{"id":99414,"date":"2025-08-27T10:20:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/99414\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T10:20:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T10:20:07","slug":"can-state-abortion-legislation-impact-womens-basketball-recruiting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/99414\/","title":{"rendered":"Can state abortion legislation impact women’s basketball recruiting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points. <\/p>\n

To the best of my knowledge, there isn\u2019t really a ton of peer-reviewed, academic research on college athlete recruiting. <\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t to say there isn\u2019t any research, because there is<\/a>. But there aren\u2019t huge numbers of journals that take college sports research as seriously as other disciplines, getting accurate data at scale can be a real challenge, and peer-reviewed research just takes a long time. By the time you build a model, finish your interviews, get approval and get a journal to accept your work \u2026 the rules could have changed. <\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need a PhD from Ohio\u2019s sport management program to know, at least at a high level, what sorts of factors tend to influence what schools athletes pick. Athletes care about playing time, winning, financial compensation, proximity to home, relationship with players and cultural fit, to varying degrees. <\/p>\n

But what about state laws? <\/p>\n

Also in 2023, Molly Harry (then an assistant professor at Arkansas), conducted interviews with athletes to better understand whether abortion restriction legislation would have impacted their recruitment decisions. According to her conversations<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Finally, no athlete interviewed, even those who were \u201csaddened,\u201d \u201cdisappointed\u201d or \u201cscared\u201d by the state laws, said they would choose a different institution or transfer based on Arkansas\u2019 strict laws concerning abortion.<\/p>\n

But that story was based on interviews of just 18 athletes (and only 13 women), all from \u201cnon-revenue\u201d sports programs in the spring 2023 semester. <\/p>\n

A recent study from the University of South Carolina<\/a> took a wider look at a larger data set, specifically focusing on elite women\u2019s college basketball recruitment. And according to the research, there does appear to be a negative relationship between restrictive state abortion laws and women\u2019s college basketball recruiting outcomes: <\/p>\n

These summary data indicate institutions in states with an immediate abortion ban experienced a decrease in the signing of elite playing talent (Top 100 Recruits) of over six percentage points or three ESPN Recruiting Rank spots. In contrast, institutions in states without such bans increased the percentage of top recruits committing to their programmes by nine percentage points, resulting in an average increase of approximately three and one-half ranking spots. This summary data suggests a nontrivial portion of talented females shifted from abortion ban states to states with no or partial bans<\/p>\n

How did the authors reach that conclusion? How did they even measure this sort of thing?<\/p>\n

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