Why Female Athletes Decide to Become Coaches

JULY 2004 FEATURE

Why Female Athletes Decide to Become Coaches — or Not

Introduction

The idea for this article came from the findings of coaching studies showing that women are under-represented in the coaching profession (Acosta and Carpenter, 2000; Sport Canada, 1999). Women make up 28 per cent of active coaches in the various sport federations in Quebec (Sports-Québec, 2000) and 31 per cent in Canada as a whole (Coaching Association of Canada [CAC], 2002). Female coaches are fewer in number than male coaches, and generally spend fewer than five years in the job (Hart, Hasbrook and Mathes, 1986).

A review of the literature shows that the few women who choose a coaching career face many obstacles, yet there is little information available to help us understand why. The studies conducted on the subject, of which there are just a handful, identify the reasons why women take up or, conversely, leave coaching. All of the studies administered questionnaires to active coaches; in some cases, the coaches were asked what factors might prompt them to leave their coaching positions (Doherty and Casey, 1996; Hart, Hasbrook and Mathes, 1986). Since I did not find any studies focusing on what happens to junior female coaches who decide to become a coach, this became my starting point for exploring the process of how women are drawn into coaching.

This article is the first stage of my exploration and is the result of group interviews conducted with potential coaches for the purpose of understanding what would induce them to become coaches.

Current Knowledge of Under-Representation of Female Coaches

The literature may be broken down into two categories: research on choosing coaching as a career, with an emphasis on under-representation of women in the profession, and research on the impact of role models on female athletes’ decisions whether to become a coach.

Choosing coaching as a career

In recent years, interest in the coach’s role and the reasons why people do, or do not, choose coaching as a career has been growing steadily (Gilbert, 2002). Interest in coaching as a career for women parallels the rise in the number of girls involved in sport — they now make up about 45 per cent of participants in federation-governed sports. This increased participation has in turn generated greater demand for people to coach girls. Based on this demand and the ongoing under-representation of women in the coaching ranks, some researchers have launched projects aimed at understanding and explaining the processes involved in recruiting, retaining, and losing women coaches. Most of the studies concern high performance coaches who have been active for a number of years (Acosta and Carpenter, 2000; Sport Canada, 1999) and unearth the factors working against or contributing to the involvement of women as coaches and the main reasons why they drop out.

Factors working against women’s involvement include male control of the sport, the lack of role models for girls and women, the success enjoyed by old boys’ networks, the lack of time due to family responsibilities, stereotypes and preconceived ideas about women as coaches, employers’ reluctance to run the risk of hiring a female coach, and the lack of careful career planning by female coaches themselves.

The main factors contributing to their involvement are skills and abilities, family and peer encouragement and support, interest in a coaching career, previous positive experiences, personality, and a variety of situational and demographic factors such as being single or not having children.

Marshall (2001) identified the main reasons why women drop out of coaching as burnout, no financial incentive, lack of experience, family conflicts, discrimination, conflict with the old guard (made up of men), and high expectations of success.

Impact of role models

Most authors agree that the lack of coaching role models is one of the factors explaining the shortage of women going into the profession. Surprisingly, I found no article reporting on actual measurement of the impact of role models. A number of questions remain unanswered: What is the real impact of the role model on the recruitment of female coaches? How do female coaches influence their athletes to become coaches themselves? What is female athletes’ assessment of the impact of having a female coach on their decision to become coaches? What is female coaches’ assessment of their impact on the recruitment of new coaches?

Above and beyond the conventional wisdom regarding the impact of a female coach model with whom the athlete can identify, it is essential, in my view, to examine how the role model actually exerts influence.

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le Journal en français

JULY 2004
Vol. 4, No. 5
Front Page
CONTENTS

Why Female Athletes Decide to Become Coaches — or Not

Introduction

Current Knowledge of Under-Representation of Female Coaches

Questions

What the Athletes Said

What the Coaches Said

Conclusion

References

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