- Update: Kathy DeBoer, Executive Director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, reacts to this report. See AVCA Director: “We don’t have a lot of good solutions”
- Correction: Apologies for misspelling the last name of Florida Coach Mary Wise.
Last season, every Pac-10 women’s volleyball head coach was a man. This season, one-quarter of the Pac-12 is run by women. Two of those coaches—Utah’s Beth Launiere and Colorado’s Liz Kritza will be in Seattle this weekend to face the Washington Huskies. Launiere and Kritza will also meet WSU’s first-year coach Jen Greeny this weekend in Pullman; Greeny is the third member of the Pac-12’s small, but growing, coaching sorority.
From zero to 25 percent: Sounds
like real progress for women seeking top volleyball jobs. But across the
country, the trend is decidedly in the other direction. D1 women’s volleyball
is increasingly a man’s game.
Volleyblog Seattle gleaned numbers
from a recent NCAA report titled Race and Gender Demographics 2009-2010. We found that the percentage of female
head coaches in Division 1 volleyball has plummeted since 1995, from 62% to 47%
last season. No other D1 women’s team sport has experienced anything close to
this gender shift.
“It’s one of the very few sports
where, since Title IX, there’s fewer women head coaches than there were
before,” says Shannon Ellis, head
coach at Seattle University. “That’s
surprising to a lot of people.”
“Women are getting into the
volleyball profession after college, and then, at some point, we have a high
rate of attrition,” says Utah’s Launiere. “We’re losing them before they get to
become D1 head coaches.”
“It seems like the higher the
strength of the conference, the fewer and fewer female coaches you find,” says
Colorado’s Kritza.
What’s happening in volleyball?
And why? Ellis, Launiere and Kritza revealed some intriguing theories during
conversations this week with Volleyblog Seattle.
