Women earning time in sporting spotlight
But there’s still a ways to go in terms of support and exposure
At the Stanley Cup Final in June, one of the unexpected guest appearances was from Manon Rheaume, who for a very brief period was the most famous member of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
She did the media rounds, talking about all the barriers she broke: first woman to play in a major junior league, first woman to try out for an NHL team, then the first to play in an NHL exhibition game. It was a nice bit of nostalgia. A film is being made about her.
But you couldn’t help noting the floodgates had not exactly been thrown open by her foray into the men’s game. Rheaume’s first pre-season appearance with the Lightning was in 1992. At the time there was all sorts of speculation about the broader implications of it. Was this a watershed moment, a sign that women would start to be considered for spots in the big pro leagues? Could certain athletic positions — goaltender, for example — transcend gender?
Twenty-three years later, the evidence suggests the answer is an emphatic no. Other than a handful of cases both brief (Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie) and sustained (Danica Patrick), women have stuck to their leagues and men to theirs.
But it is starting to feel like a moment again. The Women’s World Cup, a tournament that 24 years ago was called the women’s world championship because FIFA didn’t want to dilute the name of the World Cup by attaching it to an event involving ladies, was in its seventh edition a bona fide success in terms of interest and ratings, propelled in no small degree by the success of the winning United States team.
Becky Hammon, a coach hired by the San Antonio Spurs last season, becoming the first woman to hold such a title, just guided the Spurs to the NBA Summer League title as head coach. The Sacramento Kings are reportedly set to offer Nancy Lieberman a job as an assistant coach in the wake of her summer league work with the club.
And this week, the Arizona Cardinals hired Jen Welter, who played in some minor pro football leagues, as a coaching assistant. It’s a training camp and pre-season gig but, baby steps.
These are intriguing developments. Almost from the moment the United States won the Women’s World Cup, those involved with the women’s game stressed it was essential for the stars of that victory to try to ride the wave of success and convert fans of the national team to the professional league in which many of them play. Other than the exceptions of tennis, golf and to a lesser extent basketball, to be a female pro athlete is to essentially bide your time between appearances on the national team, when interest in what you are doing spikes exponentially. If there is suddenly a flare of attention paid to the National Women’s Soccer League because of what happened in Canada in the World Cup, it would be a first.
The coaching co-mingling is another thing entirely. The skills and talents involved in coaching are gender neutral. As Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians put it: “if you can make me better, I don’t care if you’re the Green Hornet.” Odd choice of example, but point taken.
The only explanation for why more women have not been hired into roles in major leagues is because teams haven’t been open to the possibility. I do not doubt many would argue this is foolishness, that a woman would face great challenges trying to be the leader of men so many fans imagine their ideal coaches to be. But seriously: women run Fortune 500 companies, are the heads of state of G8 countries, are chief justices of supreme courts.
You’re going to tell me that those positions don’t require a particular gender, but only men can tell which guys to jump over a bench for a line change? (And please, save the argument about chemistry, and how a female coach wouldn’t be able to relate to her male players. Tom Coughlin is 68 years old. His first-round draft pick with the New York Giants, lineman Ereck Flowers, is 21. I bet they are hitting it off famously, what with all of their common interests.)
Shaking up the boys’ club is at least a start. When the U.S. won the Women’s World Cup, the team was paid $2 million. The German men won $35 million for winning the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. There are huge revenue disparities between the two events, but that’s not the point. FIFA, as has been made all too clear in recent months, is awash in cash. Bumping up the prize for the WWC would provide an incentive for other nations to grow the women’s game.
Open-mindedness, though, does not abound in pro sports, whether it be on attitudes toward advanced statistics, head injuries or societal considerations. Just when it seemed like there was a mini-revolution of sorts with the coming-out stories of Jason Collins in the NBA and Michael Sam in the NFL, they each struggled to find roles. Rather than the start of a trend, they remain outsiders. Hammon and Welter could yet be the former or the latter.
There is a ways to go yet. On Wednesday night, Canada’s Christine Sinclair led her Portland team to victory in an NWSL game in Rochester, N.Y. There were 2,979 fans in attendance.
In light of the recent bit of groundbreaking, Yahoo Sports had a slide show on its main page this week with the headline: “Female firsts — pioneers of sports history.” Just above it, on the same page: “Hottest female athletes of 2015.”
As I say: baby steps.