Sports leadership a man’s game? Women have same skills but struggle for jobs, respect
Before tipoff at a summer youth basketball game, Felicia Braddy stood inside the coach’s box in front of the team bench. After a few minutes, a referee walked over, ready for the customary pre-game meeting.
“Where’s your head coach?” he asked.
Braddy laughed, wondering if her positioning along the sideline might have offered a clue.
“I am the head coach.”
Nine years ago, Braddy started an AAU boys basketball team that grew to encompass talented players in Kansas City and Wichita. Nearly a decade later, it still seems few can fathom that she is the one in charge.
For one simple reason: She’s a woman.
“My teams are very successful. So they can doubt me, or they can be surprised,” said Braddy, who also joined the Park Hill South High School boys basketball staff as an assistant coach last season. “Or they can come see for themselves.”
Is it so crazy?
In 2019, men occupied the majority of head coaching positions in women’s sports — at both the professional and college levels — yet examples of the inverse remain so rare that they become talking points. Or, in cases like San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon and San Francisco 49ers assistant Katie Sowers, they make national headlines.
At the youth-sports level, in AAU hoops circles, Braddy has a nickname:
That Woman Coach.
When will it change? Better yet: What’s the holdup? The Star spoke with women who have broken the barrier, with front-office executives and with experts who devote their careers to studying gender bias in sports. They offered a variety of reasons, to be sure, but the overwhelming response came back to one problem.
It’s not about capability. It’s opportunity.
Elisha Brewer, an assistant men’s and women’s track coach at the University of Kansas, has seen her athletes receive 22 All-America honors. But she’s never so much as interviewed for a head coaching job. She’s quite happy in her current position — not actively pursuing a change — but you bet she’s thought about running her own team.
Meghan Cameron, a Sporting Kansas City assistant director of player personnel, is grateful to be the highest-advancing woman on a Major League Soccer technical staff in one breath ... but has aspirations for more in the next. Eventually. On a team with an established track record and proven model — and placed in a role similar to which her predecessor moved on to become the general manager of another club — there’s an obvious path.
But the reason for her hesitancy crystallizes the fight women face in sports.
“For the longest time, I didn’t put myself out there, because I didn’t feel like sports in general were ready for a female in my (current) position,” Cameron said. “I know I’m not assertive enough in that sense. But, you know, there’s a stigma to that.
“Being an assertive female in sports — for lack of a better word, you’re a bitch.”
Title IX’s caveat
In 1972, the United States Congress passed a law banning discrimination in education on the basis of gender. That landmark federal legislation — Title IX — ensured female college athletics would receive equal funding as men’s sports. It sparked record turnout in female sports.
When it came to coaches, it led to more opportunities for one gender.
Men.
With more money poured into women’s coaching staffs than ever before, men went after the jobs of leading those teams. And they got them.
“While that law did a lot for participation, you can actually trace men coaching women’s sports, at least in these kinds of numbers, to that,” said Ann Pegoraro, a co-director for the National Research Hub for Gender Equity in Sport in Canada. She is also the Lang Chair in sports management for the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.
In the year before the legislation took effect, women held 90 percent of the coaching jobs in women’s college sports.
Today, that number is just 40.6% in NCAA Division I, according to The Institute for the Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES).
Less than half of what it once was.
“It’s embarrassing that could still be the case,” said Richard Lapchick, the director for TIDES and the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program at the University of Central Florida. “We’re 48 years after Title IX, and to still have 60 percent of women’s teams across all three divisions coached by men, it’s just unacceptable.”
But not isolated.
Title IX changed the landscape of college sports, but similar representations of gender inequality fan out to youth sports. To high school sports. And on to the pros.
There are no women leading teams in the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB or MLS. There are zero women running the front offices in any of those North American professional leagues, either.
Even in the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA), more than half the head coaches are men. So are more than half the league’s general managers.
The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) consists of nine teams. All but one is coached by a man.
As a teenager, Lapchick decided he would spend much of his life working on civil rights. In 1996, he expanded his studies to include gender, and TIDES publishes annual racial and gender report cards for professional sports leagues. Only the WNBA received a “A” for gender hiring this year.
They’re studying the disparity in Canada, too. The Canadian government has tasked Pegoraro and some colleagues with analyzing gender equity in sports. And with answering a question that Lapchick posed back in 1996:
How can this be?
One by one, Lapchick frames that question to the people who can do something about it. He frequents college campuses for speaking engagements. At some point during those visits, he’ll turn to the school’s athletic director and point out how many men occupy roles on women’s teams’ coaching staffs.
Then he’ll ask, Would you consider hiring a woman to coach one of your men’s teams?
“I get a look like, ‘Hey, we heard you were crazy, but now we know it,’” Lapchick said.
What’s in a name?
A temporary contract gave Rachel Balkovec her first taste of professional baseball in 2012.
But she wanted to stick around permanently, to make a career of it. And so she applied for any openings she saw.
The phone didn’t ring. As it became clear her search would produce nothing, she decided to change one item in her resume.
Her name.
Rae, instead of Rachel.
She figured it to be more gender-neutral, and sure enough, she got a callback. And then another. When her voice revealed her gender over the phone, one team told her it would never hire a female for the job, she told The New York Times.
The St. Louis Cardinals eventually did. And years later, after stops with the Houston Astros and Chicago White Sox organizations, the New York Yankees have hired Balkovec as a full-time minor-league hitting coach. She’s the first woman to hold such a job.
“A lot of times the default is, well, women aren’t interested in these positions. And that’s for sure not true,” Pegoraro said. “Some of the barriers are the same things we see in general society when it comes to race and gender. It’s the same thing as when you look at the business world.”
Women hold just 7.4% of the CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. Yet an Australian study released this summer revealed that its country’s companies that appointed women CEOs increased their market value by an average of 5%.
The issue traces back to the hiring process, Pegoraro explained. Those in charge tend to shy away from the dissimilar and difficult and instead embrace ease and comfort.
In short: We hire people who look like ourselves.
“When you look at the people who are in the power roles — whether it’s on a professional team or college team — they’re almost all white men,” Lapchick said. “They’re going to turn to who they know in their circle when an opening comes up. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re racist or sexist, but they’re turning to the familiar, and that perpetuates it.”
The proof is there
At one point, the best 400-meter hurdler in the world resided in Lawrence, Kansas. Michael Stigler held that distinction in 2015, when he became KU’s first hurdles national champion in 55 years.
A four-time All-America selection, Stigler was quick to credit his coaching. He had gained his strength from head coach Stanley Redwine, he said an interview with the Daily Kansan. His world-class speed came from his hurdles coach.
A woman.
Elisha Brewer has been part of the KU men’s and women staffs for 15 seasons. She’s coached 14 All-Americans, some of them earning those honors many times over. Seven have set new records.
“For me, I always wanted to be considered a great coach, not a great female coach,” Brewer said. “And I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into only coaching female athletes. I’m lucky; I’m at a place where I can do both and where I’m encouraged to be myself.”
Anecdotally, there is no shortage of local examples of women coaching men successfully. Brewer’s resume is compelling. Braddy’s AAU team once placed sixth in a national tournament.
Cameron, the Sporting KC assistant technical director, previously held a league-office job in which she helped MLS clubs oversee their budgets, only to one day say, “Wait, a minute, I can do their jobs. And I can do them better.”
There’s statistical data to back this up.
In 2017, Pegoraro, Lindsey Darvin and David Berri collected figures for 1,522 WNBA players over 19 seasons and for 4,000 NCAA women’s basketball players over three seasons. They studied the numbers — the productivity — of those who played for male coaches, then analyzed the stats for those who performed under female bosses.
The result?
“There’s no difference,” Pegoraro said. “Whether they’re coached by a man or coached by a woman, there’s no difference in player productivity, and there’s no difference in wins produced.
“So now there are two ways to have this conversation. One is the qualitative side, of understanding the perspective of women who have cracked the barriers. The other is the hard data that you can show to a decision-maker and say, ‘Listen, when you’re considering a man versus a woman for this job, hire the best person.’”
The path forward
One night in June, NFL players banded together in releasing a video supporting racial equality. A collection of statements from some of the league’s biggest stars — Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and safety Tyrann Mathieu among them — preceded a request aimed at the league office.
“This is what we’d like to hear you state: ‘We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systemic oppression of black people,’” they said, two weeks after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, killing him.
“We, the National Football League, believe Black Lives Matter.”
Twenty-four hours later, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell looked into the camera and obliged them, almost word for word.
In cities and states across America, athletes demanded change. And many were granted it. Kansas State will utilize its home games to support Black Lives Matter, among other measures. Mississippi will change its state flag, which incorporates the Confederate flag, after a grassroots movement accelerated by college athletes decried its continued existence.
The battle for racial equity is a separate fight. But it entails some overlap, and its recent success demonstrates a model for those seeking an even playing field for women in sports leadership.
“I think the change is going to come from athlete activism,” Lapchick said.
Lapchick has urged the NCAA to mandate diverse pools of candidates for leadership positions, to not avail. He’s shifted his attention to the conferences, the leagues that compete under NCAA auspice, trying to effect change piece by piece.
In the NFL, the San Francisco 49ers hired Hesston, Kansas native Katie Sowers as an assistant coach in 2017. San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich hired Becky Hammon as the NBA’s first female full-time assistant coach in 2014.
Decades ago, former Oakland/L.A. Raiders owner Al Davis set his own trend: He was the first owner of an NFL team to appoint a woman as its CEO. He promoted Amy Trask to that role in 1997, long before conversations about gender equity became more commonplace. When Trask walked into her first league owners’ meeting, she was the only woman on the guest list.
“I believe people should be hired in the manner that Al Davis hired people — which is without regard to race, gender, ethnicity, religion or any other individuality that has no impact on one’s ability to do a job,” said Trask, who wrote a book about her experiences. “I truly recognize the fortune I had in working for a man who didn’t give a thought to (that). He just wanted to hire someone who could do a job.”
Trask said she never paid attention to what people might have said about her gender. Never cared, really.
But they did talk. They called her the “Princess of Darkness.”
Getting hired is the hard part. The oft-talked about part. But even once that barrier is broken, a woman’s day-to-day experiences on the job don’t typically mirror those of what a male counterpart might encounter.
When Cameron began her career with Major League Soccer more than 10 years ago, it seemed like a natural fit. She had spent her life playing the sport and once helped guide Rutgers to a Sweet 16 berth.
But not everyone saw it that way.
The traditional path to a coaching or front-office job begins with experience as a player in the sport.
“And?” Cameron asks.
And on multiple occasions, Cameron has been told she’s not properly suited for her career — you know, because she’s not a former player.
Did you see my resume? Tell me I’m not a former player.
Braddy, the youth basketball coach, graduated from Kansas as the program’s all-time assists leader. Yet today she’s still mistaken for a scorekeeper or athletic trainer.
Cameron has been asked if she is Sporting Kansas City manager Peter Vermes’ secretary.
“Why can’t a woman do this? If a woman can lead a Fortune 500 company, why can’t she lead a sports team?” Cameron asked.
“The answer, of course, is that she can. But someone has to be open to it.”
This story was originally published August 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.