The NBA wants female head coaches. But how feasible is that goal?
NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants more female referees in the NBA. “I’m not sure how it was that it remained so male-dominated for so long,” said Silver last month. And Silver doesn’t want to stop with referees. “The goal going forward is that it should be roughly 50-50 of new officials entering in the league,” he said. “Same for coaches, by the way. We have a program, too. There’s no reason why women shouldn’t be coaching men’s basketball.”
One would think the NBA can find plenty of qualified candidates among current and retired WNBA players. Of the six women with coaching experience in the NBA, all have ties to the WNBA. However, economic and cultural barriers remain that could limit the success of a WNBA to NBA coaching pathway.
In collaboration with the National Basketball Coaches Association (NBCA), the NBA developed a plan to diversify the coaching pool. “This all starts with developing good talent and creating opportunities for people to become qualified. Quota systems don’t work. They’re ineffective, and we’re not interested in that. We’re interested in a level playing field with regard to development,” the NBCA president and Dallas Mavericks head coach, Rick Carlisle, told the Guardian.
Instead, the plan will include a declaration of equality, ongoing coaching development and the creation of a coaching database. “Our goal with this is to … have detailed information on all the careers of all of our assistant coaches that will be valuable for teams formulating ideas on who they would want to hire, both as head coaches and assistant coaches,” said Carlisle. He also hopes the database can incorporate interviews where each coach talks about their basketball journey.
While these plans are admirable, there are problems. A two-day coaches’ summit will be held at the start of July. It will be a valuable opportunity for coaches to network and talk to teams. The only problem: it conflicts with the WNBA season. That means the vast majority of WNBA coaches interested in moving to the NBA won’t be able to participate.
Then there’s the fact that getting a start as an female coach can be tough in the first place. Jenny Boucek is now an assistant coach with the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, but building up coaching experience in the WNBA after her playing career ended was not easy. “When I started coaching in the WNBA, I got paid zero dollars. I knew I needed to learn and so my first job, I volunteered. When you get into pro sports, a lot of coaches have to start at the very bottom as video coordinator, or intern, or whatnot,” she told the Guardian in a phone interview.
While Boucek believes players need to be willing to make sacrifices, she also believes the WNBA and NBA can and should create more pathways to coaching for former players. WNBA teams carry two assistant coaching slots. With the Mavericks, Boucek is one of six assistants.
WNBA coaches like Boucek and current Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve have long advocated for the WNBA to create an additional coaching position for former players. “That was always tricky, because when I was a head coach, I had a huge passion to help develop former players as coaches. But it was a little bit of a dilemma because I only had two coaching spots,” said Boucek of her four seasons as a WNBA head coach.
If paid spots are limited in the WNBA, why don’t more women go the route of Kristi Toliver? The 32-yearold combines a playing career with the Washington Mystics with an assistant coaching role at the Washington Wizards. Again, part of the answer is economic. WNBA teams have a budget of $50,000 to keep active WNBA players in-market, as opposed to having them play overseas where they can make upwards of five times their WNBA salaries. In Toliver’s case, since the Mystics and Wizards share the same owner, she would have to be paid from that $50,000.
Unfortunately, by the time the Wizards offered Toliver the role, only $10,000 from the budget was left. According to the New York Times, even at $50,000, Toliver would have been paid 50% less than the lowest-paid NBA assistant. Toliver accepted the role at $10,000, a tiny amount when some NBA assistant coaches make $1m a year.
Despite scheduling conflicts and lower pay, there are six women, including Toliver and Boucek, with WNBA ties that have made their way to NBA sidelines. Lindsey Harding (Philadelphia 76ers), Nancy Lieberman (Sacramento Kings), and Becky Hammon (San Antonio Spurs) all played in the WNBA. Karen Stack Umlauf (Chicago Bulls) played in the Women’s American Basketball Association, as well as abroad, before working as a WNBA analyst for the Chicago Sky.
None of these women got their job through a database or coaching summit. In most cases, they were somehow on the radar of a NBA coach. There too lies an opportunity to help increase the amount of women coaching NBA teams. “What I have learned in the short term is that [the NBA] is a relationships business. And you can really only have relationships with people that you’re willing to go out and seek,” ESPN analyst and former WNBA player Kara Lawson told the Guardian.
But Lawson knows more than anyone that those relationships require work. During her playing career, she also worked as a studio analyst for Sacramento Kings’ broadcasts. She wanted to sit in on team practices to get a better idea of how the players prepared for game but the Kings would not let her. Eventually, they let her sit behind a one-way mirror. The reason? “[I would] distract the players, if I was sitting [on court],” she told The Summit in 2017.
Today, she sees immense value in what Carlisle and the NBCA have committed to, but hopes the database in particular, will not just be another oneway mirror. “I hope NBA teams will immerse themselves in the women’s game more, so that they don’t need a database to look at. [Hopefully], they actually will have some type of recollection of who that person is. And when they see their name, they don’t need a database and tell them who they are and what their experience is.”