Women Men Basketball

The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2001

For Top Women's Basketball Players, the Ideal Practice Includes Men

Welch Suggs

Practice starts for the University of Notre Dame's women's basketball team on a chilly Thursday afternoon with an easy three-on-one drill. Faculty members, their kids, and other hangers-on file into the cozy Joyce Center as team members, in blue practice jerseys, bear down on a lone defender from the practice squad.

The Fighting Irish, one of the top three teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association all season, run a three-person weave down the floor, ending when a guard rainbows a pass to Ruth Riley, the all-American center, who's in position for a layup. The pass is low, though, and the defender crouches, leaps up with his arms stretched high. He swats the ball into the stands and comes down with a smile.

Wait a second. His arms? He?

Yep.

Chris Dillon is one of five male Notre Dame students at practice this afternoon. They're pretending to be Georgetown University's women's squad; the real thing will arrive Saturday for a game. Throughout a two-hour practice, Mr. Dillon, Kyle Heroman, Reggie McKnight, John Moravek, and Kevin Mumford -- plus one or two others, on occasion -- run drills at full speed with and against the 12 women on the Irish squad.

No matter the team or the sport, practice usually gets tedious, especially as the season winds down. Many of the Notre Dame women look pretty grim, and a few have the aches and pains that all athletes experience late in the season.

Not their practice partners, though. They're smiling, almost the entire time. They go at the varsity players on every drill and during every scrimmage, keeping them on their toes and forcing them to work hard for every point, pass, and rebound.

"It's great to be able to come out here and play at a real high level any day," Mr. Dillon says, pulling on a T-shirt after the workout. "You can't ask for more than to play ball for two hours."

Mr. Dillon and his "teammates" are pretty good. Not great. One or two of them tried out for the men's varsity, but they're too short or too slow to play Big East Conference ball.

Most of the top women's basketball teams in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association have all- or partly male practice squads. Many of them began these squads in the mid-1990's, following N.C.A.A. decisions in 1992 and 1993 that permitted them as long as the men met the association's usual eligibility standards for athletes. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Pat Head Summitt had pioneered the practice two decades earlier with her women's teams.

The reasoning behind having these squads is simple: There are more men wandering around college rec centers, looking for a game, who have the size, strength, and skills to compete with top-flight female basketball players. Not to mention the desire.

To put it algebraically, let x be the number of boys who graduate from high school having played varsity basketball; x is a big number, maybe half a million.

But only z players have the talent to get a scholarship to play Division I ball -- z is pretty small, perhaps 1,000. But a lot of guys in x want to be in z.

They played hard in high school, loved the game, and might even have the talent to play at a Division II or Division III institution. Call that group y.

However, some of the men in y don't want to go to Division II or III colleges. They want to go to Notre Dame or Tennessee or Louisiana Tech University, for social or academic or other reasons.

This creates an opportunity for those coaches, who can take this supply of Y chromosomes and bring them onto the court for a game their second teams and walk-ons can't match.

Muffett McGraw, Notre Dame's head coach, says her assistants go over game films from opponents with the practice squad in the days before the games.

"The guys will come in and say, 'OK, today I'm Katie Smrcka-Duffy, this is how I like to play, I shoot right-handed,' " she says. "They're good enough that they can be that player, and that's what we don't get from our bench players. They're not that good."

The Notre Dame men are just "the guys," but at other colleges, practice squads are a big deal. At Louisiana Tech, the Lady Techsters square off against "the Dream Team" in practice, while at Purdue, the Boilermakers have the "Rips" which, to Carolyn Peck, the former coach, stood for Ready, Intense, Practice.

"The guys bring so much intensity," says Niele Ivey, Notre Dame's starting point guard. "From the start, they're faster and stronger than us, and I realize we're missing something when they're not here at 6 a.m. practices. When they got other things on their schedules, there's a big difference in the intensity."

Teams recruit these players from rec-center games, or they hold tryouts, or players recruit them from among their friends. The Irish have had two marriages between practice-squad players and varsity-team members over the past four years.

Coaches at these colleges say the men on these squads have two advantages over women, even varsity female players: They're quicker, and they usually have had better coaching in high school and earlier in life. Those qualities are even more important than being stronger or taller than the women on the team.

"I think the average guy [on their squad] is a little more athletic -- he may not be good enough to play at the Division I level, but he keeps our players honest," says LaTonja Harris, an assistant coach at Iowa State University, who actually had to hold tryouts when 10 men showed up this fall wanting to play. "They're not out there trying to prove their manhood. They understand from Day One they have a certain role to play."

Manhood is an interesting concept. Why would a bunch of guys consent to be the taxi squad for a bunch of women? They're never going to get in a game; they don't get anything aside from a pair of shoes and maybe a T-shirt; and they don't even get to go to a lot of the women's games.

This is Notre Dame, so let's call it the Rudy complex. Daniel E. (Rudy) Ruettinger played 27 seconds in one football game for the Irish in 1975, after spending the rest of his career getting beaten up on the practice squad. His story was Disneyfied in the movie Rudy as one of a boy with an unquenchable thirst to be part of the Irish, no matter how small that part might be.

The players on Ms. McGraw's practice squad all say it's very simple: They get to play basketball, and they get to help one of the top women's teams in the country.

"Seeing them beat UConn, and knowing that maybe you had a part in that, that's great," says Reggie McKnight, a former Irish soccer player who came out for the practice squad for the first time after his own varsity career concluded. "Having been an athlete for a long time, it makes [me] appreciate what they can do."

The guys have a healthy amount of respect for the women on the team, Mr. McKnight says. In a pickup game last fall, they took on a group of football players -- the elite of the elite athletes at Notre Dame -- and nearly beat them, losing by a point or two. If they weren't that good, most of the men who come to practice every day could find plenty of other things to do.

"If we were over at St. Mary's, I don't think we'd be out there doing this," Mr. Dillon says, referring to the Division III women's college next to Notre Dame. "Or if we were at the bottom of the Big East [Conference]. But they're doing so well."

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about using men in practice as the coaches at Notre Dame or Louisiana Tech or Iowa State. Ceal Barry, the head coach at the University of Colorado at Boulder, refuses to use men in practice and says they ought to be banned by the N.C.A.A.

"A few years back I used a male practice squad to scrimmage against our team," she says in an e-mail interview. "What I found out was happening was that seven to eight scholarship women were standing on the sidelines, not getting playing time during practice. I thought this hurt their development and their confidence.

"We have 15 full scholarships. We should develop the 15 scholarship women's skills during practice, not the men's," she continues. "It just doesn't seem right to me to sacrifice your players' development for the win. We've won 20 games this year without using guys, and our whole team feels a part of wins against teams like Florida and Iowa State."

Ms. Barry is in the distinct minority, however. The University of Connecticut has the only other ranked women's basketball team that did not report using a male practice squad, and the Huskies still practice with some male players from time to time.

The practice does not seem to have spread to most other sports, although women's polo clubs at some universities practice against all-male teams. Also, the women's soccer team at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is putting together a male squad of intramural players for spring practice.

The availability and willingness of men to play on practice squads for their female peers says a couple of things about gender roles in sport. For one thing, the pool of men who can compete at the top level of Division I women's basketball is substantially larger than the pool of women who have what it takes to be competitive at that level. And, more than women, men seem to be willing to play a subservient part on a team, if it means the chance to be part of it.

Would Ms. McGraw take on such a role? Absolutely not, she says.

She and Ms. Harris, the Iowa State coach, say they'd recruit women if there were women who could push their top stars. But a woman with the talent to compete in Division I will be on a team somewhere else already, Ms. Harris says.

And Ms. McGraw says it doesn't matter whether a group of guys without a prayer of making Notre Dame's men's squad can give her team a good workout.

"We're not trying to be as good as the men," she says.

"We're trying to be as good as the women."

Top