WNIT Response || IBM response
The NCAA is including one other post-season ladies’s event to its schedule. The group introduced the launch of the 2024 32-team Girls’s Basketball Invitational Event. The occasion shall be absolutely owned and funded by the NCAA.
There are already two impartial post-season tournaments which have sturdy attendance: the 64-team WNIT and the eight-team Girls’s Basketball Invitational. The title of the brand new NCAA event could be very near the unique WBI. The WNIT and WBI are sometimes showcases for up-and-coming groups that later have success within the NCAA Event.
From the NCAA press launch:
With the addition of WBIT, 100 NCAA-funded postseason alternatives shall be out there to ladies’s Division I basketball groups, equal to males’s basketball throughout its two occasions (the 68-team championship and the 32-team Nationwide Invitational Event). Particulars on the event format – together with the choice course of, bracketing ideas and host venues – shall be launched at a later date.
“Girls’s basketball is at an all-time excessive with information set for the Nationwide Championship and Closing 4 viewership, and the event was probably the most watched since 2009,” stated Jamie Boggs, chairman of the Division I Girls’s Basketball Oversight Committee and vp of athletics for the Grand Canyon. “This event will create an extra NCAA-funded postseason alternative for ladies’s basketball, and it comes at a time after we are seeing large progress within the recognition of ladies’s basketball.”
The NCAA additionally launched the event mark, which continues to focus on orange in alignment with different NCAA ladies’s basketball marks, together with the March Insanity emblem. The WBIT emblem – which is impressed by a backboard and web – may even function blue to tie in with the principle NCAA branding.
Later this summer time, the NCAA will determine a range committee, comprised of ladies’s basketball stakeholders and NCAA members, to manage the WBIT.
The WNIT issued a response to the NCAA’s announcement on Monday afternoon:
Because the NCAA pronounces the launch of the brand new 32-team Girls’s Basketball Invitational Event (WBIT), WNIT will proceed to be a thriving post-season event with 48 groups beginning in 2024.
The WNIT has persistently demonstrated its unwavering dedication to ladies’s basketball and its dedication to selling the expansion and improvement of the game. With a storied 25-year historical past, the WNIT’s main aim has at all times been to prioritize what’s greatest for ladies’s basketball, and that unwavering dedication will proceed to information its operations.
Because the event strikes ahead, its dedication to offering a platform for groups and athletes to showcase their expertise, foster competitors and advance the ladies’s sport will stay unchanged, guaranteeing a vivid and promising future for ladies’s basketball on the faculty stage.
Particulars on the brand new 48-team format shall be introduced at a later date.
The WBI adopted go well with with a press release on Tuesday:
The brand new NCAA postseason event, introduced yesterday, is a long-awaited step within the progress of the sport of ladies’s faculty basketball.
The WBI (Girls’s Basketball Invitational) has supplied a post-season ladies’s basketball event since 2010. Since then, the WBI has given 132 groups the chance to proceed their profitable playoff seasons. The WBI plans to retain its distinctive format of eight groups at one venue enjoying for a championship. Particulars shall be introduced within the coming months.
Keep tuned for extra updates on this story.
