In the ongoing struggle to give balanced attention to men’s and women’s athletics, I find that I am not only working against history and society, but the Associated Press as well.

If you looked at yesterday’s paper, you noticed the women’s victory piece is shoved in the sidebar while the men receive recognition for their loss. You may label this layout as “a bunch of crock,” or say I prefer men’s athletics and didn’t do my job.

With the first opinion, I agree. It is crap that the women only get four inches of side space for their victory while the men’s team bagged nine inches of copy, four inches of stats and a photo for losing a game.

But let me say that I didn’t ditch the women’s hoop club for the men’s, and I tried to do my job.

It is hard to provide Iowa State students with equal coverage of “away” athletic events when the service we rely on, the AP, does not provide us with equal coverage.

Here’s my story.

I was frustrated on Wednesday night because I did not want to run a big story for Thursday on the Cyclones men’s game and shaft the women. To help eliminate some frustration and to look like he was actually doing something or even cared about this problem (just kidding,) Men’s Sports Editor Drew called the AP to see if it was going to send anyone to the women’s game. No diggety. The Colorado contact told us that the AP wasn’t sending a reporter to the game.

Option two: we wondered whether or not the game would grace TV screens from Boulder (yeah right) or radio waves (more realistic).

We considered reporting from the radio but decided that idea was a “no go” because it would require us to rely on commentators for game observations. And not knowing if Honest Earnest or Opinionated Oliver would be holding the mic, we concluded that radio broadcasts do not provide enough factual foundation to do a report.

Out of options and having to a next-day deadline, Drew and I decided to go with what the AP supplied (even though we knew this was a pukey alternative).

At this point I pooled my feelings and came up with the idea that I am a victim. Let me explain.

In a society that advocates equality and supposedly supports women in athletics, the length of the legs doing the work to ensure this varies depending on the task at hand. In English, I am saying that the media go to greater lengths for men’s athletics than women’s, and in this case we are dealing with the AP and women’s hoops.

(Also, I would like to acknowledge the fact that a number of sports could receive better coverage. I am simply on a rant related to women’s basketball.)

As Women’s Sports Editor and Victim Amanda, I feel that I am held to an extremely challenging standard: I am expected to hold to the theory of an idealistic society, which practices equality, while working within a realistic society that does not measure up to these ideals.

I am guessing the captain of the AP ship knows the world has these ideals, and he or she realizes the truths of the situation. But with the growing popularity of women’s athletics — case in point being the WNBA — it seems logical to think articles about women’s athletics would be more popular on the AP wire.

I thought the AP wire was supposed to supply the Daily, the city, the nation and the world with the low-down on ALL happenings, athletic or otherwise, male or female.

As a reporter/editor working for a student newspaper, it is not financially feasible to send reporters all across the nation to cover athletic events, be it men’s or women’s.

So, we look to the AP to give us a hand. In the hardwood contest between the ISU and Colorado women’s teams, we reached out to the AP — but its hands came up about 10 inches short of saving us.

How can I publish a decent story if I don’t have the statistics or a description? I simply can’t.

I have spent 17 inches telling you about this so that you understand neither Drew nor I intentionally undermine women’s basketball, or any other sport for that matter. In certain cases, we do what we have to, but we don’t have to like it. And quite frankly in the recent incident, this article shows that I didn’t like it one bit.

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Amanda Fier is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Davenport.