CHAPEL HILL, NC ― Candace Parker made history as the first woman to dunk in an NCAA Tournament game on March 19, 2006.
About 20 minutes later, she did it again.
“You’re thinking about a dunk… there it is!” announcer Sean McDonough exclaimed on the broadcast.
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On the 20th anniversary of the historic dunk against Army, and eve of the Women’s NCAA Tournament, a new generation of women’s college basketball players, many of whom weren’t alive to see it or too young to remember it, reflected on the dunk’s significance.
“It says a lot for women’s basketball, because, you know, it shows women are capable of what men can do as well,” North Carolina center Blanca Thomas said.
It was impossible to watch SportsCenter that day without seeing Parker slam the ball down. Thomas’ teammate, starting forward Nyla Harris, commented on the two-time national champion’s impact on basketball as a whole, and the dunk captured the attention of audiences around the world.
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“It’s huge to give her her flowers,” Harris said.
Maryland starting guard Saylor Poffenbarger recognized the importance of this moment.
“It was just the start to showing the abilities that women have too,” Poffenbarger said.
The presence of dunking in the men’s game has often been used as an argument for it being more entertaining than the women’s.
Harris described the differences between the men’s and women’s game, saying the women’s game is more structured while the men’s is more one-on-one. To her, the addition of players dunking is one more reason for fans to follow the women’s game.
“It’s gonna bring more attention, and I think it’s gonna make people kind of look at it like, really, what is the difference between the men’s game and the women’s game?” she said.
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Maryland forward Isimenme Ozzy-Momodu taught herself how to dunk and did it once during warmups before one of her high school games. She poked fun at the idea of using dunks to compare the men’s and women’s games.
“If I start dunking, people better start coming to watch basketball games,” Ozzy-Momodu said.
Tatum Esparza is a student in the University of Georgia’s Carmical Sports Media Institute.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Revisiting Candace Parker’s historic Women’s March Madness dunk
