Study: Can state abortion legislation impact women's basketball recruiting?

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To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t really a ton of peer-reviewed, academic research on college athlete recruiting.

That isn’t to say there isn’t any research, because there is. But there aren’t huge numbers of journals that take college sports research as seriously as other disciplines, getting accurate data at scale can be a real challenge, and peer-reviewed research just takes a long time. By the time you build a model, finish your interviews, get approval and get a journal to accept your work … the rules could have changed.

You don’t need a PhD from Ohio’s sport management program to know, at least at a high level, what sorts of factors tend to influence what schools athletes pick. Athletes care about playing time, winning, financial compensation, proximity to home, relationship with players and cultural fit, to varying degrees.

But what about state laws?

I don’t think there’s a ton of research on this yet. Back in late 2023, a paper in the Journal of Sports Economists suggested marijuana legalization correlated with slightly improved basketball recruiting outcomes but worse football recruiting outcomes.

Also in 2023, Molly Harry (then an assistant professor at Arkansas), conducted interviews with athletes to better understand whether abortion restriction legislation would have impacted their recruitment decisions. According to her conversations:

But that story was based on interviews of just 18 athletes (and only 13 women), all from “non-revenue” sports programs in the spring 2023 semester.

A recent study from the University of South Carolina took a wider look at a larger data set, specifically focusing on elite women’s college basketball recruitment. And according to the research, there does appear to be a negative relationship between restrictive state abortion laws and women’s college basketball recruiting outcomes:

How did the authors reach that conclusion? How did they even measure this sort of thing?

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