COLUMN: Gender equality a concern for basketball season

When DePauw hosted basketball double headers during the 2012-13 season, the women's team started games at 6 p.m., and the men's team followed at 8 p.m.

This year, it's switched. The men's team will begin at 6 p.m. and the defending national champions will come out after. This isn't an attempt to drag in more crowd or showcase the No. 1 team in the country, it's about equality.

DePauw has operated this way for a while, carrying it over from one conference to the next. It's not that way for every team in the North Coast Athletic Conference, DPU's current league, but it is for the Tigers and several other NCAC schools.

The West Central Conference, home of all the county schools plus Cascade and Monrovia, does not operate this way, but it should.

All the WCC games are scheduled Friday night double-headers, with the girls going at 6 p.m. and the boys coming next. It was the same way last year and in all the years before that.

As it is, every boys' varsity game will begin at about 7:30 p.m., conference or not.

The girls' teams don't have the same luxury. WCC games start at 6 p.m., non-conference games start at 7:30 p.m., or maybe 7 p.m. if there isn't a JV team, and that's an issue.

I'm not a feminist, nor am I really an equalitist (which might not be a word). Not unlike Matthew Broderick's titular character an influential 80s comedy, I believe "Ists" are not good.

Life, as I was told repeatedly by my parents when my sister got more candy than me on Easter and other holidays, is not fair. But sports are supposed to be.

Forcing girls' teams to play a flexible schedule, year after year, while giving boys' teams consistency, is discriminatory.

The size of the crowd and perceived respect from the schools, giving the boys the top-billing and sticking the girls in the matinee, is part of the problem. The bigger issue, to me, is that bouncing around times reduces the quality of play.

Boys get to become accustomed to planning the events of the day and their routine, year after year, with a late start.

Girls don't even get that day after day. It's harder to build a routine and mentally prepare to play for a game when you play home games at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 6 p.m. on Friday. It's also hard to adjust to practice at one time, then playing at another, but the boys' teams at least get consistency on both ends.

Bodies adjust to stress, learning to peak at a specific time after building a habit. The guys are given their rhythm every game, while the girls have to adjust.

Maybe it's a benefit and the girls are learning to be flexible and getting more from the sport (probably not). But if that's true, it's discriminatory against the guys.

The solution is pretty simple. The schools should swap the schedule every year, like DePauw and like they do in many other states on basketball Friday.

Continuing the current path strengthens the quality of boys' games and weakens the girls. Swapping will, every other year, weaken the boys and strengthen the girls. It's imperfect, but it's equal.