Forty years ago a Saturday Title IX was signed into law stating that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity.” Here at BTN we have a few interesting numbers when it comes to women’s sporting events.

The Big Ten and ACC announced Tuesday the matchups for the 2012 ACC/Big Ten Women’s Basketball Challenge, set for Nov. 28-29, 2012. This year’s challenge marks the sixth year of the event, which has been extended through 2016.

The first day of the 2012 Big Ten Women’s Basketball Tournament featured four games on BTN/BTN2Go as Michigan beat Illinois, Nebraska handled Northwestern, Minnesota beat Wisconsin, and Michigan State eliminated Indiana. Get caught up on all of Thursday’s action on the interactive bracket or the scoreboard and get video highlights, interviews and recaps in this post.

The Big Ten women’s basketball coaches held a teleconference to preview the Big Ten Basketball Tournament with reporters from around the league, and we’ve posted the audio from each coach in the post below. The Tournament tips off on Thursday and runs through Sunday. All of our audio, including teleconferences with the men’s basketball coaches, can be found in our BTN.com audio archive.

Thanks to our friends at BigTen.org, we’ve posted the annual interactive bracket for the Big Ten Women’s Basketball Tournament below in this post.  For extra information leading up to Thursday’s openers, check out the Tournament Central page at BigTen.org. Also, use our Big Ten women’s scoreboard and Big Ten Women’s Basketball posts archive. And we’re collecting #B1Gtourney tweets and updates from the Big Ten Conference and all 12 teams on our Big Ten Women’s Tourney Tracker. See the bracket below and book mark this page for the tournament.