CHAPEL HILL, NC ― Candace Parker made historical past as the first woman to dunk in an NCAA Tournament game on March 19, 2006.
About 20 minutes later, she did it once more.
“You’re thinking about a dunk… there it is!” announcer Sean McDonough exclaimed on the broadcast.
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On the 20th anniversary of the historic dunk towards Army, and eve of the Women’s NCAA Tournament, a brand new technology of ladies’s faculty basketball gamers, lots of whom weren’t alive to see it or too younger to recollect it, mirrored on the dunk’s significance.
“It says a lot for women’s basketball, because, you know, it shows women are capable of what men can do as well,” North Carolina middle Blanca Thomas stated.
It was unimaginable to look at SportsHeart that day with out seeing Parker slam the ball down. Thomas’ teammate, beginning ahead Nyla Harris, commented on the two-time nationwide champion’s affect on basketball as an entire, and the dunk captured the consideration of audiences round the world.
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“It’s huge to give her her flowers,” Harris stated.
Maryland beginning guard Saylor Poffenbarger acknowledged the significance of this second.
“It was just the start to showing the abilities that women have too,” Poffenbarger stated.
The presence of dunking in the males’s recreation has typically been used as an argument for it being extra entertaining than the ladies’s.
Harris described the variations between the males’s and ladies’s recreation, saying the ladies’s recreation is extra structured whereas the males’s is extra one-on-one. To her, the addition of gamers dunking is another reason for followers to comply with the ladies’s recreation.
“It’s gonna bring more attention, and I think it’s gonna make people kind of look at it like, really, what is the difference between the men’s game and the women’s game?” she stated.
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Maryland ahead Isimenme Ozzy-Momodu taught herself learn how to dunk and did it once throughout warmups earlier than considered one of her highschool video games. She poked enjoyable at the thought of utilizing dunks to match the males’s and ladies’s video games.
“If I start dunking, people better start coming to watch basketball games,” Ozzy-Momodu stated.
Tatum Esparza is a scholar in the University of Georgia’s Carmical Sports Media Institute.
This article initially appeared on USA TODAY: Revisiting Candace Parker’s historic Women’s March Madness dunk
