Basketball Schedule Detective, Addendum

 Wouldn't you know it, only a few hours after I posted about the known games for the upcoming basketball season, WAC Hoops Digest posted about the Western Athletic Conference's scheduling alliance with Conference USA, specifically the match-ups coming up on the women's side.

To recap, we know very little about the UT Arlington women's basketball schedule, but I expect a flip of venues of some of last year's opponents. Potential road games exist against Texas Southern, Texas A&M-Commerce and Arizona with potential home games against Lamar and Houston. Houston played at College Park Center in 2020/21, so that's likely a completed contract. Texas Southern played in Arlington in 2019 with no return game, so that's not set in stone either.

Unlike the men, the UTA women finished decently in the NET rankings as they played a difficult non-conference season well before injuries hurt the squad in conference play. Thanks to that, they get to participate and of the potential names to come to CPC, I'm pretty happy. 

Basketball Schedule Detective, Summer 2023 Edition

As usual per the summer, there's a slow trickle of information coming out, usually from outside sources, regarding the upcoming season's schedule. I'm not sure why and I have never followed up upon why, but the UT Arlington teams always seem late to the schedule-release party.

So with that, let's play schedule detective for the basketball teams and see what we know as of now. I'm not sure of any other place that tries to put the known releases all in one place.

First, the Western Athletic Conference has released their upcoming conference schedule and it is vastly different than what we've seen as of late. It is a full double-round robin schedule, with one home and one away game against each member of the conference. UTA hasn't had that since the 2015/16 Sun Belt Conference season, when they played 20 games against the ten other members of that conference. In fact, the first three years of the Belt was a double round robin, as well the lone year in the WAC in 2012/13. You'd have to go back to the 2002/03 season when UTA played a double-round robin in the Southland Conference.

Are the Feet Dragging

It has been three months since UT Arlington students voted in favor of football returning to campus by nearly 62 percent. Obviously, there's not going to be much movement in three months, but news has been scant to come out about the topic. 

I've spoken to a few people about the latest and unsurprisingly, the University is either taking a deliberate approach, or dragging its feet. I'm generally an optimist and want to believe the U is giving a good faith effort.

UTA President Jennifer Cowley was on record with the following quote:

Title IX requires that there be a sufficient number of women's sports seats, so the very first thing we need to do is to ask what it takes to expand our women's sports. So I've asked the Athletics director to evaluate some women's sports and come forward with recommendations around what we might do there.

What she is referencing is Title IX, the landmark legislation passed in the 1970's that dictate funding based on equality of both genders. Most people mistakenly believe Title IX requires a one for one scholarship for both women and men. It is actually a three-prong test where just one prong needs to be met.

Summer Chats: Men's Basketball Attendance

The summer is always the roughest part of the athletic sports season at the collegiate level. There's no active events, at least at UT Arlington, schedules for upcoming sports aren't released for a while and, specific to UTA, upcoming excitement for the arriving year is muted by the lack of fall sports on campus. With that said, I generally post the more random or non-calendar-specific items in June, July or August. I will now officially give it a title: Summer Chats.

Recently on Twitter, I and a couple other UTA fans engaged in a discussion about men's basketball attendance. It started off with WAC Hoops Digest showing a picture of a full College Park Center in its debut against the University of Texas-San Antonio. The text read that if new head coach K.T. Turner can pack the place, UTA would become one of the best home teams in the country. 

Of course, that point is entirely true. We have seen it before, both in big games and a couple of seasons that saw near 3,000 average fans in the seats. In addition to the high-talent teams, those crowds helped propel the team even further.