[Adam]

We've established that coaches are competitive and selfish (most people are, so this isn't bad thing, it's just how it is.) Most men's teams use their gray squads as defacto recruiting tools also. Tom Davis, when at Iowa, was noted for pulling the occasional gray squad member onto the team when he felt they could help the team in games. It's a player development program for walk-ons.

I think it's fair to say that if coaches thought female players could provide their teams with comparable improvement, then they'd use the females available to them and in the process develop potential scholarship athletes.

One other thought, and it's just a thought. With Title IX, a lot of schools are giving scholarships to female athletes who didn't even compete in the sport in high school. One example is crew, where a lot of colleges are just looking for female athletes they can give a scholarship to and teach them to row. So, along with the fact that any female basketball players on campus who could provide any sort of competition for the scholarship players are already on scholarship; most of the really good female athletes are already on scholarship for one sport or another.