VanDerveer: Hire more female coaches
Tara VanDerveer thinks Notre Dame women’s basketball head coach Muffet McGraw was “spot-on” when she said at this year’s Final Four that there are not enough women basketball coaches — and not enough women in power in general.
“I think she’s accurate,” the longtime Stanford head coach said at a news conference before she was inducted to the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.
“As more women get opportunities to play,” she said, “I think we need to develop the pipeline of young women getting into coaching and giving them opportunities. I think she was pretty much spot-on in looking at how things are.
“Hopefully, we can grow the women’s game in a lot of ways, including giving more opportunities for women to coach. She brought good attention to the fact that women need opportunities in basketball and other sports, too.”
Women who get fired from head coaching jobs are far less likely than their male counterparts to land new jobs, VanDerveer said. “If someone gets fired, it’s very rare to see them get a second chance,” she said.
McGraw gave a two-minute speech at the Final Four that went viral. She said girls are socialized to think “men run the world.”
Sports would be a great place to counter that narrative, she said. “When you look at men’s basketball and 99 percent of the jobs go to men, why shouldn’t 100 or 99 percent of the jobs in women’s basketball go to women? Maybe it’s because we only have 10 percent women athletic directors in Division I. People hire people who look like them. And that’s the problem.”
VanDerveer disagreed, however, with McGraw’s statement that she wouldn’t hire a male assistant. “We should hire the best person, period,” she said. “I don’t agree with flat-out discrimination. I wish more men would look at women for jobs. I think staffs are better when you have more diversity: men, women, black, white, older, younger, everything.”