Tucker Center Newsletter - 2009 Spring
Director | Feature | Research | Guest | Know | Legacy | Kudos | DLS
Guest Column:
Mike Messner:
“You Gotta Be Tough”:
Challenges & Strategies of
Female Coaches
in Youth Sports
Mike
Messner, pictured at right with his son Sasha.
When we arrived at our six-year-old son’s first soccer practice in 1995, I was delighted to learn that his coach was a woman. Coach Karen was tall, confident and athletic, and the kids responded well to her leadership. “Great, a woman coach!” I observed cheerily. “It’s a new and different world than the one that I grew up in.” But over the next 12 years, as both of my sons played several seasons in the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), as well as Little League baseball, they never had another female head coach. It’s not that women weren’t contributing to the kids’ teams. All of the “team parents” (often called “team moms”) were women. I was fascinated, and studied this gender division of labor for the next eight years. The numbers were stark: from 1999 to 2007, only 6% of 538 Little League Baseball and Softball teams in my Southern California community were managed by women. AYSO was better—13% of 1,280 teams had a female coach.
As I started to observe things, I noticed that a male coach was referred to as “the coach.” In contrast, a woman was usually called “the woman coach,” thus linguistically marking her. But it was more than gendered language that barred women’s entry into coaching and ultimately caused most of those who did venture into coaching to quit after a year or two. While I found very little overt sexism or hostility toward these women, the stories about their experiences revealed informal—but very powerful—processes that marginalized or discouraged them: Feeling a constant sense of scrutiny from other adults (“is she really qualified to coach my kid?”); being made to feel like an outsider in the midst of the “old boys’ network”; having to contend with men’s “intimidating” loud voices on the playing fields. As one woman told me, “I just couldn’t take that.”
In spite of such challenges, some women do manage to survive and thrive as coaches. They develop strategies to contend with challenges they face as “the woman coach.” “You gotta be tough,” one told me. The women who survived by being more competitive than men ran head-on into the same sort of double-standard that women face in corporate and professional life: If you’re not competitive and aggressive, you’re not taken seriously; if you are overly so, you are labeled a bitch. Clearly, the most successful gender strategies are group ones. In AYSO, I found the beginnings of what one woman called (with an ironic chuckle) an “old girls’ network” to recruit and support more female coaches. In Little League Baseball and Softball, the number of women is still too low for this kind of women’s network to develop. Baseball (and by extension, softball) still “belongs” to men, leaving female coaches as isolated tokens. In sum, a successful strategy is one that results in a critical mass.
It is very important to increase the numbers of female coaches in youth sports. Why does it matter? Because what adults do in youth sports is linked to gender divisions of labor in other realms; an “unfinished feminist revolution” in work and family life is further reinforced by such a skewed male dominance in youth sports. It also matters because, as preparation for the world they will inhabit as adults, boys need to see and experience the full range of women’s leadership skills and physical abilities. And it matters because women coaches can be an inspiration to today’s girls, giving them a vision of what they can do when they become adults. As one coach told the girls on her softball team, “Someday, most of you girls are going to be moms. You don’t want to just let Dad do all that stuff. Not when you’ve got this kind of experience. You want to do it too.”