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Oopsie! (Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images)
The women’s college basketball scene is having an f-ing moment. The ratings are through the roof. The talent is generational. There’s even a villain — which as every sports fan knows, really elevates the watching experience. It’d take a really bone-headed move to fumble the bag at this point.
…Women’s college basketball made a really bone-headed mistake. Seriously, it was an unforced error of epic proportions — and it all came to light thanks to an attorney.
One of the 3 point lines at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, was incorrectly marked out on the floor. And not just a little off — the line that demarcates 2 points versus 3 was 9 whole inches wrong on one side of the court. The error wasn’t caught for four full games at the court — and they were in the middle of the fifth when it was finally noticed. And that might never have happened if it weren’t for divorce attorney Michael McGrath.
He told the Willamette Week it was pretty obvious to him, “I saw it in like three seconds. Seriously. I mean, I walked in and one team was practicing on the correct side of the court, and you could just see that the other side was too short.” McGrath attributes the catch to his legal training, “I’m a lawyer, so that’s what I do all day long, I proofread stuff. I notice grammar mistakes. I do divorce, so half my job is negotiation and half is making sure that whatever we negotiate is accurate. That, and I’m probably just a nerd.”
Once he spotted the error, McGrath posted pics to Reddit and chatted to folks around him about the mistake, that’s how the refs were alerted to the problem:
The guy in front of me stood up and waved to someone down at the court, and he waved back from courtside. So I went to him and said, “Who is this guy? Can he talk to the referees?” He texted his buddy who got ahold of someone in the NCAA, and three minutes later, they pulled out the big measuring tape.
My kids were watching the game at home and said, “There’s some kind of delay.” I said, “I know. I think I caused that.”
The mistake was spotted mid-game, but NC State and Texas played on rather than have a delay. The court was corrected in time for the UConn USC Elite Eight game.
Lynn Holzman, NCAA vice president for women’s basketball, apologized for the mistake, and chalked it up to human error. “We apologize for this error and the length of time for which it went unnoticed,” Holzman said. “Simply put, this court did not meet our expectations, and the NCAA should have caught the error sooner.
Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer called the wrong 3-pt line “inexcusable and unfair.” Her team was bounced on the busted court in the Sweet Sixteen.
“When you arrive at a gym, especially in the NCAA Tournament, at the very least you expect the baskets to be 10 feet and the floor markings to be correct,” she said in a statement Monday. “For an error of that magnitude to overshadow what has been an incredible two weekends of basketball featuring sensational teams and incredible individual performances is unacceptable and extremely upsetting.”
I feel for VanDerveer and the Cardinals, but… have they never seen Hoosiers? She could take a page from the pre-game ritual memorialized in the film. When the heroic underdogs from Hickory reach the state championship, Gene Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale leads them into the empty venue before practice and grabs a tape measure.
Coach Dale: “Buddy, hold this under the backboard. What is it?”
Buddy: “15 feet.”
Coach Dale: “15 feet.”
Coach Dale: “Strap, put Ollie on your shoulders. Measure this from the rim. Buddy? How far?”
Buddy: “Ten feet.”
Dale: “Ten feet. I think you’ll find it’s the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.
If only VanDerveer had pulled out her own tape measure and found the 3-pt line was less than the prescribed 22 feet, 1¾ inches…
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.
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