Women Dominate This Sport. Why Is the Coaching a Boys’ Club?
Dec 21, 2019 11:06:56 GMT -5
ironhammer and baytree like this
Post by bigfan on Dec 21, 2019 11:06:56 GMT -5
Women Dominate This Sport. Why Is the Coaching a Boys’ Club?
Hugh McCutcheon, the coach of the Minnesota women's volleyball team, coached the United States men’s team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and the women’s team to a silver in 2012."/>
A female head coach has yet to win a national title in Division I women’s volleyball. This season’s semifinalists? All coached by men.
PITTSBURGH — As Taylor Morgan’s volleyball career at the University of Minnesota comes to an end this week, she has set her sights on becoming a college coach. She understands what the career entails from her father, who coaches track and field at Minnesota, and she is confident that she will take the lessons taught by her respected coach, Hugh McCutcheon, and figure out the rest.
But Morgan harbors no illusions.
She recognizes that even in a sport played overwhelmingly by women, there are few former female players coaching at the sport’s highest college level.
So when Minnesota played Iowa last month, Morgan made a point of seeking out Iowa’s coach, Vicki Brown, who is one of two women coaching in the Big Ten and who, like Morgan, is African-American, a rare combination.
“She’s doing what I want to do,” Morgan said. “I told her after the game that I aspire to be like you.”
The math suggests that Morgan should not have to look far and wide for inspiration. Among players in the sport, women outnumber the men by more than 10 to 1 in N.C.A.A. Division I. They compete before more robust crowds than the men do, and they also don’t have to fight the perception — unlike in basketball and soccer, among other sports — that their game is a lesser version of the men’s.
And yet when it comes to becoming head coaches, women find themselves running into a familiar glass ceiling: fewer opportunities, lower pay and scarcer resources.
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That is borne out once again this week in Pittsburgh, at the N.C.A.A. women’s volleyball tournament, by the four teams that reached Thursday’s semifinals: top-seeded Baylor; the reigning champion, Stanford; and a pair of next-door-neighbor rivals, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
None have a woman as head coach.
Sarah Dodd, left, congratulates Emma Whitehead after a play as the Wisconsin women’s volleyball team practices for an N.C.A.A. tournament semifinal.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
This ensures that for the 39th year since the N.C.A.A. instituted a women’s volleyball national tournament, no woman will have coached a team to a title. (Stanford and Wisconsin won on Thursday, advancing to Saturday’s final.)
Though volleyball is the most popular team sport for high school girls nationwide and was played last year by nearly 18,000 women in all N.C.A.A. divisions, fewer than half of Division I coaches are women — and that 46 percent is slightly less than it was a decade ago, according to the N.C.A.A.
In the Power 5 conferences, where the athletic departments are fueled by football revenue, the numbers are more stark: Just one in three head coaches this season is a woman.
“That’s terrible, just brutal,” said Patti Phillips, the chief executive for Women Leaders in College Sports, an advocacy group. “You don’t want to be it if you can’t see it. I think people look around and go, ‘Why aren’t there more women?’”
That question was put to Kelly Sheffield, 49, the coach at Wisconsin, and Minnesota’s McCutcheon, 50, who coached the United States men’s team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and the women’s team to a silver in 2012. Both men shrugged, saying they did not have a good answer, and pointed out that they were not doing the hiring. (Left unsaid: Of the 65 athletic directors who do the hiring in the Power 5 conferences, only four are women.)
Asked if it was a problem in the sport, Sheffield said with a laugh, “I’m just trying to win a volleyball match right now.”
As he admittedly fumbled to answer the question, Sheffield said players would want the job to go to the best candidate. “Now, maybe that’s a little bit easier coming from a dude here that I would want them to say that,” he said. “But I think — do I see it as a problem? No.”
But in interviews with female coaches, athletic directors and volleyball officials, a more complex portrait emerges, one with which women have more difficulty than did Sheffield, who never played the game. He worked his way up coaching at Albany and Dayton to land the coveted Wisconsin job. It rewards him with a salary of $381,000 per year and the chance to compete for national titles.
Kelly Sheffield, the head coach for the Wisconsin women’s volleyball team, said he did not have a good answer for why there aren’t more women coaching college teams.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
In some ways, women have fallen behind as a result of the sport’s popularity, as men leave jobs coaching men’s volleyball teams to chase more lucrative jobs coaching women’s teams, a dynamic that is not present in other sports. Imagine John Calipari leaving the Kentucky men’s basketball team to take over the Connecticut women’s team, said Kathy DeBoer, the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association.
And with better pay comes greater pressure — to recruit, to promote their program and to win. In job interviews, “women get to the quality-of-life questions much faster than the men do,” said Debbie Yow, a longtime athletic director who retired this year from North Carolina State.
But there are also systemic issues that begin at the youth level. Most club teams, where the most competitive volleyball is typically played, are run by men, who are in turn viewed as experts. “Who are young women — pre-high-school — being coached by? What are they used to?” said Sandy Barbour, the athletic director at Penn State. “We’re never going to build the pipeline if we don’t have role models.”
Kirsten Bernthal Booth is conscious of being a role model.
When she was hired as Creighton’s coach in 2003, she inherited a team that won three games and played its games in a high school gym. She has built the Blue Jays into a consistent winner, forcing Minnesota to fight off two match points to advance out of the second round of this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament.
Booth has had opportunities to take more lucrative jobs, but there were other considerations. She would have to make enough money that her husband, a lawyer, could stay at home with their three daughters, ages 14, 12 and 8. She also feels a sense of loyalty to Creighton, which arranged for extra help so she could travel with her daughters when they were young.
“I’m a better coach because I’m a mother,” said Booth, noting the necessity of multitasking and working odd hours. “I want my players to see me as a coach and a mother, and the goal is to do both of those successfully.”
There were two assistant coaches trying to do that on Wednesday while they prepared their teams for a semifinal match on Thursday.
As Minnesota’s practice began, Laura Kasey, 40, an assistant coach, checked on her 7-month-old son in a bassinet that her father was watching. This is her third trip to the national semifinals in five seasons at Minnesota, and while she aspires to be a head coach, she is admittedly “picky.”
“There’s a lot of pressure to succeed that you don’t see with men,” said Laura Kasey, the associate head coach for the Minnesota women’s volleyball team.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
As much as she appreciates her circumstances at Minnesota, she is wary of stepping into a job with too many obstacles to win because it might be her only shot. It is also discouraging, she said, for plum jobs like ones at Washington and Illinois to go in recent years to young male assistants.
“There’s a lot of pressure to succeed that you don’t see with men,” Kasey said. “It’s that mind-set of perfection that women have or this fear of failure because you have to do it right, or else. I know that weighs on me.”
Earlier on Wednesday, after Baylor practiced, Samantha Erger was sitting on the floor of a locker room with the remnants of a bagged lunch. Erger, 30, is an assistant coach in charge of Baylor’s recruiting, as well as the daughter of a decorated high school coach, and she wants to be a head coach before long. But she was operating on coffee and a few hours of sleep after waking up at 3 and 6 a.m. to feed her daughter, Demi.
Demi was born on Dec. 5, and Erger, who also has a 2-year-old son, was back on the sideline 48 hours later for top-ranked Baylor’s second-round playoff match against Southern California.
“Um, how do I say it?” Erger said. “It’s not easy. It’s an extra challenge to be a head coach as a female, especially if you want a family.”
Still, she says it is “a shame” that a woman has never coached a national championship team in volleyball — something she attributes, as does Kasey, to women rarely being hired in the upper echelons of the sport.
“I’m sad,” Erger said. “Volleyball is a little behind.”
No woman has come closer than Mary Wise. She has taken Florida to the national semifinals eight times and twice reached the championship game — the only female coach to do so.
Her great regret was not insulating her players two years ago, when the Gators were upset by Nebraska for the title.
“I did not prepare our players for the number of times they would get asked that question and the pressure they felt,” Wise said. “I did not feel it, but in hindsight that was an awful lot to ask to beat Nebraska and carry the future of volleyball and all women going into that match. I put that on me.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/sports/volleyball-ncaa-women.html
Hugh McCutcheon, the coach of the Minnesota women's volleyball team, coached the United States men’s team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and the women’s team to a silver in 2012."/>A female head coach has yet to win a national title in Division I women’s volleyball. This season’s semifinalists? All coached by men.
PITTSBURGH — As Taylor Morgan’s volleyball career at the University of Minnesota comes to an end this week, she has set her sights on becoming a college coach. She understands what the career entails from her father, who coaches track and field at Minnesota, and she is confident that she will take the lessons taught by her respected coach, Hugh McCutcheon, and figure out the rest.
But Morgan harbors no illusions.
She recognizes that even in a sport played overwhelmingly by women, there are few former female players coaching at the sport’s highest college level.
So when Minnesota played Iowa last month, Morgan made a point of seeking out Iowa’s coach, Vicki Brown, who is one of two women coaching in the Big Ten and who, like Morgan, is African-American, a rare combination.
“She’s doing what I want to do,” Morgan said. “I told her after the game that I aspire to be like you.”
The math suggests that Morgan should not have to look far and wide for inspiration. Among players in the sport, women outnumber the men by more than 10 to 1 in N.C.A.A. Division I. They compete before more robust crowds than the men do, and they also don’t have to fight the perception — unlike in basketball and soccer, among other sports — that their game is a lesser version of the men’s.
And yet when it comes to becoming head coaches, women find themselves running into a familiar glass ceiling: fewer opportunities, lower pay and scarcer resources.
Unlock more free articles.
Create an account or log in
That is borne out once again this week in Pittsburgh, at the N.C.A.A. women’s volleyball tournament, by the four teams that reached Thursday’s semifinals: top-seeded Baylor; the reigning champion, Stanford; and a pair of next-door-neighbor rivals, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
None have a woman as head coach.
Sarah Dodd, left, congratulates Emma Whitehead after a play as the Wisconsin women’s volleyball team practices for an N.C.A.A. tournament semifinal.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
This ensures that for the 39th year since the N.C.A.A. instituted a women’s volleyball national tournament, no woman will have coached a team to a title. (Stanford and Wisconsin won on Thursday, advancing to Saturday’s final.)
Though volleyball is the most popular team sport for high school girls nationwide and was played last year by nearly 18,000 women in all N.C.A.A. divisions, fewer than half of Division I coaches are women — and that 46 percent is slightly less than it was a decade ago, according to the N.C.A.A.
In the Power 5 conferences, where the athletic departments are fueled by football revenue, the numbers are more stark: Just one in three head coaches this season is a woman.
“That’s terrible, just brutal,” said Patti Phillips, the chief executive for Women Leaders in College Sports, an advocacy group. “You don’t want to be it if you can’t see it. I think people look around and go, ‘Why aren’t there more women?’”
That question was put to Kelly Sheffield, 49, the coach at Wisconsin, and Minnesota’s McCutcheon, 50, who coached the United States men’s team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and the women’s team to a silver in 2012. Both men shrugged, saying they did not have a good answer, and pointed out that they were not doing the hiring. (Left unsaid: Of the 65 athletic directors who do the hiring in the Power 5 conferences, only four are women.)
Asked if it was a problem in the sport, Sheffield said with a laugh, “I’m just trying to win a volleyball match right now.”
As he admittedly fumbled to answer the question, Sheffield said players would want the job to go to the best candidate. “Now, maybe that’s a little bit easier coming from a dude here that I would want them to say that,” he said. “But I think — do I see it as a problem? No.”
But in interviews with female coaches, athletic directors and volleyball officials, a more complex portrait emerges, one with which women have more difficulty than did Sheffield, who never played the game. He worked his way up coaching at Albany and Dayton to land the coveted Wisconsin job. It rewards him with a salary of $381,000 per year and the chance to compete for national titles.
Kelly Sheffield, the head coach for the Wisconsin women’s volleyball team, said he did not have a good answer for why there aren’t more women coaching college teams.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
In some ways, women have fallen behind as a result of the sport’s popularity, as men leave jobs coaching men’s volleyball teams to chase more lucrative jobs coaching women’s teams, a dynamic that is not present in other sports. Imagine John Calipari leaving the Kentucky men’s basketball team to take over the Connecticut women’s team, said Kathy DeBoer, the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association.
And with better pay comes greater pressure — to recruit, to promote their program and to win. In job interviews, “women get to the quality-of-life questions much faster than the men do,” said Debbie Yow, a longtime athletic director who retired this year from North Carolina State.
But there are also systemic issues that begin at the youth level. Most club teams, where the most competitive volleyball is typically played, are run by men, who are in turn viewed as experts. “Who are young women — pre-high-school — being coached by? What are they used to?” said Sandy Barbour, the athletic director at Penn State. “We’re never going to build the pipeline if we don’t have role models.”
Kirsten Bernthal Booth is conscious of being a role model.
When she was hired as Creighton’s coach in 2003, she inherited a team that won three games and played its games in a high school gym. She has built the Blue Jays into a consistent winner, forcing Minnesota to fight off two match points to advance out of the second round of this year’s N.C.A.A. tournament.
Booth has had opportunities to take more lucrative jobs, but there were other considerations. She would have to make enough money that her husband, a lawyer, could stay at home with their three daughters, ages 14, 12 and 8. She also feels a sense of loyalty to Creighton, which arranged for extra help so she could travel with her daughters when they were young.
“I’m a better coach because I’m a mother,” said Booth, noting the necessity of multitasking and working odd hours. “I want my players to see me as a coach and a mother, and the goal is to do both of those successfully.”
There were two assistant coaches trying to do that on Wednesday while they prepared their teams for a semifinal match on Thursday.
As Minnesota’s practice began, Laura Kasey, 40, an assistant coach, checked on her 7-month-old son in a bassinet that her father was watching. This is her third trip to the national semifinals in five seasons at Minnesota, and while she aspires to be a head coach, she is admittedly “picky.”
“There’s a lot of pressure to succeed that you don’t see with men,” said Laura Kasey, the associate head coach for the Minnesota women’s volleyball team.Credit...Michael M. Santiago for The New York Times
As much as she appreciates her circumstances at Minnesota, she is wary of stepping into a job with too many obstacles to win because it might be her only shot. It is also discouraging, she said, for plum jobs like ones at Washington and Illinois to go in recent years to young male assistants.
“There’s a lot of pressure to succeed that you don’t see with men,” Kasey said. “It’s that mind-set of perfection that women have or this fear of failure because you have to do it right, or else. I know that weighs on me.”
Earlier on Wednesday, after Baylor practiced, Samantha Erger was sitting on the floor of a locker room with the remnants of a bagged lunch. Erger, 30, is an assistant coach in charge of Baylor’s recruiting, as well as the daughter of a decorated high school coach, and she wants to be a head coach before long. But she was operating on coffee and a few hours of sleep after waking up at 3 and 6 a.m. to feed her daughter, Demi.
Demi was born on Dec. 5, and Erger, who also has a 2-year-old son, was back on the sideline 48 hours later for top-ranked Baylor’s second-round playoff match against Southern California.
“Um, how do I say it?” Erger said. “It’s not easy. It’s an extra challenge to be a head coach as a female, especially if you want a family.”
Still, she says it is “a shame” that a woman has never coached a national championship team in volleyball — something she attributes, as does Kasey, to women rarely being hired in the upper echelons of the sport.
“I’m sad,” Erger said. “Volleyball is a little behind.”
No woman has come closer than Mary Wise. She has taken Florida to the national semifinals eight times and twice reached the championship game — the only female coach to do so.
Her great regret was not insulating her players two years ago, when the Gators were upset by Nebraska for the title.
“I did not prepare our players for the number of times they would get asked that question and the pressure they felt,” Wise said. “I did not feel it, but in hindsight that was an awful lot to ask to beat Nebraska and carry the future of volleyball and all women going into that match. I put that on me.”
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/sports/volleyball-ncaa-women.html
