How far women's hoops has come...

There was a nice feature in Saturday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune on Queen's professor Dr. Joan Stevenson, who was the first coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers women's basketball program in the early '70s.

"...the arrival of Title IX as federal law in 1972 opened the door for women's sports in ways that seemed unimaginable when Stevenson coached the Gophers with no assistants, no recruiting and barely any money.

" 'I drove the bus,' she said. 'Literally.' "

It goes without saying that today's players owe a debt. Stevenson, who's in U of T's Hall of Fame as a basketball player, also coached at York and at Lakehead during the days of the old GPAC in the '70s, when the Thunder Bay school were part of a fierce rivalry between the three Manitoba universities.

At the same time, there's still progress to be made with media coverage of women's hoops on both sides of the border, as Dave Zirin points out.