| Comstock to head NCAA Women’s Basketball Committee BY MIKE UNGER Next March, when women’s college basketball fans throughout the country tune into ESPN to see if their favorite school made the NCAA Tournament or had its
bubble burst, AU athletic director Joni Comstock will be featured front and center. Later this summer, Comstock will begin a one-year term as chair of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Committee, heading the 10-member group charged with running the tournament from top to bottom. Its tasks include picking the venues and selecting and seeding the teams. Comstock has served on the committee for four years and said she is looking forward to the challenge of leading it. “Anytime you can be on a very prominent national committee, being a part of one of the major committees in the NCAA, that is one of the things that really distinguished a person’s career in intercollegiate athletics,” she said. “I will have a lot of exposure in both regional and national media, and each time I receive that recognition so will American University.” Comstock is the first person to ever serve as chair while a member of the Patriot League. During her previous years on the committee, she was on the site selection, television, and game management subcommittees. The NCAA has nine years remaining on an 11-year deal with ESPN granting the sports network exclusive rights to televise all 63 games of the tournament. “We have finished our second year of that, and I think it has dramatically increased the amount of attention the women’s tournament has received,” Comstock said. “We want to continue to work aggressively with ESPN to continue to promote the women’s tournament. One of the things that will occur next year that we’re hoping will increase the visibility is that we will move our selection announcement from Sunday to Monday. Our goal with that is to establish a clear and separate identity with the men’s tournament. It will be very important for us to work closely with ESPN on that.” Comstock played high school basketball and was an assistant coach at Lincoln College in Illinois. As an assistant athletic director at Purdue University, she helped transform the Boilermakers into a perennial women’s basketball power. The school won the national championship in 1999. The committee meets five times during the year, and the process of picking and seeding teams can be an arduous—and occasionally controversial—one. But Comstock is well positioned to meet the challenges of the job, said Lynn Parkes, the outgoing chair. “Joni is a good communicator, and I think she is somebody that can see both sides of an issue,” said Parkes, an assistant athletic director at the University of Memphis. “She’s very fair and balanced. I think Joni is a natural leader, and I think people trust her. They see her as somebody that has integrity, and I think her sense of fairness will carry her a long way in the position.” Comstock originally was nominated for a spot on the committee by the Big Ten conference while she was at Purdue. As chair, she’ll be in the hot seat when ESPN anchors and analysts interview her live in front of a national television audience during the selection show next year. “Normally we’ll find ourselves in a situation where we have four to five teams to fill one to two slots,” Comstock said. “We’re all aware of the importance to those teams to be a part of the NCAA Tournament. When you get down to that point, that process can take several hours. We try and look at the statistics and performance of those particular teams and try to evaluate how have they been playing. It becomes a very stressful time. You’re trying to make sure that you do everything to identify the teams that have earned that right.” |
