row2k Features
The Distaff Side of Rowing Staffs
Counting Coaches
Finding a Seat for Women Head Coaches in Rowing Can a Challenge
January 23, 2017
Ed Moran, row2k.com

Meghan Cooke Carcagno at the helm for Duke University

Meghan Cooke Carcagno knew she wanted to be a coach for as long as she can remember. Her father was a coach. Growing up, she was surrounded by the things found in a coach's home - water bottles, clipboards, whistles.

"My dad was our high school basketball coach," Cooke Carcagno said. "I grew up in a locker room. There were always water bottles in my house, my mom was always washing towels and there were clipboards everywhere. Whistles everywhere."

So, when the time came to move from being an athlete to coaching, the transition seemed natural, if unexpectedly sooner than Cooke Carcagno wanted.

Just after being cut from the 2008 U.S. women's Olympic team, she was offered and accepted a job at the University of Wisconsin. Given her background as an athlete and the daughter of a career coach, it was a perfect fit for Cooke Carcagno.

"Having a parent that was a coach made it acceptable to be a coach," she said. "You grow up and you hear in families that you've got to be a doctor, you've got to be a lawyer. For me (coaching) was teaching outside, and that was always appealing to me."

The choice has taken from Lake Mendota in Wisconsin to Duke University and her first career head coaching position. In first campaign at Duke last year, Cooke Carcagno made a name for herself and her team by earning bid to Duke's first ever NCAA Championship.

But it was also an eye-opening experience.

When she got to the NCAA's, she found that there were only six other women head coaches among the 22 Division I schools competing. It raised two questions for her; why was that the case, and why wasn't anyone asking why that was the case?

"The million-dollar question is why isn't anyone asking the question?" she said. "It's really a male dominated arena. And I think it's a challenge."

The reasons, or more to the point, the answers, to Cooke Carcagno's question are layered.

Female Coaches in Rowing by the Numbers
According to the experts, research, and coaches interviewed, there are several factors - they include family and parenting concerns, the number of actual jobs that exist, and the fact that the best head coaching positions do not become available that often.

While rowing is a sport with multiple opportunities for women athletes because of the size of the teams, and is relied upon by universities that have large men’s football programs to offset Title IX gender equality numbers, the number of programs is actually small compared to other sports like basketball, lacrosse, soccer, or track and field.

According to NCAA data, there were 1114 basketball head coaching positions last year. There were 150 in women's rowing.

Gender Among Rowing Coaches by the Numbers
To begin to evaluate if women are fairly represented in collegiate women's rowing overall, a good place to start is the NCAA data, which shows that over the past decade the ratio of men to women head coaches across all the NCAA women's divisions have remained consistent at just about 33 percent.

Of the 150 head women's rowing coaching positions listed for the 2015-2016 season, 99 were men and 49 women. The ratio was about the same for the 2007-2008 season, the first season with available comparative figures, at 93 to 52.

At the assistant coach level, the numbers are reversed; there is an abundance of women who work, or have worked, as assistant collegiate rowing coaches compared to men. The NCAA data base shows that during the 2015-2016 season there were 213 women working as assistant coaches compared to 96 men.

While those figures do not scream injustice, academics who study and teach women in sports issues say the data, in some ways, is misleading and that rowing is "doing poorly" compared to other collegiate women's sports.

Giddings: Better Data is Needed
Amy Giddings's resume includes years of coaching at the club, scholastic and collegiate levels, as well as a graduate degree in Sport and Recreation Administration and a Ph.D. in Sport Psychology. She currently serves as Associate Clinical Professor and Program Director of Sport Coaching Leadership at Drexel University, where she teaches and writes about the role of women in coaching.

Giddings feels there are two problems in trying to define opportunities for women in coaching: a lack of available data beyond collegiate numbers, and a lack of research that tries to understand the challenges women coaches face and cause some to leave the profession.

"I think that we lack overall data," Giddings said. "What you are looking at is collegiate data. Usually, people look at mostly Division I and sometimes II and III while taking an assessment of gender equality in coaching," she said.

"We don't have any data for rowing at any of the other levels. We have this club model that is growing significantly, but we don't have any data in terms of who is coaching those people, what are their educational backgrounds, what gender are they, what age are they. We don't have any of those demographics so we can't really even say what the big picture is. We only see the collegiate side."

She said there is also a lack of data that shows why women who were coaching rowing left those jobs compared to other women's sports.

Rowing Receives a Barely Passing Grade
To gain perspective on the numbers of head coaching positions filled by women in other collegiate women's sports, Giddings refers to research conducted by Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, co-director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota.

That research, based on studies across all three NCAA divisions, shows that rowing did not compare well to other women's sports, receiving an overall D grade in their statistical report card.

From LaVoi's report (which you can read here: Head Coaches of Women's Collegiate Teams: A Report on Select NCAA Division-I Institutions 2015-2016), broken down by Sport:

The percentage of women head coaches in 23 NCAA-sponsored sports varied greatly (see Table 3). Field hockey (100%), lacrosse (92.6%), and golf (78.9%) continued to have a large majority of female head coaches. Two sports—water polo and alpine skiing—sustained all male coaches for a third year in a row. Nearly twice as many sports received failing grades of Ds or Fs (n = 13) as received As or Bs (n = 7). Eight sports had no change in percentage of female head coaches; nine sports increased in percentage including four sports (gymnastics, ice hockey, softball, sand volleyball) that moved up a grade level; four sports decreased in percentage (diving, rowing, soccer, volleyball), but no sport dropped a grade level.

<!-- f-size --> From 'Head Coaches of Women's Collegiate Teams,' Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi
From 'Head Coaches of Women's Collegiate Teams,' Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi

LaVoi's report focuses on the overall situation in women's coaching and the major point of her conclusions is that overall opportunities for women in coaching has decreased by 40 percent since the passage of Title IX.

Watch a video of LaVoi discussing her findings.

Addressing rowing specifically, LaVoi agrees that two big limiting issues are the actual number of positions available, and the low turnover rate.

"There really aren't many women coaches in the big programs," LaVoi said. "We have record number of women participating in rowing, but we don't see that translating into women coaching in rowing, and that's a little concerning."

One factor in ratio of women's coaches is the actual number of rowing programs compared to other sports. "There is very little turnover in rowing because there aren't many rowing programs, unlike basketball where nearly every school has a basketball team," she said. "When people have those positions they aren't going to give them up, because there aren't many opportunities."

Coaching and Family: A "False Narrative"
In addition, for women in coaching across all sports one hindrance is the belief that coaching is not a good profession for women who want to raise families, something she calls a "false narrative."

LaVoi said that in schools that have supportive administrations and athletic directors, coaching is actually a good family career choice for both women and men.

"The thing about women and coaching and families is something I hear a lot about," LaVoi said. "That's kind of a dominant narrative - it's hard to coach and have families. That is partially true because women are still the primary care takers of children and do most of the domestic labor," she said.

But LaVoi is hoping that she can "shift the narrative around on that," and believes that coaching is a far better family choice than a high-level position in the corporate world, "where you are never going to bring your kids in the board room, to your office, on trips," she said. "So in the big scope of things, coaching can be very family-friendly if you have a culture and an athletic director around that. You can be more flexible. You can bring your kids to work. You can bring your kids around the team," she said.

"That is what I would like to start talking about for women. The more we say that women can't coach and have a family, what's going to happen? They are not going to go into coaching."

"I've had a lot of young women tell me, I don't think I can have a family and coach. Well, the reason they say that is because everyone keeps saying it. If the narrative was, hey, coaching is a great career for you to have a family, and here's all the benefits of that, then they would think differently about it."

Hearing from Current Female Coaches
Of the women who are in coaching who were interviewed for this story, none felt they were being shut out, or that their opportunities were limited.

"Right now, I'm just trying to learn the ropes and see if this is something I want to continue with," said two-time U.S. Olympian Adrienne Martelli, who recently retired from competitive rowing following the summer Olympics in Rio and is now an assistant women's coach at Northeastern University.

NU's Adrienne Martelli
NU's Adrienne Martelli

"I haven't thought that much about it. I feel proud to be a woman representing our sport in coaching. I know that there are not very many head female coaches. There are a lot of programs that have coaches who have been established for a very long time. And, hopefully we'll see more and more head female coaches as more and more programs build up and those positions become available," Martelli said.

"Right now, I'm the only female coach in the boathouse. But I feel excited to be representing."

Kristine O'Brien, another former national athlete who left the national team following the 2016 Olympic cycle, is now coaching at the University of Virginia and doesn't believe her gender is a hindrance in any potential career in coaching. "In taking on this job and talking to other people, I'm being told 'good for you, we need more women in coaching,'" O'Brien said.

"I haven't heard, or even thought, how it would be easier for a male (to advance in coaching.) I don't feel like I'm at a disadvantage because I'm a woman, and if coaching is something I want to do and something I aspire to do, I can work towards it.

"There are women who are head coaches and are very successful," she said. "Some of the top program in the U.S. - Radcliffe, Washington, Princeton - are some that stand out to me. The head coaching positions are predominantly male, but I don't feel when I'm thinking about doing this for a long time that I couldn't because I'm a woman."

Princeton's Lori Dauphiny has held her position for the past 21 seasons and has never felt held back by gender in either her ability to coach or the university's support of her as a head coach.

"I started the fall of 1989 and I've been pretty fortunate," Dauphiny said. "Princeton, although they admitted women later than many universities did, made a great effort toward making it work.

"By the time I came to Princeton, the women's program was embraced by the administration and the coaching staff at the boathouse, and I've always felt welcome as a female coach in a male dominated profession. I give much credit to my environment. There was some inequity, absolutely, but I felt welcome and a part of something special and big and didn't feel I had to claw my way to receive recognition," said Dauphiny.

Understanding the overall numbers, she said, "is a tricky question, really. I don't think it's because women aren't hired. I've had plenty of assistant coaches that have gone on to become head coaches and some that have left being head coaches because they wanted to do something else.

"I think they were finding their jobs rewarding, but they were juggling raising a family, or there were other issues. Maybe they were forced to move because their mates were relocated in their jobs.

"I think one thing that is interesting about our sport is that while women's rowing has blossomed, in general in those more established programs the turnover hasn't been great," Dauphiny said.

Going into her second season at Duke, Cooke Carcagno is not concerned with how her experience compares to her male colleagues. She is confident in what she brings to her coaching and what other women bring to the sport when they move from the boat to the launch.

"At the end of the day, I have to be who I am and I can't worry about who I'm not," she said. "I think a lot of people, like my colleagues out in the field, think, geez, this guy has been coaching for 30 years and he's going to know how to do this better than me.

"And then I think with the other part of my head, he's never been a female collegiate athlete," Cooke Carcagno said. "I know what that feels like. He's never walked past a male football locker room and then walked past our locker room and thought, hmmm, that looks different. I know what that feels like. I've set world records and done all these things in sport and I know what that feels like."

That does not mean she is not aware that there are different challenges faced by women in coaching.

"It's just different," she said. "Like, I'm a mom with two little tiny kids and we're at regattas and we're traveling all the time and I go to work at 6 am and I get home at 6 pm, so that's a really big challenge.

"Some days I do it because I love it. And some days I do it because it pays the bills, and some days I do it because if I don't do it, who will. If not me, who?"

For more reading on the subject, see this article published in the NCAA's Champion Magazine titled "Where are the Women."

See also row2k.com feature, published Jan. 16th about Rio Olympic cycle U.S. national team athletes who have joined the coaching ranks.

Editor's note: the original article included a sentence as well as a direct quote that there were only four female DI coaches at the 2016 NCAA Championships; row2k corrected both at 11:45am Monday; we regret the error.

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Comments

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FannyWhite
12/30/2021  3:57:56 PM
Wow. How outdated is this article. Now, in ‘woke’ 2021, hiring a QUALIFIED person with a resume to match is no longer status quo. ‘You’re female! You’re hired!’ It’s ironic that females cried (and justly so) about men getting hired simple because they were a man and now that’s it’s opposite and fitting the narrative of today, it’s an acceptable practice now. If it was sexist then, it should be sexist now. So far as someone saying they ‘know what it feels like’ just because they were a female athlete so they would be better at coaching females is ridiculous. If that holds true then how could that white straight female coach a BIPOC athlete, or a gay athlete, or men? It’s just another way of justifying sexism and discrimination. Last, men are parents too. Being a parent is extremely hard on anyone of any gender. Navigating through any job for any gender of parent at any point of a child’s life is hard. Sacrifices are made from any gender of parent. My advice is stop acting like a victim and do what a good coach would tell their athletes to do; ‘work through it and become a better person for it.’


Rower0121
12/29/2021  11:10:49 AM
I've chosen to resign from coaching. Much due to reflection during the COVID pandemic, but much because of everything mentioned in this article.

Something that I think is overlooked is, if a woman is a head coach, associate, assistant, director of ops, rigger, etc., it's as if you have plan out creating a family a year in advance, if not more, around the racing schedule, signing period, training trip, etc. Try to have a family in the "slow' months and then hope you can have time off you need to bond with your baby. Of course, hopefully, you're already thinking about starting a family or adding another baby, but it doesn't always work like that. So then, what do you do? It becomes tricky to have to pick one or the other.

I've heard different stories from multiple female coaches who were also mothers, which made me not want to be a coach and a mom.

I've heard from a female assistant that her female head coach wasn't supportive of her bringing her infant on a training trip. She had to bring the infant because she was still nursing. This led her to leave said school and start over somewhere new.

I've also heard from a female coach presenter at a female coaches conference that you cannot successfully have a family and be a successful coach because your school and or administration may not be as supportive as you need.

On the flip side, I've had my "time off" taken advantage of because I didn't have a family or a partner.

You have to make sacrifices no matter what job you have. But the sacrifices you make as a coach are one's you can never forget and one's you don't want to regret later. I've lived this and didn't want it for my future anymore. You don't have the normal PTO that you can have at a 9-5. You have to confirm every vacation or time off with your superior. And the higher up you get in competition, the more pressure you receive. And if you aren't winning, you better start counting your days until your let go. That's not how I want to create or raise a family.

I now have a new job that's way less tasking on my mental health, and did I mention that I'm also making $20k more than I was as a D1 coach.

I'm happy some female head coaches have had success in being a mom and a coach. It's amazing and incredibly admirable. But ultimately, I think one of the reasons there are not as many female head coaches as there are males is because it's damn hard to do both!


bpickard
01/26/2017  3:46:37 PM
"While rowing is a sport with multiple opportunities for women athletes because of the size of the teams, and is relied upon by universities that have large men’s football programs to offset Title IX gender equality numbers, the number of programs is actually small compared to other sports like basketball, lacrosse, soccer, or track and field.

According to NCAA data, there were 1114 basketball head coaching positions last year. There were 150 in women's rowing."

In light of the recent changes at US Rowing, what can be done to significantly increase the number of PEOPLE rowing, period - young juniors, juniors, collegiate, masters, vets, elites and recreational - all of it? Seems to me that if the total numbers of programs and people can be increased, then the numbers of coaches will go up too (along with the numbers of disadvantaged, captive, etc.)


Lou Berl
01/25/2017  2:07:00 PM
For me, the issue was time. Later it was salary. I coached some of the fastest women in the US, D1 and D3, before having kids and then early on when I was raising my daughters, but when I had my third, and the first two were getting older, I found it to be incredibly difficult to be the mother I wanted to be and the coach I was. Doing both 100% was impossible for me, in the life my husband and I had constructed. This crushed me. And while I did both for several years, leaving coaching was one of the most painful decisions I’ve ever made. After about 10 years raising the girls, and having a blast doing so, I was offered an excellent collegiate coaching position which I jumped at. But a few years later, it was an offer to coach and work at an independent school that enabled me to provide almost four times the income to my family than I was making on the college level. Not only was the salary higher, but so is the quality of life.

That being said, to me, there is nothing more empowering, exciting and satisfying than being a woman coaching, empowering and working with top collegiate women. How I miss working with them and their drive to be their absolute best!

When I was coaching I never once felt that I was treated differently because I was a woman; I felt my male counterparts were great to work with. Nor did I focus on gender of my fellow coaches. I DID and DO, however, wish there were MORE top collegiate FEMALE head coaches mentoring women AND KICKING BUTT. To those of you out there, keep up the great job!


mschomers
01/24/2017  8:22:54 AM
I do think we need to remember that this issue, like so many, is multi-faceted. I worked for two programs in collegiate rowing, a major DI program and a top DIII program, and ultimately left collegiate coaching because of salary. I make more coaching and teaching in the private school world than I think I would if I had stayed in collegiate athletics. I also have more opportunity for advancement as there are simply more schools/positions in private schools. I also think that so many of the women who row(ed) are smart, talented, motivated, ambitious and often want to be other things--doctors, lawyers, businesswomen, etc. When salaries are low, I can see why many talented and ambitious women (and men) who would be very good coaches and head coaches opt to pursue other interests than stay with a sport. I teach and coach because I am passionate about teaching and coaching, but I am also very cognizant of the fact that in another field I could make far more money. Rowing is a demanding sport and coaching is even more demanding. If you don't truly love the sport and coaching young people, it can be very easy to opt for the usual 9-5 where you could also be making 2-3 times more.


MattBaldwater
01/24/2017  4:23:17 AM
How many applicants are women? (This is not a rhetorical question, I do not have the answer. I guess one way of finding out would be polling the drawers where ADs keep resumes in case they have an opening) Where I live (France), there is also a 1/3 ratio but that pretty much matches participation in the sport, and I notice that while many women complain that there are too few women coaches, few of them apply for coaching clinics or the entry-level training sessions to get in.

Also a point which I never see pointed out is that coaches have to carry a clipboard and a whistle, but also 110-lb shells which are on the wrong side of the trailer when nobody's around to help, or 190-lb novices who capsize in cold water. I am not saying that women cannot do that, (6-foot tall elite rowers certainly can), but it has to be a deterrant to many (given the looks I get when I have to do stuff like that)


cmc14
01/23/2017  1:27:05 PM
This is a very interesting article and great to see it on Row2k/passing through rowing circles. One area this does not address, however, is how gender may play a role in a women's team coach's relationship with the rowing program as a whole (ie men and women's team, boathouse, funding etc.) and relationship with the athletic department.


EBeeper
01/23/2017  12:18:06 PM
Good article, but what about all the coaching positions for men's teams? This focuses only on women or men coaching women, which seems to be assuming that those positions are the only ones available to female coaches. I'd like to see that assumptions challenged strenuously. There have got to be at least as many positions in college for coaching men. If those were taken into the equation, there would be a lot more opportunities, and at the same time, the current picture would be much bleaker.



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