On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Greg Berge wrote:
 
> I'm not usually very sympathetic to such attitudes, but in this case
> IMHO it would have been much more appropriate to name a woman head
> coach.
 
I was talking with Coch Jackie Clark of our women's basketball team this
past season.  She said something that I found interesting and that seems
to apply here.  In some form anyway.
 
She noted how much the game had changed even in the time she had been
involved with it.  She noted that the women she was coaching now were
really the first generation of women basketball players to have been
born, and to have grown up in a society where the sport was availible
from the beginning.  When she had started the game had only been
availible for a little more than a year where she went to school.  And as
for Coach Clark's first coach (who was a woman) she had only played it as
a club game in college.
 
This in turn caused me to think matters out even more.  The generation of
women coaches coming into the game over the last 5 or ten years, are only
the first generation to have benifited from playing the game as girls
through college.  They were coached by women who were new to the game in
some respects.  The young women they are coaching now are only members of
the first generation of (pardon the phrase) "Pure breed" women's
basketball players.  They have been purely emmersed in the game all their
lives, without a stigma attached.  On the back of all this we have seen
the women's game improve immensely over recent years.  The difference has
been simply the fact that the sport has been developing the basic
foundation to do it.  With no less than two legitimate women's pro
leagues starting next year (one backed by the NBA no less) it is certain
the game won't resemble its current form in twenty years.
 
That brings us to women's hockey.  If you look to other women's sports,
there are a great many men who are among the top coaches.  So I don't
think it matters if a man or woman is hired so long as it is done with
the interest of the team is the reason.  Frankly the best coaches at the
point my be men, not because men do thing inheritly better, but simply
because the foundation is still being built that will allow women to step
to the forefront of their own sport.  I like the move because this man
has made a three year comitment to the team.  It isn't as though he has
signed on as a superstar coach for a couple of months to bring some
pubplicity to the team only to step down when his other job comes around
again.  That is a sincer commitment that shows women's hockey to be an
emerging sport to be taken seriously.  He is an outstanding coach that
will greatly benifit the team because of his skill, not gender.  Drawing
back to women's basketball, who is to say in twenty years, on the back of
the pro leagues starting now, that a woman won't be leading a mens team
to the NBA finals?
 
Just some thoughts.
Nathan W.L. Boyle
 
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