Women Dominate This Sport. Why Is the Coaching a Boys’ Club?

Though volleyball is the most popular team sport for high school girls nationwide and was played last year by nearly 18,000 women in all N.C.A.A. divisions, fewer than half of Division I coaches are women — and that 46 percent is slightly less than it was a decade ago, according to the N.C.A.A.

In the Power 5 conferences, where the athletic departments are fueled by football revenue, the numbers are more stark: Just one in three head coaches this season is a woman.

“That’s terrible, just brutal,” said Patti Phillips, the chief executive for Women Leaders in College Sports, an advocacy group. “You don’t want to be it if you can’t see it. I think people look around and go, ‘Why aren’t there more women?’”

That question was put to Kelly Sheffield, 49, the coach at Wisconsin, and Minnesota’s McCutcheon, 50, who coached the United States men’s team to a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics and the women’s team to a silver in 2012. Both men shrugged, saying they did not have a good answer, and pointed out that they were not doing the hiring. (Left unsaid: Of the 65 athletic directors who do the hiring in the Power 5 conferences, only four are women.)

Asked if it was a problem in the sport, Sheffield said with a laugh, “I’m just trying to win a volleyball match right now.”

As he admittedly fumbled to answer the question, Sheffield said players would want the job to go to the best candidate. “Now, maybe that’s a little bit easier coming from a dude here that I would want them to say that,” he said. “But I think — do I see it as a problem? No.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/sports/volleyball-ncaa-women.html?emc=rss&partner=rss