The student-athlete experience

Amanda Newton, basketball student-athlete

Drury University

NCAAsports.com

Reacting to her team’s loss in this year’s regional final after a four-year stint in which the Panthers advanced to four NCAA tournaments, two regional semifinals and one championship game:

“I think I can say it now that we lost, but basketball isn’t everything. The friendships we developed and the stuff we got out of it in that regard besides the basketball means everything.”

Kara Rutledge, basketball student-athlete

Drury University

NCAAsports.com

“I wouldn’t trade this (bond formed with her teammates) for all the national championships. This is right where I want to be. What we have here will last a lifetime.”

Basketball distributions

Bud Haidet, athletics director

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Orlando Sentinel

“People really think there’s a lot of money to be made (by being in the NCAA tournament), and there’s some, but by the time you get through with expenses and (paying for) travel parties, it’s not a wash but it’s not much better. The further you go in the tournament, the more you’re going to make, but you’ve got to go pretty far. And you need some more teams in your own conference to get in and go far.”

Winning and losing

Geno Auriemma, head women’s basketball coach

University of Connecticut

Associated Press

Reacting to his team’s narrow loss to Duke University in the regional final of the Division I Women’s Basketball Championship:

“They say you really don’t understand what winning is. You really don’t appreciate what winning is until you’ve had your share of losing. I think the opposite is also true. I think you can’t quite fathom how much losing hurts when you have had as many chances to win, that we had, over the years.”

Funding college sports

John Rouse, faculty member

Ball State University

Indianapolis Star

“We can accredit the football team (in Division I-A), but not the master’s program in public administration. It would take $150,000 for two more professors. It takes five. We have three. I’m a (college sports) fan, but when it begins to infringe on my own teaching function in my own department, I start to have reservations.”