Women's teams will now get paid for playing in NCAA Tournament

Women’s basketball teams finally will be paid for playing games in the NCAA Tournament each March just like the men have for years under a plan approved Wednesday at the NCAA convention in Nashville.

The unanimous vote by NCAA membership was met by a round of applause both inside the ballroom and around the sport. This was the final step toward a pay structure for women playing in March Madness after the Division I Board of Governors voted unanimously for the proposal in August.

NCAA President Charlie Baker joined others in giving credit for the creation of a performance fund to those who came before and helped build women’s basketball.

South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, whose Gamecocks went undefeated winning last year’s national championship and her third overall, said her first thought hearing of the vote was a simple “YES!”

“This continues our fight to lift women’s basketball to historic levels,” Staley said. “I appreciate the decision by the Kaplan Hecker and Fink law firm to include the lack of units in their report as a key issue holding women’s basketball back from capitalizing on the historic viewership and quality of the product on the court.”

So-called performance units, which represent revenue, will be given to women’s teams playing in the tournament starting this year, the event’s 43rd edition. A team that reaches the Final Four could bring its conference roughly $1.26 million over the next three years in financial performance rewards.

In the first year, $15 million will be awarded to teams out of the fund, which is 26% of the women’s basketball media revenue deal. That will grow to $25 million, or 41% of the revenue, by 2028. The 26% is on par with what men’s basketball teams received the first year the performance units program was established.

Teams making this March’s NCAA Tournament won’t actually be paid until the organization has a full tournament of data available.

The women’s March Madness plan is similar to the men’s basketball unit program. Each of 32 conferences with an automatic bid receive a unit, and additional units will be rewarded for teams receiving at-large bids to the 68-team field.

The longer a school’s tournament run lasts, the more units the school’s conference receives. Conferences decide the distribution of unit revenue to each of its members. Each unit was worth about $2 million for the 2024 men’s tournament.

Men’s basketball teams now receive 24% of the media rights deal, which is $8.8 billion over eight years, starting this year. Women’s basketball is valued at $65 million per tournament in the NCAA’s new media rights deal with ESPN — roughly 10 times more than in the contract that ends this year.



(AP Photo George Walker IV)