Hiring of Lieberman and Welter further evidence of women coaches breaking into US sport

A handful of female coaches are blazing a trail for women after landing jobs in men’s professional sport, but the jury is out on whether the flurry of appointments represents a tipping point or a statistical blip.

San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon made worldwide headlines earlier this month when she guided the NBA team to a summer league championship in Las Vegas, just more than a year after being hired by coach Gregg Popovich.

Popovich, a five-time NBA champion, says he believes it is only a matter of time before Hammon is appointed as a head coach with an NBA franchise.

“I don’t even look at it as, well, she’s the first female this and that and the other. She’s a coach, and she’s good at it,” Popovich said in a recent radio interview.

Bobby Marks, a former assistant general manager with the Brooklyn Nets who watched Hammon in the summer league, was impressed at how she commanded the attention of her players.

“When she’s talking, they’re looking at her,” Marks told the Washington Post, later writing on Twitter: “If I was running a team and had a head coaching opening, the first call would be to Becky Hammon.”

A little more than a week after Hammon and the Spurs clinched victory in the NBA summer league, the Arizona Cardinals made history by announcing the appointment of Jen Welter as an assistant coach.

Welter, hired for training camp and preseason to work with inside linebackers, is believed to be the first female coach of any kind to work in the National Football League.

“This is about every woman and girl who absolutely loves the game of football and they haven’t had a place before,” Welter said. “Now they can see that there’s a future in football even for women.”

Just as Popovich has emphasised with Hammon, Cardinals coach Bruce Arians stressed that Welter’s appointment was made on merit.

“Coaching is nothing more than teaching,” Arians said. “One thing I have learned from players is, ‘How are you going to make me better? I don’t care if you’re the Green Hornet, man, I’ll listen.’”

Welter’s appointment, meanwhile, was followed on Friday by news that the Sacramento Kings of the NBA had hired Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman to join head coach George Karl’s staff as an assistant.

Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, says she believes the appointments represent “important milestones” as they owe little to political pressure.

“What I am most hopeful about is the fact that I don’t believe the NFL and the NBA are responding to pressure which says ‘You must hire more women’ or that these appointments have been made because of pressure to be politically correct,” Kane said.

“If that were the impetus for these hirings, then they could check the ‘hired women’ box and then move on.”

The fact that Popovich and Arians, as well as several professional athletes, had given both Hammon and Welter ringing public endorsements was also significant, Kane said.

“You have the gold standard in coaching and the gold standard in players saying, ‘Come on down. Come on over,’” Kane said.

“If they are doing this, it’s not because they need a feel-good story or they need to generate some good publicity.”

Kane is cautious, however, on whether the appointments of the likes of Hammon, Welter and Lieberman will be seen as a tipping point.

“I think it’s too soon to tell whether it is,” she said. “For me, a tipping point would be that it has opened the floodgates to create a critical mass of women who are coaching men’s sports, and at the highest levels, not just two or three women here or there.”

The recent appointments are also set against a backdrop of a wider trend which has often seen men filling coaching jobs of women’s college teams.

Title IX, the landmark 1972 amendment which led to equal opportunities for women in college athletics programs, had not created a dual career track for women coaches in the way it has done for men.

“Prior to Title IX, over 90 per cent of all head coaches in women’s sports were female, nationwide,” Kane said.

“Today it’s just under 40 per cent. That is a trend which has been going on for the last three decades and shows no signs of turning around.”

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