Because seriously, I feel embarrassed after having waxed all poetic and shit last quarter at how this campus is finally learning how to rally around its sports teams only to walk in last weekend and find 7,000-seat Maples half-full and dead, and after we BEAT UCONN, too. One of the best basketball teams in the country is right in your backyard, but unless Jersey Shore Auriemma is in town, none of you seem to care.

It’s real sad too, because every student I know that starts following the women’s basketball team (i.e. the Band) eventually falls in love with them. They’ve been a great source of joy for me over the past four years, and I’ve definitely developed a crush on Kayla Pedersen by this point. All they do is lay waste to the Pac-10 and make the Final Four year after year—glorious blood sport for the low, low price of Free Ninety-Five. Yet, the only takers are either too old to yell or too young to pay attention. Just once, I’d like to see someone who can actually dance win the Twist Cam contest. Men’s basketball is rowdy because of the student section, while at times the atmosphere at the women’s games reminds me of elementary school.

“But women’s basketball is boring, and I don’t have time.” That’s usually the most enlightened response I get when I ask people why they won’t go see this team. Even at uber-diverse Stanford, located in the self-proclaimed most progressive area of the country, the mention of women’s basketball still prompts misogynistic caveman chest-beating, usually followed by petulant whining about the lack of dunking.

I don’t get why dunking is so important, unless you’re talking about Dunk-a-roos. After all, it’s just a glorified exclamation point, and it doesn’t turn a basket into a sure thing either. I’ve seen plenty of hot-stuff male athletes who end up missing an easy basket because they’re too busy trying to make SportsCenter.

It’s such a hobbyhorse for women’s basketball haters, though, that at times I feel the need to don my French feminist hat and make claims about how dunking is a violent, penetrative act that reinforces phallogocentrism, emphasizing man’s supremacy over the ball compared to the cooperation with the ball that the layup requires, which is more in tune with the feminine ideal, and that the positioning of dunking as an essential part of the game is a means of preserving the especially strong patriarchy of sports by creating a space of exclusion in the sport of basketball. I don’t actually have to make those arguments, though, because they imply that women can’t dunk because they’re inferior athletes, which is not true. Both Ogwumikes can dunk, and I’m pretty sure Pedersen can as well; it’s just that Tara VanDerveer thinks it’s bad sportsmanship. If you want dunking, then show up and get amped and demand it. That’s the only way you’ll convince Tara to take the reins off (and, I won’t lie, it’d be awesome).

The dunking issue aside, if you still want to argue that women’s basketball is more boring, then I think it’s time for a field trip to last weekend’s box scores. Which team would you rather watch, the one that shot over 50 percent in both games, going 80 percent and 36 percent from behind the arc with 21 steals on the weekend, or the team that shot 42 percent both times with 20-percent and 16.7-percent three-point shooting and eight steals on the weekend?

I shouldn’t have to resort to pointing out the men’s shortcomings to prove women’s basketball’s worth, though; in fact, that’s still reinforcing the problem. If you can’t enjoy just watching the Ogwumike sisters play their beautiful brand of basketball without having to qualify it by comparing them to men, then you’re not really a fan of the game. Eastern Tennessee and the state of Connecticut seem to understand this; their teams drew crowds three times the size of ours last weekend, and those places are still respective bastions of Confederate pride and liberal privilege. Stanford’s supposed to be all about forward thinking, and it’d be nice if we could apply that mindset to our approach toward athletics instead of clinging to a worldview that’s more reminiscent of our past as a boy’s club for rich white Californians that tried just a little bit harder than the U$C student body. More importantly though, the main attraction of college basketball is the enthusiasm of the fans, and you just can’t get that when your crowd consists of geriatrics and easily distracted 10-year-old girls, so show up and yell, and pre-game it too if that’s your style, because as much as I want to take down institutional oppression, I’m really just asking you to watch sports, and we all like sports, right?

For real Kayla, holla atcha boy: [email protected].