The NCAA on Monday announced the creation of the Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament. Here’s what you need to know:

  • The 32-team postseason tournament will be funded and owned by the NCAA. It will begin play in 2024.
  • It raises the number of NCAA-funded postseason spots for Division I women’s basketball teams to 100, the same number as the men’s teams.
  • Details about the tournament’s selection process, bracketing principles and host sites will be announced later.

The new secondary NCAA women's basketball tournament will be called the WBIT.

The 32-team tournament, announced in January, will begin in 2024. This tournament will be run by the NCAA, like the men's NIT. (The WNIT is privately-owned).

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) July 17, 2023

The Athletic’s instant analysis:

What does this mean for women’s basketball?

When the Kaplan Report published its review of the gender equity issues between the women’s and men’s basketball tournaments, one of the findings was that the NCAA supports more postseason opportunities for men’s teams than for women’s teams. When women’s programs fail to earn a berth in the NCAA Tournament, they often turn down the NIT because the college has to fund its own participation. The WBIT will help to rectify this situation.

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It will be interesting to see the quality of teams that enter the WBIT. On the men’s side, the CBI is the third choice among programs after the NCAA Tournament and the NIT. The association with the NCAA theoretically would make the WBIT more desirable than the WNIT. But as we learned in 2021, merely being an NCAA event doesn’t guarantee that the participating teams will be supported in a way that ensures the best possible basketball.

What did the NCAA say about the event?

“Women’s basketball is at an all-time high with records being set for national championship and Final Four viewership, and the tournament was the most viewed since 2009,” said Jamie Boggs, chair of the Division I Women’s Basketball Oversight Committee and vice president of athletics for Grand Canyon. “This tournament will create an additional NCAA-funded postseason opportunity for women’s basketball, and it comes at a time when we are seeing tremendous growth in popularity for women’s basketball.”

(Photo: Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)