History

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) conducted the first national women's college basketball tournament in 1972.

At that time, the NCAA wasn't involved in women's sports. During the 1981-82 school year, though, the association began to conduct a number of championships for women, usually in competition with the AIAW.

The first NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament was staged in 1982. The AIAW also conducted its final tournament that year.

Until then, most of the country's top women's basketball teams had come from small, little-known schools such as Louisiana Tech, which won the first NCAA tournament in 1982 by beating Cheyney State in the final. With the NCAA takeover, many larger schools better known for their men's teams began taking women's sports much more seriously.

As a result, scholarship money increased dramatically. So did the caliber of play and fan interest.

The 1982 championship game drew 9,531 fans, and the entire tournament had an attendance of 56,320. In five years, tournament attendance had grown to over 100,000, and it's now approaching 300,000. The 1996 final, in Charlotte, NC, drew a record attendance of 23,921.

Television exposure has grown along with attendance. The University of Connecticut's unbeaten 1994-95 team and its player of the year, Rebecca Lobo, helped greatly by drawing national media attention. Lobo was profiled in Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and People magazines, and she appeared with Regis and Kathy in the morning and with Letterman on late-night television.

That made a good lead-in for the 1996 Olympic squad, which became known as "the other Dream Team." Lobo was only a reserve on the team, which swept to a Gold Medal just as easily as the men's team, made up of NBA players.

Like the men's tournament, the NCAA women's tournament has a field of 64 teams, of which 30 are conference champions and 34 are at-large entries chosen by committee. The tournament has the same system of regional tournaments, leading up to a Final Four. ESPN and ESPN2 televise about 25 of the games, including the championship, which is played late Sunday afternoon, between the men's semi-finals on Saturday and the men's championship game on Monday night.