Katie Sowers can remember journal entries she wrote as a young girl expressing her love for football. She wanted to grow up and play on an organized team, but it was something she believed she could only hope for because she never saw girls playing football on TV.
Photo credit: Katie Sowers
“I remember the exact moment of taking it in and looking around and realizing that everything I was doing was something I had only hoped for when I was younger,” Sowers said, recounting the first time she stepped on a football field with a helmet and pads.
By her senior year of college, Sowers had found a women’s league and began playing for the Western Michigan Mayhem. From there she went on to play for teams in Kansas City. When she retired as a player she decided to pursue a career in coaching football, something not many women before her have done.
This season, Sowers was hired full time by the San Francisco 49ers as an offensive assistant, working with the receivers. Sowers is in relatively uncharted waters, as there has only been one other female NFL coach: Kathryn Smith, the special teams quality control coach with the Buffalo Bills in 2016.
In the NBA, there are currently only two female assistant coaches: Becky Hammon with the San Antonio Spurs and Jenny Boucek with the Sacramento Kings. The MLB, NHL, and MLS have no female coaches.
Additionally, during the 2016-17 academic year about 39 percent of NCAA Division I coaches were women compared to about about 60 percent for men.
But it’s not just major professional leagues and college athletics where there is a lack of female coaches. While it is rare to see women coaching a men’s team, the opposite is not true when it comes to men coaching women’s teams. According to the Alliance of Women Coaches, females coach only 43 percent of women’s teams.
From youth sports to college athletics and professional leagues, stereotypes and biases against women coaches are pervasive. Some of these issues were discussed during a panel at the LA84 summit on October 27 in downtown Los Angeles.
“Coaching is one of the only professions where we label a coach as a female,” said Megan Khan, the executive director of the Alliance for Women Coaches. “I don’t say I’m going to my female doctor or my female attorney. But in sports we’re so far behind in diversity and inclusion that we’re still labeling gender.”
The labeling that Khan discusses causes assumptions that Sowers knows all too well.
“People assume that because I’m a woman maybe I’m the token female, I’m the publicity stunt,” Sowers said. “They don’t assume that my knowledge or that my impact could actually be something that could help the team.”
Catherine Dávila, president of LA Villa FC, a women’s soccer club in Los Angeles, and another member on the Game Changers panel, expressed frustration when parents of players in her youth soccer organization intrude on halftime talks.
Dávila said that she’s been approached by parents who said she lacked passion and that she needed to be meaner to the players if the team was going to win. In her experience, what parents see as a stereotypical coach, passionate, loud, and angry, is not how they think a woman should act. “There’s this weird double standard that people want to see this angry passionate coach, but not if it’s a woman,” Dávila said. “They want the woman to win, but not like that.”
Julie Shaw, director of education for the Women’s Sports Foundation and a collegiate women’s basketball coach for 15 years at Gonzaga and La Verne, echoed Dávila’s statements. For Shaw, the image of a coach is what reinforces the stereotype.
“Men can just rip into their players and not be judged,” Shaw said. “Even against referees, sometimes I would stomp up to a referee and I would see the differences in how they interacted with me, and how they interacted with male coaches.”
According to Shaw, some of these prejudices were evident among her female players. “A lot of them had never had a female coach in their history of playing,” she said. “When I would yell at them it would be like ‘Oh, coach is a B.’”
The panel at the LA84 summit stressed that changing the biases surrounding the coaching profession would not be easy, but was unanimous in saying that one way to fix it was to get more women into coaching positions.
But getting more women involved presents a challenge in itself when many don’t even think about the opportunity being there.
“I think when we’re children we observe a lot more than people think. If you don’t see something happening, you don’t believe it can happen,” Sowers said. “It was never even a thought process for me to think about coaching, to think about playing, because I didn’t think that it could happen.”
To get more female coaches on the field, Sowers said more attention needs to be brought to these types of opportunities for women. She said she hopes she is leading the way by providing an image for women to look up to.
Photo credit: Katie Sowers
Photo credit: Katie Sowers