Minnesota Senator Tina Smith continues to push the NCAA towards an independent investigation regarding unequal treatment for student-athletes in the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.
Sen. Smith's call for the investigation comes after Sedona Prince, a player with the Oregon Ducks, posted a TikTok showing the obvious differences between the men's weight room and the women's weight room at their respective tournaments.
"She brought a lot of great attention to this and I wanted to help," Sen. Smith told WCCO Radio's Dave Lee on Thursday morning.
Sen. Smith wrote a letter to the NCAA addressing gender inequalities, which she said treated female-athletes as, "second-class citizens."
"These women athletes are so strong, so exciting to watch, and in my mind are just being completely disrespected," Smith said. "This is part of a long, underlying condition of unfairness for women in sports."
Smith told Dave Lee that the NCAA responded to her letter and will launch an independent investigation.
Sen. Smith also spoke Thursday morning about the mass shooting in Colorado that left 10 people dead.
"It's such a tragedy that we've seen in Boulder, Atlanta, and the one we just had in Minnesota," she said. "You these terrible tragedies and loss of live, but the other thing to keep in mind is that over 40,000 Americans died from gun violence in 2020. Completely different in this country from other countries."
Pressure is mounting in Washington D.C. to pass what Smith calls, "common sense solutions."
"Universal background checks and I think banning assault weapons with high capacity magazines that are designed to kill a whole bunch of people really, really quickly," Smith added. "The question is...can that be marshalled in the United States?"
Boulder, Colorado previously voted to ban assault weapons in the city nearly three years before Monday's massacre. A lawsuit, backed by the NRA, blocked the ban just 10 days before the shooting.
