Websites Try to Close College Basketball Data Gender Gap

Journalists who write about college basketball and fans who want to fill out their brackets rely on statistics collected during games, analyzed, and posted online to assess players’ performance, compare teams, and make decisions on what topics to write about and which teams to support. While there is a wealth of detailed information available about male college basketball players and teams, the data is often less in-depth when it comes to women’s basketball. Fortunately, some websites are trying to change that.

Websites such as Sports-Reference.com and shotanalytics.com offer detailed information about pace, point differentials, and many other statistics about men’s teams. The information collected about women’s performances tends to focus on more basic components, such as points, rebounds, and blocks, and less on the in-depth analysis that is found for men’s basketball.

Some journalists, such as Sue Bird from The Players’ Tribune and Howard Megdal from Excelle Sports, have written about the disparity between data on men’s and women’s basketball and have said it limits the types of stories they can write about the sport. They have called for more detailed information about women’s performances in basketball.

Some sources are trying to bridge the gender gap. Basketball-Reference.com shows the usage rate and true shooting percentage for female basketball players. ESPN has statistics available on women’s basketball. That data is organized in the form of leaderboards, and the top 50 teams can be searched and sorted. The NCAA’s website is also a good source of data on women’s basketball with information on Division I, II, and III teams. Its archives include national statistical rankings going back to 2000 and a team and player national rankings summary starting with 2002. The site also includes Final Four records stretching back to 2001.

WBBState.com was until recently a go-to source for detailed information about women’s basketball. It collected and shared data such as usage, true shooting percentage, adjusted team rankings, and other detailed statistics. The website went offline on February 29, leaving journalists and fans without the ability to use its detailed information. The company that provided server space to data company National Statistical, which ran the site, took its equipment offline.

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