It’s been two years since Maggie Lonergan owned the court at Catholic University, leading the women’s basketball team to its two most successful seasons ever and ending the Lady Cardinals’ decade-long losing streak.
Coaching basketball came naturally to Mrs. Lonergan, who had been a star guard herself. After four seasons at Catholic, her team was about where she wanted it. By then she had personally recruited each of the players. She certainly wasn’t ready to give it all up.
But while she had been successful, Mrs. Lonergan’s tenure at Catholic had also been a struggle. She had two preschoolers, whom she barely saw. Her sister had moved in to help raise them, and Mrs. Lonergan often didn’t arrive home before they went to bed. Sometimes she and her husband, Michael, who coached men’s basketball at Catholic, would try to have a family dinner and end up at Applebee’s at 11 p.m. “It was crazy,” he recalls.
When Mrs. Lonergan became pregnant with their third child, in 2005, and Mr. Lonergan accepted an offer to be head men’s coach at the University of Vermont, she left the job in Washington to become a full-time mother. “I had wanted to be a coach for a real long time, and I had my mind set on making it work,” she says. “Leaving was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”
Mrs. Lonergan still considers herself a basketball junkie, but now she sits in the stands during her husband’s games. She yells out tips — reminding him how much time is left on the shot clock, or keeping track of which opposing players have racked up the most fouls. Sometimes Mr. Lonergan hears her, sometimes he doesn’t.
Although she intends to return to coaching eventually, Mrs. Lonergan is now counted among the mounting female casualties of the profession. Increasingly women in nearly all sports are either leaving intercollegiate coaching or never entering in the first place. While most concern over women’s sports has focused on the opportunities that federal equity laws have offered to female players — whose numbers have grown steadily — the ranks of female coaches have quietly dwindled. Last year nearly 60 percent of women’s intercollegiate teams were led by men, the highest proportion ever.
Back in 1972, the year Title IX of the Education Amendments was enacted, more than 90 percent of all women’s teams were coached by women. The law requires colleges that receive federal funds to ensure gender equity in their programs. In one of the first academic studies of gender and coaching, to be published early next year, Deborah L. Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University, calls the declining proportion of female coaches an “ironic byproduct” of Title IX.
Indeed, as the law has raised the profile of women’s sports, the job of coaching female players has grown more lucrative, more prestigious, and more demanding. “It’s not OK not to win,” says Charli Turner Thorne, women’s basketball coach at Arizona State University. “Too much money is being spent.”
As a result, the coaching positions have attracted more men. But at the same time, they have repelled many women, who now have better-paying professional options that may not require such all-out dedication. So far little has been done to alleviate the plight facing women in coaching. That puts college athletics behind much of the rest of the work world, including the rest of academe, which for years has been looking for ways to attract women and make careers more family-friendly.
This year, the National Collegiate Athletic Association took the first step toward correcting the situation by recommending that colleges consider how they might make life easier for coaches with families. “We know people are leaving or deciding not to enter the field because they don’t think they can keep it all in balance,” says Carol A. Cartwright, president emeritus of Kent State University, who led the NCAA effort.
Meanwhile, athletics directors at several Division I institutions say they are aware of the gender issue but haven’t been able to do much about it. “I find fewer and fewer females who want to go into coaching,” says Jim Livengood, of the University of Arizona, where nine of the 11 women’s teams are coached by men.
With numbers like those, he says, college athletics should be worried about the future. “Sometimes when you’re watching Rutgers play Duke, with two great female basketball coaches, or Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee, you think: These are the people who have been in the game,” he says. “But who are going to be the next Pat Summitts?”
Women by the Numbers
In their push to create more sports opportunities for women, most advocates of Title IX have focused their energy on female athletes. And they have scored in a big way. Since Title IX was enacted, the number of women playing college sports has risen from 16,000 in 1972 to 180,000 in 2006. The number of women’s teams per campus has grown as well, from 2.5 before Title IX to 8.5 in 2006.
The number of women coaching female teams has actually climbed in recent years, from 3,008 in 1998 to 3,690 in 2006. But the number of men coaching women’s teams has climbed much faster. Over the past eight years, men have captured nearly three-quarters of the new head-coaching positions created by the surge in women’s sports teams.
Although more men are coaching women, the opposite is not true. Fewer than 2 percent of men’s intercollegiate teams have female head coaches. “The door has swung in only one direction,” says Linda Jean Carpenter, a professor emeritus at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York who taught physical education and exercise science and has collected statistics on women’s athletics for about 30 years. She and R. Vivian Acosta, another professor emeritus at Brooklyn, publish the data annually in a report called “Women in Intercollegiate Sport.”
The data show that women leave the profession at every step up the ladder. For example, while 57 percent of paid assistant coaches in women’s sports are female, the same is true for only 42 percent of head coaches, and for just 19 percent of athletics directors. “You’re seeing a whole lot of women at the entry-level beginnings of the coaching career,” says Kathleen J. DeBoer, executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association. “But we’re not keeping them.”
Over the past three decades, female coaches have been sidelined in virtually every women’s sport. In the five most popular — basketball, volleyball, soccer, softball, and rowing — all but soccer have seen a steep decline in the proportion of teams coached by women. Nearly 80 percent of women’s basketball teams were coached by women three decades ago, compared with 61 percent today.
That still gives basketball, which is widely considered the flagship sport of female athletics, one of the highest proportions of female coaches. This year three of the four squads that made it to the Women’s Final Four were led by women.
But that is the exception. In her forthcoming study in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Ms. Rhode found that, on average, female coaches are less successful than their male counterparts. For example, she writes, six women’s sports have never had a national championship team coached by a woman.
People concerned about the paucity of female leaders in college sports say it denies female role models to athletes. Watching a woman coaching not only provides life lessons for female players, these people say, but also encourages them to become coaches themselves.
“I can look these kids in the eye and say, I have stood in your shoes,” says Kristen Smyth, who is head coach of women’s gymnastics at Stanford. “I can say, I was taking a final the Friday before the Pac-10 championships when I was your age. I know what it’s like to balance academics, athletics, and a social life.”
At least one conference commissioner, however, does not count the declining proportion of female coaches as a top issue in college sports. “To say we’ve taken a step back because there aren’t as many female head coaches, I don’t necessarily agree,” says Linda Bruno, commissioner of the Atlantic 10 Conference. Coaching is only one piece of the puzzle, she says. Administrators need to make sure that they are giving opportunities to women and members of minority groups throughout athletics. “I’m not as worried about women coaching women,” she says, “as that you’d like to see women involved in positions of authority.”
Not many women are. Nearly 80 percent of all NCAA athletics directors are male, a proportion that climbs to more than 90 percent in Division I. That means most female coaches operate in a man’s world, where men control the purse strings and the hiring. The report “Women in Intercollegiate Sport” notes that athletics departments that are headed by men have fewer female head coaches than do departments headed by women. Where there is no female athletics administrator at all, the proportion of head coaches who are female falls from 42 percent to 38.5 percent.
Women Prefer Men
It is worth noting that female athletes themselves are not always the biggest cheerleaders for hiring female coaches. A study released by Pennsylvania State University last year that involved interviews with 41 female athletes found that the majority said they preferred a man at the helm.
Ted Leland isn’t surprised by that. When he was athletics director at Stanford, he told some female players who had just lost their coach that he would prefer to hire a woman as the replacement. “The female athletes got right back in my face, and one said, ‘I don’t care, I’ll be coached by a zebra. I just want to win a national championship.’” Many female athletes, notes Mr. Leland (who is now vice president for advancement at the University of the Pacific), have been coached by men all their lives and are comfortable that way.
The delicate job of interacting with female athletes can actually make the job of head coach more difficult for women than for men. One female coach of a Division I women’s rowing team says she routinely asks her male assistant to tell the team when there is something unpopular to announce, like adding an extra practice. “If I say it, even though I’m the head coach, I have to explain,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “He can boss them around and say something I couldn’t, and the kids will take it better.”
Likewise, female coaches say they get closer scrutiny from athletics directors than their male colleagues do. Male coaches who complain about facilities or other resources are perceived as fighting for their teams, say female coaches, while women who do the same can be considered whiners. And if a male coach is abrasive, that’s OK, as long as his team is winning. Female coaches who are tough, on the other hand, say players and supervisors are likely to label them coldhearted and urge them to lighten up.
In the testosterone-infused world of intercollegiate athletics, female coaches who are lesbians can sometimes have the most difficult time of all. In interviews, some say they have felt forced to conceal their sexual orientation or else face costly disapproval from supervisors, potential recruits, players, parents, and other coaches. “Women are leaving the profession because of the pressures to live such a closeted life and because of the negative recruiting that goes on,” says Celia Slater, executive director of the NCAA Women Coaches Academy. “It is subtle. A coach might say, You don’t want your daughter to go there, because they don’t have family values; wink, wink. These things can be very, very painful.”
The NCAA, which held a meeting last October to talk about the problem, is working with the National Center for Lesbian Rights to put together an educational campaign that college sports programs could use to address homophobia.
Baby or Basketball?
The biggest hurdle for most women trying to make a career in college coaching, however, is the pace that the job requires. It isn’t unusual for coaches to be gone three to four days each week for competitions, and then again for several short recruiting trips during the off-season. Coaches frequently assume the role of substitute parents to their young players. That can mean a lot of hand-holding, or at least a lot of text messaging.
According to Ms. Rhode’s study, the time commitment adds up to more sacrifice for women than for men. Female coaches, the Stanford professor found, are less likely to be married and to have kids than their male counterparts are.
“It took me a long time to find the right man who understood how much commitment is involved in my job,” says Carol Russell, who is in her fifth year as head coach of women’s basketball at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. “I’m highly competitive, so this is 24/7 during the season.” An earlier relationship broke off, she says, because the man didn’t understand her dedication.
Neither did lots of other people when Ms. Russell gave birth to her first son in March and was on the court six hours later to help coach her Division II team in the NCAA tournament. It was her squad’s first appearance in the Elite Eight, and Ms. Russell wanted to be there. She left her son behind in the hospital for the evening. The news went further than she expected: It reached CNN and Good Morning America. The coach received hostile e-mail messages from people she didn’t know, asking, “How can you leave your baby?”
The attention has started to die down, and Ms. Russell is hopeful that she will be able to strike a balance between coaching and caring for her son. She has already interrupted her six-week maternity leave to meet with a recruit.
Clearly, some hard-driving women manage to combine kids and coaching, and they do it well. Pat Summitt’s talents on the basketball court are legendary: Under her tutelage, Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers have won seven national titles. The story of how she went into labor on a university plane en route to visit a recruit is legendary as well. Ms. Summitt made the visit anyway, then spent the flight home lying in the aisle. She got to the hospital in time to deliver her son, Tyler, who is now 16. And while she didn’t snag the recruit that year, the player transferred to Tennessee a year later.
Arizona State’s Ms. Thorne is also at the top of her game while managing to be the mother of three young children. Her Sun Devils have won the Pac-10 Conference title twice since she arrived 11 years ago and been invited to the NCAA tournament four times in the past six years.
Her husband quit his job as a human-resources manager at an audiovisual company a year and a half ago to stay home and help manage the kids, who are now ages 3, 6, and 8. It works pretty well, says Ms. Thorne, except that she doesn’t get to see them as much as she’d like. “I do miss out on a ton,” she said in an interview in March. She had just returned from a game in Los Angeles at noon the day before, and answered about 50 e-mail and text messages at her office before leaving for home, where she fit in a quick workout before her players started arriving for Chinese food. The team sat around during dinner watching tape of forthcoming opponents. After the players left, Ms. Thorne had hoped to watch more film, but her 3-year-old wouldn’t fall asleep until 10:30 p.m., and by then the coach was exhausted.
While Ms. Thorne seems to relish her role on the court — and has just signed an extension of her contract until 2012 — she knows that her career in coaching won’t last forever. “As the kids get older and life gets more complicated, they might need me more,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t know how long I’m going to do it.”
Despite Dena Evans’s early success, her coaching career was a quick one. In 2003, her first year as women’s cross-country coach at Stanford, the team won the national title. But raising two small children made the job too difficult, even when family members accompanied the team on road trips. “The way that athletics is run, the way we do business,” she says, “wasn’t set up in a way that anticipated mothers being involved, let alone in leadership roles.”
After just two seasons, Ms. Evans quit. To replace her, Stanford hired a man, Peter Tegen, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to coach both the men’s and women’s cross-country teams.
Small Steps
Some colleges are already taking small steps to make life easier for coaches who are mothers. Peg Bradley-Doppes, athletics director and vice chancellor at the University of
Denver, allows female coaches to delay a maternity leave, if they’d rather not take time off during a recruiting season. And she has helped female coaches pay for baby sitters so they can take their children along when they travel.
Some female coaches are taking matters into their own hands, paring down their jobs to make them more manageable. Ms. Smyth, the women’s gymnastics coach at Stanford, has two young children. She has turned over primary responsibility for recruiting — including about eight recruiting trips she used to take each year to look for talented high-schoolers — to an assistant coach. She also leaves for home by 5:30 each evening. “Coaching is not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” says Ms. Smyth. But she has learned to tell students and recruits, “This is my schedule, these are my hours. Evening is my time with my family.”
Maggie Lonergan, the former basketball coach at Catholic University, has not yet figured out how to coach while raising three young children. But she still tries to keep her hand in the sport. Each summer she runs a two-week basketball camp at the University of Vermont. And every March, the family travels to the men’s Final Four with the kids in tow. While her husband catches up with colleagues and attends Division I meetings, Mrs. Lonergan hopes to soak up as much as she can from coaching clinics.
One day in March at the Final Four, in Atlanta, she entertained the kids as her husband attended a morning meeting. Then the entire family sat through a two-hour lunch to honor him and other coaches who had won their conference championships. After the lunch, Mr. Lonergan had promised, he would spell his wife and watch the kids while she sat in on a coaching clinic.
But a possible job offer that had surfaced from another Division I men’s team suddenly grew more serious. When it came time for him to keep track of the kids, who are 18 months old, 6, and 8, Mr. Lonergan was holed up in the hotel room, holding a powwow with his assistant coaches. Mrs. Lonergan said she understood — after all, her husband is the coach with the job. But it left her on her own again with the children, navigating Hoop City, a carnival-type gathering held each year at the Final Four, where fans can shoot baskets, listen to bands, and buy T-shirts and caps.
Once that afternoon, Mrs. Lonergan did wander over to sit down on some bleachers and watch a clinic on ball-handling skills. But after just five minutes, her 6-year-old daughter announced that she was bored. So Mrs. Lonergan was up again, off to feed the kids some pizza and let them try their hand at the game she loves.
| MORE WOMEN’S TEAMS, BUT MORE MALE COACHES Although more opportunities than ever exist for female athletes, the share of women’s teams coached by women is at a new low. | Number of women’s teams per college, all NCAA divisions | | 1978 | | | 1979 | | | 1980 | | | 1981 | | | 1982 | | | 1983 | | | 1984 | | | 1985 | | | 1986 | | | 1987 | | | 1988 | | | 1989 | | | 1990 | | | 1991 | | | 1992 | | | 1993 | | | 1994 | | | 1995 | | | 1996 | | | 1997 | | | 1998 | | | 1999 | | | 2000 | | | 2001 | | | 2002 | | | 2003 | | | 2004 | | | 2006 | | | Share of women’s teams coached by women, all NCAA divisions | | 1978 | | | 1979 | | | 1980 | | | 1981 | | | 1982 | | | 1983 | | | 1984 | | | 1985 | | | 1986 | | | 1987 | | | 1988 | | | 1989 | | | 1990 | | | 1991 | | | 1992 | | | 1993 | | | 1994 | | | 1995 | | | 1996 | | | 1997 | | | 1998 | | | 1999 | | | 2000 | | | 2001 | | | 2002 | | | 2003 | | | 2004 | | | 2006 | | | NOTE: Colleges had to comply with Title IX beginning in 1978. Figures for 2005 are not available.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita displaced the teams of some institutions that otherwise would have been functioning in the 2005-6 academic year. | | SOURCE: “Women in Intercollegiate Sport,” Linda Jean Carpenter and R. Vivian Acosta, Brooklyn College of the City U. of New York | |
http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 53, Issue 35, Page A40
