DALLAS — Friday’s opening game of the women’s Final Four will feature two of the most prominent female coaches in college basketball.
Tara VanDerveer won two national championships at Stanford and coached the Americans to a gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Dawn Staley, recently named 2020 Olympic coach, won three gold medals as player and guided South Carolina to the national semifinals for the second time in three seasons.
Yet even as VanDerveer and Staley re-emerge on their sport’s most visible stage, the opportunity for women to coach female collegiate athletes has stagnated after a decades-long decline.
In 1972, when the gender equality law known as Title IX was signed into law, women were head coaches of more than 90 percent of women’s college teams in two dozen sports. Today, that figure has fallen to around 40 percent.
“I want to think sexism is too simple an answer, but what is it if it’s not that?” said VanDerveer, the only woman, along with Pat Summitt, to win 1,000 career Division I games. “Any time someone hires a male coach and says, ‘Coaching is coaching,’ well, why aren’t there more women in men’s basketball?
The winningest coach in women’s college basketball is Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma, who has won 111 consecutive games and is seeking his fifth straight national title — and 12th overall. During the second semi-final of the NCAA On Friday, UConn will face Mississippi State, also coached by a man, Vic Schaefer.
Earlier in his career, Auriemma said he felt some antipathy toward his success because he was a man, but not anymore.
“I’d like to think I’ve done too much for the development of the game for people to be mad at me for being a man,” he said.
Several top female coaches agreed, saying they respected what Auriemma had accomplished and that he was hiring women as assistant coaches.
“The coaches don’t really talk specifically about Geno,” Staley said. “They’re probably talking more about dethroning him.”
On Thursday, Auriemma said fewer women want to become coaches because they have many more career opportunities beyond teaching and basketball than when Title IX was enacted.
“It’s pretty simple,” he said.
But this characterization would be vigorously contested by a number of female coaches.
“Basketball is not one genre,” Staley said.
She added: “I think women should have the opportunity to coach women. I think a lot of times administrators may be hiring someone with a man’s mindset. When you adopt this mindset, you are not giving women the opportunity to be heard.
” Where are the women ? the NCAA asked a comprehensive examination of the issue this winter by Rachel Stark in the organization’s Champion magazine.
The answers Stark found were numerous and complex: As more money and higher salaries entered college sports, men became increasingly interested in coaching women’s teams. (In October, Auriemma signed a five-year contract extension that will pay him at least $13 million).
The same opportunity did not present itself the other way around. Only about 3 percent of men’s teams are coached by women. Meanwhile, 80 percent of college athletic directors are men.
From conversations with female coaches, Stark discovered other factors leading to the stagnation of their numbers: “Increasing demands of the job. The pressure on working mothers. Fear and discrimination among lesbian coaches. Lack of mentors. Lack of networking opportunities. Perceived gender bias.
Muffet McGraw, a longtime women’s coach at Notre Dame who won the 2001 NCAA championship and is a board member of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, said in a telephone interview: “We seem to be losing women, and we therefore seek to see: Is this due to a lack of work-life balance? It is a demanding profession for both men and women, but many women have other responsibilities at home.
The number of women’s head coaches varies widely, by sport, at 86 universities at the highest level of Division I competition, according to a study conducted by the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.
Field hockey, lacrosse, golf, equestrian and softball received an A grade from the research center in 2016-17 for the percentage of female head coaches of American Athletic Conference women’s teams. Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pacific-12 and Southeast Conferences.
Women’s basketball received a B, with 53 of 86 head coaches being women in those leagues. But the percentage of female coaches fell to 61.6 percent, from 64 percent in 2015-16. Of the eight head coaches hired in 2016-17, two were men replacing women.
Among Final Four women’s programs, Stanford and South Carolina received a C for hiring women as head coaches, and UConn and Mississippi State received a D by the Tucker Center.
“My biggest concern is that young women don’t often have the opportunity to have a female coaching role model,” said Nicole M. LaVoi, co-director of the Tucker Center. “It hurts development.”
When McGraw last had an opening for an assistant coaching position at Notre Dame, she said, the ratio of male to female applicants was about 70 to 30 percent.
Women might be more reluctant than men to transfer from one college to another, McGraw said.
“I don’t think it’s usually about money and business, even if they like the quality of life where they are,” she said. “I think work-life balance is a bigger issue for women than men.”
It is also clear that some women have been dissuaded from pursuing a coaching career.
Kara Lawson, who played for Summitt at Tennessee from 1999 to 2003, was early in her WNBA and broadcasting career in Sacramento when she asked to attend a practice of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. The Kings refused, she said, saying she might “distract” the players and only offering to let her watch practice through a two-way mirror.
“I look back on it and wonder, is my life totally different from what it could have been?” said Lawson, now an ESPN commentator. “I wanted to be a coach.”
The Women’s Basketball Coaches Association tried to change that. Sixty-one graduated players were invited to its convention this week in Dallas. They participate in a workshop, So you want to become a coach, intended to raise their awareness and arouse their interest.
This season, Staley found an innovative way to add another female assistant coach at South Carolina. She hired Melanie Balcomb, who had been head coach for 14 seasons at Vanderbilt, to be head of analytics, a groundbreaking role for women’s college basketball.
An attractive aspect of the position for Balcomb, who has two young children, was that she didn’t have to travel or recruit during the season. But there was another important reason to choose South Carolina, she said Thursday. Balcomb and his partner, both white, adopted African-American children.
For these reasons, she says, “we weren’t welcomed everywhere, and Dawn welcomed me and my family. It was an incredible experience.
Homophobia, Balcomb added, “is the white elephant in the room that we don’t talk about.”
Anucha Browne, NCAA vice president for women’s basketball, said it’s vital for both male and female coaches and administrators to provide women with more coaching opportunities.
“It is essential that we do something to stem the decline of women in the coaching profession,” Browne said.
