Few Women Joining Coaching Ranks Despite Rise in Girls’ Participation

The trend is a disturbing one for those who oversee girls’ high school sports: Despite exponential growth in numbers of participants during the past 15 years, female athletic teams are increasingly being coached by men.

Studies have shown this trend to be true nationally--at the high school and college levels--causing concern that female athletes aren’t being exposed to female role models.

“It’s important for both sexes to see women and men in leadership positions,” said Kathie Maier, girls’ athletic director at Cypress High School. “When you look back, most people’s heroes tend to be in the athletic world whether it be a coach--the John Wooden type--or an athlete.

“And we are getting more and more women athletes who are becoming superstars, but at the same time, the number of women coaches who are at the so-called superstar level are very few.”

But more disconcerting to educators such as Maier, who wrote a master’s thesis on the subject, is that change doesn’t appear to be coming soon because of the situation at the lower levels.

Between 1971 and 1985-86, participants in girls’ high school sports increased nationally from 300,000 to 2.1 million, causing a corresponding increase in the number of opportunities to coach girls’ athletic teams, according to a 1985 study by R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter of Brooklyn College.

Credit for the increases in participation usually is given to Title IX, part of a law passed in 1972 which gave the federal government the power to withhold funds from institutions that discriminated against women.

But as the numbers of females active in athletics increased, the number of women coaching them has dwindled.

At the collegiate level, women held about 90% of the coaching positions in 1972 but only 48.3% in 1988, a 1988 study by Acosta and Carpenter reported. No similar national study exists for high school coaches, but Maier found several surveys that showed the trend to be true over large regions in the United States.

In her thesis, Maier set out to determine the figures for the Southern Section, the largest of 10 bodies that govern high school sports in California.

Maier found that women coaching girls’ teams in the section decreased from 89.6% in 1975-76 to 35.7% in 1988-89. In softball, 92.8% of the coaches were women in 1975-76, but only 30.2% were women in 1988-89. In basketball, the figures were 90% in 1975-76 and 32.3% in 1988-89.

Excluding badminton, field hockey and gymnastics--sports which are offered by few section schools--volleyball is the only sport in which more women (56.9%) than men are coaching girls’ teams.

The bottom line: “ . . . between the school years of 1975-76 and 1988-89, the number of girls’ sports leadership positions has increased almost 50%, while the number of females holding those positions has decreased over 50%,” Maier wrote.

Maier and several other Orange County girls’ athletic directors expressed similar reasons for the decline. Included were:

--More men seeking jobs coaching girls after Title IX equalized pay.

--Men in hiring positions who tend to give jobs to people in their circles.

--Better opportunities for women in other professions.

--The traditional role of women in this society.

“I hate to say this, but I think the reason you don’t see many women in coaching is because they have so many other responsibilities in life,” said Sheri Ross, girls’ athletic director at El Toro. “I think that perhaps the problem is inherent in the nature of our society, in that the woman has a lot of other responsibilities--talking care of the home, the family and the husband.

“That’s practically a full-time job in itself, and coaching takes a ton of hours on top of that.”

The athletic directors said they hire women for open positions when possible. Given a situation in which applicants have equal qualifications, she always would hire the women, Maier said.

That is difficult to do when few individuals of either sex are applying for the positions. At Brea-Olinda, where all but two of the nine coaches of girls’ varsity teams are men, girls’ Athletic Director Sharen Caperton is having trouble finding applicants for assistant coaching positions in the spring sports.

“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “I don’t know where the women are going unless it’s into the workplace. These college athletes who are female can go no further in competitive sports. I’m not sure where they are going. They must be (going into) the workplace because they sure can make more money.”

But Ross, who recently hired Denise Christensen, a former Cal State Fullerton basketball assistant, to coach the girls’ team at El Toro, believes there is hope for the future because more coaching guidance is being given to female athletes in college.

“Much like the California Condor, we need a preservation society,” Ross said. “But I believe in my heart that we will see an upswing because now college students are being taught to be coaches.”