So this morning I wake up and am putting together our NCAA schedule / results page and I realized that the men are once again competing first at NCAAs. The men compete on Wednesday and Friday and the women compete on Thursday and Saturday. Last year, the first year that the NCAA segregated the sexes, the schedule was the same.
I find this to be extremely odd. The logical thing would be to rotate it from year to year. When I was coaching collegiately, the schedules always roatate one year the women's prelims would be in the morning, the next year it would be the men.
I'd love to hear a rationale for why the NCAA isn't doing that this year as it seems like it's blatant discrimination against men.
A number of people I talked to last year felt like the NCAA put the women's competition on Thur/Saturday on purpose as its way easier to draw a crowd on a Thursday and Saturday versus and Wednesday and Friday.
Does anyone have a good explanation for it other than, "We don't want the men's attendance to outsize the women's by a large margin?"