Hansen’s Sunday Notebook: With Cats missing from TV, Adia Barnes fights for equality

By the time Adia Barnes‘ Arizona women’s basketball team makes its TV debut this season against Kansas on Dec. 8. That’s Game 8 of the Wildcats’ season.

“It needs to change,” says Barnes. “It needs to be equal.”

Equal? The Pac-12 Networks this season will broadcast 86 nonconference men’s basketball games, including eight featuring coach Tommy Lloyd’s UA men’s team.

It will broadcast 16 women’s nonconference games in the same period.

“We are nowhere near being treated equal,” says Barnes, who has not been quiet about pushing for equality for women’s college sports. “The whole system needs to change.”

ESPN and its platforms are broadcasting four Pac-12 women’s nonconference games this basketball season. Men? How about 32.

But ESPN spins wholly on revenue possibilities. The Pac-12 Networks was not created strictly with TV ratings or viewership in mind, but also with a collegial approach of sharing among its membership.

That’s not what is happening.

“We need to have more exposure,” says Barnes, who was notably unhappy when she learned her team’s 2021 Final Four run did not deliver any money back to the UA or to the Pac-12.

“That was insane,” she says now.

With the exception of Arizona and UCLA, Pac-12 men’s basketball this season has thus far been a national embarrassment. Check out the following results and the broadcast outlet:

• UC Irvine defeated Oregon on Pac-12 Networks
• Florida Gulf Coast defeated USC on Pac-12 Networks
• Grambling defeated Colorado on Pac-12 Networks
• Sam Houston State defeated Utah on Pac-12 Networks
• Prairie View A&M defeated Washington State on Pac-12 Networks
• Cal Baptist defeated Washington on Pac-12 Networks
• Texas Southern defeated Arizona State on Pac-12 Networks

It’s not like the Pac-12 is serving up must-see basketball.

To its credit, the Pac-12 televises almost every women’s conference game on its Friday-Sunday rotation, which is the ideal upon which the network was founded. But not so much in the pre-conference season.

“If it’s not talked about now, it’ll be forgotten,” says Barnes. “We deserve our seat at the table.”

In the meantime, enjoy this week’s Pac-12 basketball telecasts: Texas State at Cal, Grambling at ASU, Pepperdine at ASU and Detroit-Mercy at WSU. All four are men’s games.

The controversial LIV Golf Tour has tentatively scheduled one of its nine 2023 USA events for mid-March at the private Gallery Golf Club, South Course.

The Gallery and the Dove Mountain Golf Club are both owned by Texas’ Escalante Golf operation, which owns Oregon’s Pumpkin Ridge Golf Course, site of the first-ever LIV Golf event in the United States this year.

LIV Golf is a professional golf tour financed by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Reaction to the LIV Tour’s first season was mixed, at best. It raided the PGA Tour and signed high-profile players such as Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson and has created an unprecedented split of ill will in the golf community.

If the March event at The Gallery goes off as planned, it could create a problem by taking away interest and income from the March 3-5 PGA Tour Champions Cologuard Classic at Tucson National.

One potential negative to the Cologuard Classic and LIV Golf sharing Tucson’s golf dollars in March is that the Conquistadors are a nonprofit group that has generated more than $40 million for Southern Arizona charities since 1962. The LIV Tour is not a charity-based organization.

My feelings about the LIV Tour are not good. Those such as Cameron Smith who jumped to LIV purely for the money will find lesser career accomplishments and rob golf fans from seeing how good some of these players were likely to be. The older players like Dustin Johnson are cashing in on past success, again understandable, but will still hurt their legacies. Best example: Mickelson, three-time Tucson Open winner whose reputation has sunk — as has his golf game.

The 2023 LIV Tour is tentatively scheduled to open in February on a Florida golf property yet to be named, with a second February event on a California course, also yet to be identified.

When the Chicago Bulls made Arizona guard Dalen Terry a first-round draft pick in June, he probably couldn’t have imagined playing a doubleheader. But that’s what happened last Sunday when Terry played 33 minutes for the G League’s Windy City Bulls in the afternoon, scoring 16 points, and that night suited up for the Bulls and scored six points in five minutes. Over Chicago’s first 15 games, Terry appeared in nine games, scoring 10 points. Two ex-Wildcats lead the G League in statistical categories through Friday’s games. Gabe York leads the league with a 33.1 scoring average for the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, and James Akinjo leads the league with 12 assists per game. Akinjo, who plays for the Westchester Knicks, is also averaging 21 points per game. …

The core of Arizona coach Laura Ianello’s 2018 NCAA women’s golf championship team is trying to secure LPGA Tour playing privileges at the ongoing LPGA Qualifying School in Florida. Through Friday, Haley Moore was inside the cut line with rounds of 73-70, and sisters Yu-Sang Hou (73-74) and Vivian Hou (75-74) were outside the cut line, as was 2018 Wildcats regular Gigi Stoll (73-76). The only player from Arizona’s 2018 national championship team to play as a regular on the LPGA Tour this year was Bianca Pagdanganan, who earned $116,806 to retain privileges for the 2023 tour. ….

When coach Dave Cosgrove’s defending NJCAA national champion men’s soccer team was eliminated in two games last week at the national finals, held at the Kino Sports Complex, Cosgrove put it in perspective by saying “we just weren’t quite good enough this year.’’ The 2018 and 2021 national champs played at something of a disadvantage in the opener against Southeastern Community College of Iowa. SCC started a lineup with no American players; the 10 players who got the most minutes against Pima are from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the Netherlands, Peru, Costa Rica, the Virgin Islands, Spain, Japan and Honduras. By comparison, Cosgrove’s lineup included six players from Arizona, three from Tucson. Not quite an even playing field.

Tucson distance running legend Pam Reed, 61, was inducted into the American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame last week, the 21st person so honored. Reed has won 32 ultra marathons, including the 2002 and 2003 Badwater Marathon, a 135-mile test of will through Death Valley in the summer. Reed is the 19th person globally to run at least 100 races of 100 miles, finishing in the top three in 45 of those events. I read Reed’s book “The Extra Mile’’ in which she detailed her epic journey from a stay-at-home mom to world-class runner. It was superb. She was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 2017. …

Arizona’s men’s tennis coach Clancy Shields, who has engineered one of the most remarkable rebuilding projects in school history — the long-dormant Wildcats won the 2020 Pac-12 championship and Shields has twice been the Pac-12 Coach of the Year — was inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame last week in Denver. To make it even better, Clancy’s brother, Luke Shields, was also inducted, one of just three members of the Class of 2022. Luke is the head tennis coach at Boise State. The Shields brothers grew up in Grand Junction, Colorado, and became national-level tennis players as teenagers, traveling the country with their parents every summer. “My mom was a nurse and my dad was our coach and we ended up in a cargo van traveling the country playing every event we could enter,” Clancy said. Ron Elliott, the Shields’ coach in Grand Junction, said “Clancy was a ball of fire.” That fire still burns at Arizona. …..

No one in Tucson will be busier on Friday than Marana businessman Toby Bourguet. His quarterback-playing sons will play-day-after-Thanksgiving football games: Treyson, a freshman at Western Michigan, is scheduled to be WMU’s starting QB at 11 a.m. Tucson time, against Toledo. Trenton, a junior at ASU, is a possible starting QB for Arizona State two hours later in the Territorial Cup at Arizona Stadium. There’s never been anything like this in a Tucson football family. I watched Treyson on Wednesday’s ESPN telecast of the WMU-Central Michigan game, played in a blizzard in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. He made the game’s biggest play in the final two minutes, somehow completing a 36-yard pass in the ice, cold and snow to set up a winning field goal in a 12-10 game.

Now that Arizona has three walk-over home blowouts in the books, coach Tommy Lloyd is likely to face the most challenging question of the early season as competition is expected to be intense at the Maui Jim Invitational this week.

The No. 1 issue: do the Wildcats have a capable big man to back up center Oumar Ballo when/if Ballo is in foul trouble, needs a rest, or perhaps is injured?

Seven-foot freshman Henri Veesaar has shot 83% and is averaging 8.0 points, but he has yet to play against a quality big man. Early indications are that Veesaar needs a full year to develop his strength, ballhandling, presence and confidence.

Almost no team in college basketball has an off-the-bench big guy who can provide 10 or 15 quality minutes a game. Over the last 40 years Arizona has filled in with bigs like Kevin Flanagan, Isaiah Fox, Kirk Walters, Mohamed Tangara, Angelo Chol, Ira Lee and Joe Turner at center. Of that group, only Turner was a consistently reliable sub.

This isn’t anything new. Oregon is the only Pac-12 club with quality big man depth. The key is for Ballo to stay healthy and average about 32 minutes a game.

The best thing I saw last week: Amy Bonner was one of the three referees who worked the Arizona-Utah Tech men’s basketball game. I did not hear a single person say “Hey, that’s a woman referee.’’

Bonner has become part of the fabric of college basketball, men or women. She called 69 games last year (none in the Pac-12) and has been so capable that barriers have been broken. From Tucson, she flew to Los Angeles and worked Friday’s USC-Mount St. Mary’s game.

The only other female referee to work an Arizona game is Crystal Hogan, who called the Arizona-NAU game in 2019 and the Arizona-Montana game in 2020 and has worked three Pac-12 games so far this season.

Tucson has been something of a cradle of basketball officials for the last 50 years, producing those from 1960s official Gordon Overstreet to Chris Rastatter and Bob Scofield, the only NCAA referee in history to work both the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. Ex-Wildcat basketball player Brenda Pantoja has worked NBA and WNBA games, and former Wildcat Felecity Willis is one of the top referees in Pac-12 women’s hoops.

It’s fitting that Bonner and Hogan have done some of their early work at McKale Center.