TheFarmFan
Stanford Fan, Huskies Admirer
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
- Messages
- 2,024
- Reaction Score
- 14,344
Hi all, a random observation/question that I'd be curious for your collective wisdom about:
I noticed tonight in the Baylor-Texas thread some (not unreasonable) roasting of Karen Aston's coaching ability, and it got me to thinking: do we assess male and female WBB head coaches in the same way? The reason I ask is that the coaches I regularly see roasted for poor coaching abilities are almost always female. In particular, this is a repeated trope applied to Aston, Holly Warlick, Cori Close, and Lindsay Gottlieb, off the top of my head, and in almost every game thread featuring those teams, both on this board and on others. By contrast, I can't really think of a single male WBB head coach that regularly receives as much scorn. Maybe that's on the merits, but it does strike me as a little odd, given that at the top of the heap, there's roughly gender parity among the best coaches (e.g., Geno, Waltz, Rueck, Graves, Schaefer vs. Pat, Tara, MM, Mulkey, CTT, Hatchell), and yet outside the truly elite, female head coaches seem (impressionistically, at least) to be singled out much more than men. And this despite the fact that all four of the female head coaches I've just mentioned - Aston, Warlick, Close, and Gottlieb - regularly seem to get their teams into the Top 25 in the country.
So: Respectfully, am I wrong in perceiving this? If not, is there a legitimate basis for the disproportionate scorn that seems to be directed toward female coaches?
I noticed tonight in the Baylor-Texas thread some (not unreasonable) roasting of Karen Aston's coaching ability, and it got me to thinking: do we assess male and female WBB head coaches in the same way? The reason I ask is that the coaches I regularly see roasted for poor coaching abilities are almost always female. In particular, this is a repeated trope applied to Aston, Holly Warlick, Cori Close, and Lindsay Gottlieb, off the top of my head, and in almost every game thread featuring those teams, both on this board and on others. By contrast, I can't really think of a single male WBB head coach that regularly receives as much scorn. Maybe that's on the merits, but it does strike me as a little odd, given that at the top of the heap, there's roughly gender parity among the best coaches (e.g., Geno, Waltz, Rueck, Graves, Schaefer vs. Pat, Tara, MM, Mulkey, CTT, Hatchell), and yet outside the truly elite, female head coaches seem (impressionistically, at least) to be singled out much more than men. And this despite the fact that all four of the female head coaches I've just mentioned - Aston, Warlick, Close, and Gottlieb - regularly seem to get their teams into the Top 25 in the country.
So: Respectfully, am I wrong in perceiving this? If not, is there a legitimate basis for the disproportionate scorn that seems to be directed toward female coaches?