Three Pioneers: Women Who Coach Male Athletes

Myths abound when it comes to women in the coaching profession. Over the years, the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching has tackled all of them, from the one that suggests that marriage and children spell an end to her coaching career—sure it is difficult to successfully combine the three, but studies and role models point to support on the home front as the key ingredient—to the one that positions the woman coach as (too) emotional. Anyone who follows televised sports would be hard put to advance that erroneous claim for more than 30 seconds. Emotions certainly play a part in good coaching, and while all generalizations should be suspect, women tend to bring to sport those that tilt toward fairness and balance as opposed to the more commonplace bravado and posturing of their male counterparts. More to the point is the fact that there are as many styles of coaching as there are coaches, but the one that works is inevitably based on mutual respect.

In this issue, the Journal disproves yet another myth, the one about women coaches lacking the ability, knowledge, and commitment to successfully coach male high performance athletes. Their numbers may be small, but they do exist and flourish, as author Claire Carver-Dias discovered.

Track and field coach Brenda Van Tighem has developed sprinter Sam Effah into a legitimate contender for a spot on Canada’s 2012 Olympic team.

Appointed in 2003 as the first woman head coach of a Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) men’s basketball team, Olga Hrycak, who heads the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) program, began with raw rookies—the team was a first for UQAM—and captured the Quebec championship in 2009/2010.

Multi-decorated long track speed skating coach Xiuli Wang, who has drawn accolades for her stellar coaching of such female stars as Clara Hughes and Kristina Groves, has also enjoyed considerable success with a large number of male athletes. As Claire points out, strides are being made as growing numbers of men are being exposed to female leadership in the workplace, in business, in government, and elsewhere in the public sector. Only in coaching is such progress proving to be elusive and for reasons hard to fathom given the encouraging examples discussed in this article. Let us hope that the coaching world takes notice and acts to dispel one last myth.—Sheila Robertson

The views expressed in the articles of the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching are those of the authors and do not reflect the policies of the Coaching Association of Canada.