Tonight Teresa Phillips will make history. The Tennessee State University athletic director will become the first woman to coach a major college men's basketball team -- but only for one game. Phillips will be filling in for the team's coach while he serves a one-game suspension. With Title IX -- the statute that requires colleges to provide an equal number of athletic opportunities for men and women -- under scrutiny, Phillips chose a good time to highlight how far women have come in the world of college athletics. But her actions also raise a question: Isn't it about time for a woman to coach a Division I men's college basketball team -- and for more than one game?
Thanks in large part to Title IX and the success of women's basketball, at the college level and in the WNBA, there is certainly a pool of high-profile women coaches who would be qualified to coach in the men's game. And it's not as if there is any shortage of men coaching women. One need look no farther than the most prominent women's basketball program in the country, the University of Connecticut, which recently set a record for consecutive wins. Its coach is a man.
In fact, across all college sports, there is perhaps no more striking inequality than the one that exists in the realm of cross-gender coaching. According to the National Association for Girls and Women in Sports (NAGWS), only 2 percent of coaches for men's programs are women. Add to this the fact that a majority (56 percent) of women's teams are coached by men, or that in the past two years, men have made up 90 percent of the new hires at women's programs, and you have the makings of a system in which men have coaching opportunities across athletic gender divides, but women are confined to female sports.
The numbers for women in men's sports are stunningly low -- and yet, who knew they were that high? It is, after all, difficult to picture a woman coaching any men's team. And we have largely college basketball to blame for this. It is probably the most high-profile college sport, and -- unlike, say, football -- one that has plenty of high-profile coaches of women's teams. Yet, until today, a woman has never coached a men's team. And even after tonight, no woman will have yet won a permanent job running a men's basketball program.
There has been some progress at the high-school level, but it has taken place in small steps -- and not without opposition. Geraldine Fuhr garnered national attention several years ago when she was passed over at Hazel Park High School in suburban Detroit for the men's varsity basketball job. Despite her 10 years as coach of the school's women's squad and nine more leading the men's junior varsity team -- while piling up a 60-20 record and several league championships -- the administration chose Fuhr's colleague John Barnett. Barnett's résumé consisted of two years as coach of the men's freshman basketball team.
In response, Fuhr sued the school district on sexual-discrimination grounds, arguing that the region's school board president had consistently expressed the desire for a man to coach the men's varsity team. Fuhr won the case, and U.S. District Judge George Steeh left her with two options: Accept full damages totaling $455,000 or reduce that amount by $210,000 and take the head men's coaching position at Hazel Park. Fuhr chose to coach.
The Hazel Park case highlighted for the first time two unspoken anxieties common to college athletic directors and even high-school administrators: Can women be trusted to coach men? And even more significantly, can men be trusted to embrace female coaches as leaders?
The skill and success of women's coaches such as Tara VanDerveer of Stanford University, Jody Conradt of the University of Texas and Pat Summitt of the University of Tennessee offer all the proof necessary to debunk the antiquated belief that women can't run a game with the same shrewdness -- not to mention toughness -- as men. Should any college basketball program decide to seriously look at women candidates for its men's basketball program, all three of the aforementioned coaches would have to be high on the list.
But the more troubling question -- and the one that has probably prevented a woman from landing a job at a men's program thus far -- is whether men would respond to a female coach. It's a difficult question, and one that we won't really know the answer to until the situation arises. But this seems suspiciously like one of those cases where men would play for a woman if it were normal to play for a woman. And it won't be normal until a decent number of schools give it a try for a sustained period of time. Besides, if they don't, they will just be giving prejudice carte blanche to perpetuate further prejudice.
Most athletic directors probably understand this. While Fuhr's case demonstrates that overt discrimination is always lurking, the real issue is that despite an athletic director's best intentions, women still get hired at lower rates than men -- especially in high-profile programs, where directors are consistently more proactive in recruiting male coaches than females.
"I've never hired a coach on the basis of a paper application," observes Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation and a former athletic director at the University of Texas. "You go out and you steal [a good coach] away from whoever has one, because you are not going to hire an entry level employee . . . You go out and you recruit them like you would an athlete. You put together the package that would do it. Nobody's doing that for women."
More than 83 percent of all athletic directors are men. According to a NAGWS study, if an athletic director is a woman, the likelihood that a school will hire a female coach goes up, but not much, from 44 percent to 48 percent.
Plus, as many male athletic directors are quick to note, there is not always the same level of interest to coach among women as there is among men. Indeed, perhaps the most fundamental barrier facing women coaches wishing to enter the men's game is the lack of prominent role models. Female athletes have grown up with the ability to emulate the likes of Billy Jean King, Cheryl Miller and Mia Hamm. The Conradts, VanDerveers and Summitts of the world have likely left a genuine influence on younger coaches in the women's game. But in men's college basketball, the list of female coaches is nonexistent. The time is ripe for a major college program to give a pioneering woman the chance to change that -- for more than one game.
David Hensel is a third-year law student at George Washington University.
