WASHINGTON – As a high school All-American and NCAA Division I basketball player in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Natasha Adair always played for female coaches. Now, the newly-appointed head women’s basketball coach at Georgetown University says many of the players she recruits have never been coached by a female.
“Now that’s a problem,” she says. “For 16 years they’ve been given direction by a man. So now where do we fit in this equation?”
The “we” refers to female Division I basketball coaches, who may be asking that same question as the number of them continues to dwindle.
In an analysis of the top 100 NCAA Division I teams in the 2013-2014 season, as ranked by rating percentage index (RPI), the Medill News Service found that 55 percent of the teams had female head coaches.
That’s a notable drop from a decade earlier, when 62.6 percent of those same 100 teams had female coaches. And 10 years before that, females coached 69.7 percent of the teams. (Only 99 teams were counted in those data sets because in 2003-2004, one of the teams had male and female co-head coaches and in 1993-1994, one of the programs did not exist.)
What has caused the drop of nearly 15 percentage points over the past two decades?
A large part of it ironically ties back to the 1972 passage of Title IX, according to Dr. Daniel Rosenberg, professor of sport sociology and sport ethics at Barry University in Miami. The law prohibits gender discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding.
“An unintended consequence of Title IX is that, although it created all these opportunities for women to play, all of a sudden the money associated with coaching Division I women’s basketball increased. And because of that, the interest by men also increased,” he says.
In 2013 ESPN reported University of Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma, who has led the Huskies to nine national championships, signed a five-year contract extension worth $10.86 million.
While this may be an extreme case, the high-profile success of programs like Connecticut and the University of Tennessee has also drawn more male coaches to the women’s game, Rosenberg says.
“The visibility of women’s basketball and the emergence of the WNBA have made coaching women’s basketball a viable career track for men,” he says.
The arrival of the WNBA in 1997 also created a new career track for women, another contributing factor to the fewer number of female coaches, Adair says.
“Now when we (women) are graduating, we’re playing at the professional level,” she says. “When I came out of college, there wasn’t one, so you went right into coaching.”
In her experience coaching in three major conferences – the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big East and the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) – Adair has observed that the percentage of male and female coaches varies by league.
For the upcoming 2014-2015 season, in the ACC there are 10 female head coaches and five males. In the Big East, there are seven male head coaches and just three females.
In its analysis, the Medill News Service found the largest drops in the percentage of female coaches have come in the Midwest and West regions of the country. Each of the two regions had more than 80 percent female coaches in the 1993-1994 season. In 2013-2014 both regions had less than 60 percent female coaches.
Adair feels the decline in female coaches at the college level stems from the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and travel team levels, where she has noticed an immense increase in male coaches.
“These young women are growing up in the game being coached predominantly by men,” she says. “So then there’s that comfort level. ‘Well my high school coach was a man, my AAU coach was a man, so I’m just going to gravitate toward the men.’”
Rosenberg’s observations have also confirmed this affinity for male coaches.
“Part of this issue is that many, many women buy into the stereotype too,” he says. “They’re very comfortable being coached by men – in fact many prefer it – because they see men as the most competitive and elite and want to emulate masculine drive or passion.”
But Adair says one of the greatest advantages of having a female coach is simultaneously having a positive, female role model. An additional level of comfort may exist between a female player and a female coach, she says.
“We can help them through some things that the male coach may not understand,” she says. “We tend to coach more from a human side, from a more compassionate side. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but I think that you’re more apt to respect me if you know that I get it.”
Kristi Dini played at Boston University from 2005-2009 and says she has no preference when it comes to being coached by a male or a female. Her high school and college head coaches were females, but she also loved playing for her male AAU coaches.
However Dini, who now coaches girls high school basketball, says the shrinking number of female head coaches concerns her.
“You look at men’s sports vs. women’s sports: game attendance, professional sports salaries and things along those lines, and there’s a prominent difference between men and women,” she says. “And now on the women’s side, men are becoming dominant there as well.”
Rosenberg says the downward trend of female coaches is an important gender issue.
“I think it reinforces the traditional stereotype that men are in control and men are in charge. When it comes to sport, it’s still male dominated,” he says. “I think it does send that message loud and clear. We accept what we see.”
For Dini and many others, the issue isn’t that men aren’t qualified for these jobs – because most of them are – it’s that, culturally, it’s not acceptable for women to coach men. Women aren’t given the same opportunities in the men’s game.
Essentially, men are double-dipping.
“How many women do you see coaching men’s high school, college or professional basketball? Women don’t have those opportunities and now men have double the opportunity on the women’s side,” says Dini, who also coaches both boys and girls AAU teams.
While there have been a few cases in the past – Bernadette Mattox was an assistant on Rick Pitino’s staff at Kentucky from 1990-1994 – there are currently zero female coaches in Division I men’s basketball.
However in early August, a breakthrough occurred when the San Antonio Spurs, the defending NBA champions, hired WNBA star Becky Hammon as an assistant coach, making her the first full-time female coach in NBA history.
“I think it sends a very powerful message,” Rosenberg says. “I think it will have an impact. When you have a role model, all of a sudden it’s no longer an abstraction.”
“I think it will open doors and in the years to come, we’re going to see more women coaching men’s sports. It won’t be too far off when we see a woman as the head coach of a Division I men’s basketball program.”
Perhaps the Hammon hire will encourage more women to coach, period. Adair says people need to unite and make a conscious effort to reverse the declining trend. The players need female coaches as influencers.
“They taught me more than just basketball,” she says of her past coaches. “Having female coaches gives me my strength today because I watched them fight, I watched them stand for causes and I think it motivates me. Nothing knocks me off my rocker now.”
The mother of two stresses the importance of having powerful women coaching girls as soon as they start playing the sport. She would like to see a speaker tour in which prolific female college coaches share their success stories with young coaches and players.
“I don’t know if our younger generation knows right now that coaching is an option and that they can do it and be successful at it,” she says.
“Somewhere along the line we’ve lost that excitement about it, and we just need to get it back. We need to get back to glorifying it as a great profession.”