Women coaching a women’s sports team? Not likely.

Emma Huff said she hasn’t a female coach since elementary school.

All through high school, CEGEP and so far in university, the Carleton Raven’s women’s basketball team member and second-year political science student has played on women’s teams coached by men.

“Why is it okay we have men coaching women, when it would be seriously abnormal to have a woman coaching a man’s team?” Huff said. “It kind of goes back to the men stereotypically being in positions of power.”

Steph Carr is an alumni of Carleton and the Ravens women’s basketball program. She also said she hasn’t had a female coach since Grade 8. Carr played under coach Taffe Charles for her whole university career.

With the former Carleton men’s basketball coach Dave Smart stepping down from his coaching position to move to a new position as director of the basketball program, Taffe Charles moves into the position as men’s head coach. Charles had been in the position since 2007.

The women’s head coach position has been filled by Brian Cheng, who previously coached the women’s basketball team at Western.

Men coaching women’s sports is not unusual at the university level. Coaches for all sports at Carleton are male. Across Ontario University Athletics (OUA), the disparity in gender between the number of male and female coaches of sports is striking.

Ryerson University is the only post-secondary institution in Ontario that had a female coach for all four major women’s sports (basketball, soccer, rugby, and ice hockey).

Dr. Ivan Joseph, director of athletics at Ryerson, said this was a conscious decision he made as director.

He said he wanted not only to have more women coaching but more people of diverse cultural backgrounds, so that the coaches “represented the people they were coaching.”

“I wanted to make sure I created opportunities for different people to be coaches, leaders and administrators,” Joseph said.

Across universities though, these opportunities appear to be scarce.

For both women’s rugby and hockey, females were in the head coaches role for less than less of half of the teams in the OUA.

The statistics for women’s soccer are stark: out of 18 OUA schools with women’s soccer teams, only one is coached by a woman.

Women’s basketball at the end of last season had little more than a third of teams being coached by women. But after a swell of new appointments, women’s basketball has achieved parity between male and female coaches.

In her time playing, Huff said has noticed that women tend to be hired as assistant coaches. She said the assistant coaches can serve as a “middle ground” between the player and the male coaches.

She said she thinks it’s beneficial to have women coaches on the staff for a women’s team.

“I like to have super open lines of communication. I like to develop a relationship of trust and confidence with a coach no matter who they are,” she said.

“But I definitely think there are some things that are easier to approach as a female, from a female.”

Carr agreed with this sentiment. She noticed from conversations that coaches of men and women’s teams often need to have a different way of communicating with their players, she said.

Players on the women’s team want feedback to be more “straightforward and to the point,” Carr added.

“I’d say, ‘don’t joke around, don’t make fun of us, just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it,’” she said.

“We always had different assistant coaches that were women, and I always felt more comfortable approaching them about off-court stuff. On-court I could talk to whoever, but anything other I was just naturally inclined to talk to [women coaches] about it,” Carr added.

Despite this, both Carr and Huff said they have had positive experiences with their coaches. Huff said she would like to see more female head coaches, but said it was not crucial they be in that top position.

“I really think it comes down to how you want to be coached. I don’t think there should be a huge difference between having a woman or a man coach. There needs to be respect either way and the same kind of dynamic.”

Carr also mentioned the importance of maintaining a boundary between the player and the head coach, and she wouldn’t necessarily prefer having a female coach, although it may be easier.

“You have to have a different skillset to coach men and women, and I think that, for men to coach women, they need to learn those skills, whereas women already have them. I think it’s almost more difficult to coach the opposite gender.” – Steph Carr, former Carleton Ravens women’s basketball player

Joseph said after he made changes to the department and started to increase the diversity of the people in positions of power, the benefits were noticeable.

“Number one, our teams and athletic population became more diverse. Number two is our teams became more successful on and off the court,” he said.

“And number three, our leadership of our department and our athletes represented the community that we were part of.”

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Feature image by Tim Austen