Female coaches in the NBA

During the first year of my bachelor’s in International Sports Management I had to face an assignment of writing a 3,000-word essay about Gender and Sexuality in Sport in the 21st Century. Diving deeper into scientific literature and exploring the topic really changed my mind and the conclusion was:

“As participation numbers continue to grow, sport still remains male centred, dominant and organized.” 

and 

“Although, sport still remains sex segregated, this literature review outlines the positive changes in 21^st century regarding equality. Positive changes include increase in female participation, more positive attitudes and inclusion for LGB community individual’s in sport.”

Basically, in few words, my conclusion was that we don’t have an equality in sports, but the things are slowly changing, and the things are becoming better, but a lot of the work has to be done before we can talk about true inclusiveness and equality. 

A few things have changed, but the general idea, which is mentioned in my conclusion has remained the same. Thereby, this blog post is created as tool for my future comparison of sexual segregation in different sports. Furthermore, I want to emphasise the great job done by NBA and their willingness to create more diverse environment in the game, whilst the soccer is failing to adapt to this idea. 

Time for listing the female coaches in the NBA

And yeah, I know that these are only assistant coaches, but I truly hope that we will see either a Head Coach or a president of basketball operations in the NBA. My biggest hope right now is San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon, which has already rocked up some accolades by leading the Spurs Summer League team to championship and while San Antonio Spurs coaching legend Greg Popovich is approaching retirement, anything can happen. Additionally, this 2019-2020 is historically bad for the Spurs and NBA analysts are speculating that Pop would not be a part of the rebuild and approving Becky Hammon as a Head Coach would be an amazing farewell gift to the world of sports.

List of All Current NBA female assistant coaches:

Jenny Boucek	Dallas Mavericks
Brittni Donaldson	Toronto Raptors
Lindsay Gottlieb	Cleveland Cavaliers
Becky Hammon	San Antonio Spurs
Lindsey Harding	Philadelphia 76ers
Niele Ivey	Memphis Grizzlies
Kara Lawson	Boston Celtics
Natalie Nakase	LA Clippers
Kristi Toliver	Washington Wizards
Karen Stack Umlauf	Chicago Bulls
Teresa Weatherspoon	New Orleans Pelicans

Source: https://in.nba.com/news/list-of-female-assistant-coaches-in-the-nba/1wkuju9kshzsi1oobdyhld7ymn

Why did I choose to outline Kristi Toliver of Washington Wizards?

Kristi Toliver has a slightly different story as everyone else on this list. All of the other coaches mostly have been a WNBA players at some point, then hanged around the NBA franchises as data analysts, working in administrative staff, working as commentators or even coaching at the college level. Unlike all others, who are currently retired basketball players, Kristi is still active as an WNBA player for the Washington Mystics and decided to pursue the coaching job, while most of the other WNBA players are playing in Europe after the WNBA season. I find this incredibly inspiring and I hope that more NBA franchises give opportunities WNBA players to work in the NBA as a substitute to going to Europe and competing there. I will not go into the absurdness of the WNBA and female basketball in general, because this blog post would turn into an essay, but the fact that WNBA players play the whole summer in US and then go straight to the Europe, because WNBA does not pay very well. Pay issue, as well as having basically no break from playing basketball is utterly absurd, but unfortunately, I do not have a solution to propose, thereby, I will not go too much into this topic.

Conclusion

I am incredibly proud of NBA and their willingness to change the way we views sports and move towards equality. Some might argue that this number is too low, but the changes are happening, starting from 2018, the number of female Assistant coaches in NBA, has raised from 2 to 11. This is a big jump and, I we all must hope that 2020-2021 season will bring more females not only in the assistant coach position, but in every single department.

P.S This Blog post is a first part of my duty of highlighting how basketball is moving in the right direction, while Soccer, especially in Europe is falling behind.(Especially from the female staff perspective).