll “ramp up” her shooting challenge again this summer, as she nears her 50th birthday.
To her, the mid-range jumper has become more than a lost art. It represents a way to play the game that she and others believe has been abandoned too easily in the pursuit of speed, strength and athleticism.
Last season, only Baylor shot better than 50 percent in all of Division I, and that was with Brittney Griner, arguably the most dominating low post player in the history of the game.
Thus far this season, only UConn, Notre Dame and Duke are above that mark.
It’s not an accident, Antonelli said, that UConn and Notre Dame remain the only undefeated teams in the country and are the favorites for the national championship.
Yes, they’re terrific defensively, as UConn showed in shutting down Louisville’s Shoni Schimmel on Monday, and as Notre Dame has done twice in wins over Duke.
But what also separates the Huskies and Irish from everyone else, Antonelli stressed, is that “they have superior offensive skill at all five positions.”
Her “Offensive Incentive Plan” calls for contract goodies for coaches if their teams shoot 48 percent or higher. This season, Maryland, Stanford and South Carolina have done that, and Princeton is at 47.9 percent.
She’s been talking to a few athletic directors but only Furman has taken the bait for now, for its men’s coach.
Antonelli said she’s “been pitching hard” new Rutgers AD Julie Hermann for a bonus for defensive-minded Vivian Stringer if her team shoots 48 percent in conference games.
The Knights are averaging 67 points a game, their highest scoring rate since Rutgers reached the NCAA title game in 2007 (65 ppg). They’re also up to 45.4 percent shooting in American Athletic Association games, second only to UConn (51.1 percent), their highest figure in that category in several years.
So there’s a small bit of progress.
“Some BCS coaches have said to me, ‘You may be on to something,’ ” Antonelli said. “I’m glad people are recognizing the benefit of the ball going in the basket.”
